Control of Spatial and Feature-Based Attention in Frontoparietal Cortex

Visual attention selects task-relevant information from scenes to help achieve behavioral goals. Attention can be deployed within multiple domains to select specific spatial locations, features, or objects. Recent evidence has shown that voluntary shifts of attention in multiple domains are consistently associated with transient increases in cortical activity in medial superior parietal lobule, suggesting that this may be the source of a domain-independent control signal that initiates the reconfiguration of attention. To investigate this hypothesis, we used fMRI to measure changes in cortical activation while human subjects shifted attention between spatial locations or between colors at a location. Univariate multiple regression analysis revealed a common, domain-independent transient signal [in posterior parietal cortex (PPC) and prefrontal cortex] time-locked to shifts of attention in both domains. However, multivariate pattern classification conducted on the cortical surface revealed that the spatiotemporal pattern of activity within PPC differed reliably for spatial and feature-based attention shifts. These results suggest that the posterior parietal cortex is a common hub for the control of attention shifts but contains subpopulations of neurons with domain-specific tuning for cognitive control.