Top-down versus bottom-up attention differentially modulate frontal-parietal connectivity

The moment-to-moment focus of our mind's eye results from a complex interplay of voluntary and involuntary influences on attention. Previous neuroimaging studies suggest that the brain networks of voluntary versus involuntary attention can be segregated into a frontal-versus-parietal or a dorsal-versus-ventral partition-although recent work suggests that the dorsal network may be involved in both bottom-up and top-down attention. Research with nonhuman primates has provided evidence that a key distinction between top-down and bottom-up attention may be the direction of connectivity between frontal and parietal areas. Whereas typical fMRI connectivity analyses cannot disambiguate the direction of connections, dynamic causal modeling (DCM) can model directionality. Using DCM, we provide new evidence that directed connections within the dorsal attention network are differentially modulated for voluntary versus involuntary attention. These results suggest that the intraparietal sulcus exerts a baseline inhibitory effect on the frontal eye fields that is strengthened during exogenous orienting and attenuated during endogenous orienting. Furthermore, the attenuation from endogenous attention occurs even with salient peripheral cues when those cues are known to be counter predictive. Thus, directed connectivity between frontal and parietal regions of the dorsal attention network is highly influenced by the type of attention that is engaged.