Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 108, Issue 33, Pages 13426-13431Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1103583108
Keywords
attention; attentional blink; psychological refractory period
Categories
Funding
- National Institute of Mental Health [R01 MH70776, P30-EY008126]
- Australian Research Council [DP0986387]
- Australian Research Council [DP0986387] Funding Source: Australian Research Council
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Human information processing is characterized by bottlenecks that constrain throughput. These bottlenecks limit both what we can perceive and what we can act on in multitask settings. Although perceptual and response limitations are often attributed to independent information processing bottlenecks, it has recently been suggested that a common attentional limitation may be responsible for both. To date, however, evidence supporting the existence of such a unified bottleneck has been mixed. Here, we tested the unified bottleneck hypothesis using time-resolved fMRI. Experiment 1 isolated brain regions involved in the response selection bottleneck that limits speeded dual-task performance. These same brain regions were not only engaged by a perceptual encoding task in Experiment 2, their activity also tracked delays to a speeded decision-making task caused by concurrent perceptual encoding (Experiment 3). We conclude that a unified attentional bottleneck, including the inferior frontal junction, superior medial frontal cortex, and bilateral insula, temporally limits operations as diverse as perceptual encoding and decision-making.
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