Skip Navigation



Cerebral Cortex Advance Access published online on September 29, 2009
Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp201
This Article
Right arrow Full Text
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to My Personal Archive
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Ross, B.
Right arrow Articles by Picton, T. W
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Ross, B.
Right arrow Articles by Picton, T. W
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us  
What's this?

© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Temporal Dynamics of Selective Attention during Dichotic Listening

Bernhard Ross1, Steven A Hillyard2 and Terence W Picton1

1 Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Centre, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M6A 2E1, 2 Department of Neurosciences, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

Address correspondence to Bernhard Ross, Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest Centre, University of Toronto, 3560 Bathurst Street, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M6A 2E1. Email: bross{at}rotman-baycrest.on.ca.

The ability to selectively attend to one sound and ignore other competing sounds is essential for auditory communication. Subjects in our study detected occasional changes in the frequency of amplitude modulation in sounds presented to one ear while ignoring sounds in the other ear. Neuromagnetic source analysis revealed attention-related activity in a cortical network including primary auditory cortices, posterior superior temporal gyri, inferior parietal lobules (IPLs), inferior frontal gyri (IFG), and medial frontal gyri. Time courses of event-related magnetoencephalography responses were analyzed during the interval between stimulus presentation and behavioral response. Enhanced neural responses to targets and standards in the attended ear indicated early modulation of sensitivity in the attended sensory channel. A subsequent process of discriminative stimulus selection was indexed by a response increase over time for targets and decreasing activity for standards. Enhanced responses to deviants in the unattended ear indicated discriminative processing of unattended inputs as well, though to a lesser extent than for attended stimuli. Superior temporal gyrus, planum temporale, and the IPL were prominently involved in stimulus selection, whereas medial frontal regions were linked to initiation of behavioral responses and sustained activity in IFG suggested a role in attentional control.

Key Words: attention control network • auditory evoked response • beamformer source analysis • dichotic listening, stimulus selection


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us    What's this?




Disclaimer: Please note that abstracts for content published before 1996 were created through digital scanning and may therefore not exactly replicate the text of the original print issues. All efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, but the Publisher will not be held responsible for any remaining inaccuracies. If you require any further clarification, please contact our Customer Services Department.