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Cerebral Cortex Advance Access originally published online on February 16, 2005
Cerebral Cortex 2005 15(10):1609-1620; doi:10.1093/cercor/bhi039
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org

Attention to Simultaneous Unrelated Auditory and Visual Events: Behavioral and Neural Correlates

Jennifer A. Johnson and Robert J. Zatorre

Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University, 3801 University St., Montreal, QC H3A 2B4, Canada

Address correspondence to Jennifer A. Johnson, Montreal Neurological Institute, 3801 University St., Montreal, QC H3A 2B4, Canada. Email: Jennyj{at}ego.psych.mcgill.ca.

The cognitive and neural bases of the ability to focus attention on information in one sensory modality while ignoring information in another remain poorly understood. We hypothesized that bimodal selective attention results from increased activity in corresponding sensory cortices with a suppression of activity in non-corresponding sensory cortices. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we presented melodies and shapes alone (unimodal) or simultaneously (bimodal). Subjects monitored for changes in an attended modality while ignoring the other. Subsequently, memory for both attended and unattended stimuli was tested. Subjects remembered attended stimuli equally well in unimodal and bimodal conditions, and significantly better than ignored stimuli in bimodal conditions. When a subject focused on a stimulus, the blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) response increased in sensory cortices corresponding to that modality in both unimodal and bimodal conditions. Additionally, the BOLD response decreased in sensory cortices corresponding to the non-presented modality in unimodal conditions and the unattended modality in bimodal conditions. We conclude that top-down attentional effects modulate the interaction of sensory cortical areas by gating sensory input. This interaction between sensory cortices enhances processing of one modality at the expense of the other during selective attention, and subsequently affects memory encoding.

Key Words: bimodal • crossmodal suppression • fMRI • selective attention


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