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Paper   IPM / Cognitive%20Sciences / 14255
School of Cognitive Sciences
  Title:   Does Correlated Firing Underlie Attention Deployment in Frontal Cortex?
  Author(s): 
1.  M. Esghaei
2.  C. Xue
  Status:   Published
  Journal: Journal of Neuroscience
  No.:  6
  Vol.:  36
  Year:  2016
  Pages:   1791-1793
  Supported by:  IPM
  Abstract:
Attention is an essential cognitive ability that animals and humans rely on to survive. It allows complex nervous systems to selectively process the most behaviorally relevant sensory information. While an abundance of literature has demonstrated attentional modulation of neuronal activity in sensory areas (Treue, 2001; Maunsell and Treue, 2006), it is much less clear which brain areas control this modulation (Petersen and Posner, 2012). One candidate region is the prefrontal cortex (PFC), which makes reciprocal projections with almost all sensory and motor cortical areas, as well as many subcortical structures (Miller and Cohen, 2001). Studies on the cross-areal interaction between prefrontal and sensory areas have identified PFC as a major control center for directing attention to a location (Moore and Armstrong, 2003; Gregoriou et al., 2009), a feature, or an object (Zaksas and Pasternak, 2006; Baldauf and Desimone, 2014). An additional candidate is anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which has a close functional connectivity with PFC (Womelsdorf et al., 2014). Although numerous studies have probed the role of these two frontal areas in controlling attention, it is not clear how attention signals are integrated within and between these regions.

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