Abstract
Human ability to attend to visual stimuli based on their spatial locations requires the parietal cortex. One hypothesis maintains that parietal cortex controls the voluntary orienting of attention toward a location of interest. Another hypothesis emphasizes its role in reorienting attention toward visual targets appearing at unattended locations. Here, using event-related functional magnetic resonance (ER-fMRI), we show that distinct parietal regions mediated these different attentional processes. Cortical activation occurred primarily in the intraparietal sulcus when a location was attended before visual-target presentation, but in the right temporoparietal junction when the target was detected, particularly at an unattended location.
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Notes
Editorial Correction:
The printed version of this article contained an error. Because of a technical problem, some of the numbers in Table 1 were printed in the wrong columns. The full-text web version of this table is now correct. We regret the error.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by NIH EY00379 and EY12148 (M.C.). We thank Thomas Conturo, Avi Snyder and Erbil Akbudak for technical support.
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Corbetta, M., Kincade, J., Ollinger, J. et al. Voluntary orienting is dissociated from target detection in human posterior parietal cortex. Nat Neurosci 3, 292–297 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/73009
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/73009
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