Neural mechanisms of top-down divided and selective spatial attention in visual and auditory perception

Abstract

Top-down attention mechanisms require the selection of specific objects or locations; however, the brain mechanism involved when attention is allocated across different modalities is not well understood. The aim of this study was to use functional magnetic resonance imaging to define the neural mechanisms underlying divided and selective spatial attention. A concurrent audiovisual stimulus was used, and subjects were prompted to focus on a visual, auditory and audiovisual stimulus in a Posner paradigm. Our behavioral results confirmed the better performance of selective attention compared to devided attention. We found differences in the activation level of the frontoparietal network, visual/auditory cortex, the putamen and the salience network under different attention conditions. We further used Granger causality (GC) to explore effective connectivity differences between tasks. Differences in GC connectivity between visual and auditory selective tasks reflected the visual dominance effect under spatial attention. In addition, our results supported the role of the putamen in redistributing attention and the functional separation of the salience network. In summary, we explored the audiovisual top-down allocation of attention and observed the differences in neural mechanisms under endogenous attention modes, which revealed the differences in cross-modal expression in visual and auditory attention under attentional modulation.