Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on March 2, 2005
Cerebral Cortex 2005 15(12):1855-1865; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhi063
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Monetary Incentives Enhance Processing in Brain Regions Mediating Top-down Control of Attention
1 Northwestern University Brain Mapping Group and Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Center, 2 Department of Neurology, 3 Department of Psychology and 4 Department of Radiology, Northwestern University Medical School, 320 East Superior Street, Searle 11, Chicago, IL 60611, USA, 5 Department of Psychology, Yale University, 2 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, CT 06520, USA, 6 Department of Surgery, Yale University, 333 Cedar Avenue, New Haven, CT 06520, USA and 7 The John B. Pierce Laboratory, 290 Congress Avenue, New Haven, CT 06519, USA
Address correspondence to Dana M. Small, The John B. Pierce Laboratory, 290 Congress Avenue, New Haven, CT 06519, USA. Email: dsmall{at}jbpierce.org.
To evaluate the effect of an abstract motivational incentive on top-down mechanisms of visual spatial attention, 10 subjects engaged in a target detection task and responded to targets preceded by spatially valid (predictive), invalid (misleading) or neutral central cues under three different incentive conditions: win money (WIN), lose money (LOSE), and neutral (neither gain nor lose). Activation in the posterior cingulate cortex was correlated with visual spatial expectancy, defined as the degree to which the valid cue benefited performance as evidenced by faster reaction times compared to non-directional cues. Winning and losing money enhanced this relationship via overlapping but independent limbic mechanisms. In addition, activity in the inferior parietal lobule was correlated with disengagement (the degree to which invalid cues diminished performance). This relationship was also enhanced by monetary incentives. Finally, incentive enhanced the relationship of activation in the visual cortex to visual spatial expectancy and disengagement for both types of incentive (WIN and LOSE). These results show that abstract incentives enhance neural processing within the attention network in a process- and valence-selective manner. They also show that different cognitive and motivational mechanisms may produce a common effect upon unimodal cortices in order to enhance processing to serve the current behavioral goal.
Key Words: fMRI • inferior parietal lobule • orbitofrontal cortex • parahippocampal gyrus • posterior cingulate cortex • visual spatial expectancy
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
This article has been cited by other articles:
|
|
 |
|
  K. M. Cham, A. J. Anderson, and L. A. Abel Task-Induced Stress and Motivation Decrease Foveation-Period Durations in Infantile Nystagmus Syndrome Invest. Ophthalmol. Vis. Sci., July 1, 2008; 49(7): 2977 - 2984. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 A. Mohanty, D. R. Gitelman, D. M. Small, and M. M. Mesulam The Spatial Attention Network Interacts with Limbic and Monoaminergic Systems to Modulate Motivation-Induced Attention Shifts Cereb Cortex, February 27, 2008; (2008) bhn021v1. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 C. Giessing, G. R. Fink, F. Rosler, and C. M. Thiel FMRI data predict individual differences of behavioral effects of nicotine: a partial least square analysis. J. Cogn. Neurosci., April 1, 2007; 19(4): 658 - 670. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|