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Orienting and maintenance of spatial attention in audition and vision: multimodal and modality-specific brain activations

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Abstract

We studied orienting and maintenance of spatial attention in audition and vision. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in nine healthy subjects revealed activations in the same superior and inferior parietal, and posterior prefrontal areas in the auditory and visual orienting tasks when these tasks were compared with the corresponding maintenance tasks. Attention-related activations in the thalamus and cerebellum were observed during the auditory orienting and maintenance tasks and during the visual orienting task. In addition to the supratemporal auditory cortices, auditory orienting, and maintenance produced stronger activity than the respective visual tasks in the inferior parietal and prefrontal cortices, whereas only the occipital visual cortex and the superior parietal cortex showed stronger activity during the visual tasks than during the auditory tasks. Differences between the brain networks involved in auditory and visual spatial attention could be, for example, due to different encoding of auditory and visual spatial information or differences in stimulus-driven (bottom-up triggered) and voluntary (top-down controlled) attention between the auditory and visual modalities, or both.

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Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the Academy of Finland (grants numbers 201160, 210587, 202562, 207180, 210186, 209709, and 113789), Finnish Cultural Foundation, and Research Funds of the University of Helsinki.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Helsinki, PO Box 9, Helsinki, 00014, Finland

    Juha Salmi, Teemu Rinne, Alexander Degerman & Kimmo Alho

  2. Advanced Magnetic Imaging Centre, Helsinki University of Technology, Espoo, Finland

    Juha Salmi & Alexander Degerman

  3. Helsinki Medical Imaging Center, Helsinki University Central Hospital, Helsinki, Finland

    Oili Salonen

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  1. Juha Salmi
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  2. Teemu Rinne
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Correspondence to Juha Salmi.

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Salmi, J., Rinne, T., Degerman, A. et al. Orienting and maintenance of spatial attention in audition and vision: multimodal and modality-specific brain activations. Brain Struct Funct 212, 181–194 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00429-007-0152-2

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