Investigating the Neural Correlates of Crossmodal Facilitation as a Result of Attentional Cueing: An Event-Related fMRI Study.
Degree of Masters of Science, 2008
Zainab Fatima
Institute of Medical Science, University of Toronto
ABSTRACT
Attentional cueing modulated neural processes differently depending on input modality. I used event-related fMRI to investigate how auditory and visual cues affected reaction times to auditory and visual targets. Behavioural results showed that responses were faster when: cues appeared first compared to targets and cues were auditory versus visual. The first result was supported by an increase in BOLD percent signal change in sensory cortices upon cue but not target presentation. Task-related activation patterns showed that the auditory cue activated auditory and visual cortices while the visual cue activated the visual cortices and the fronto-polar cortex. Next, I computed brain-behaviour correlations for both cue types which revealed that the auditory cue recruited medial visual areas and a fronto-parietal attentional network to mediate behaviour while the visual cue engaged a posterior network composed of lateral visual areas and subcortical structures. The results suggest that crossmodal facilitation occurs via independent neural pathways depending on cue modality.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TORONTO/oai:tspace.library.utoronto.ca:1807/10429 |
| Date | 25 July 2008 |
| Creators | Fatima, Zainab |
| Contributors | McIntosh, Anthony Randal |
| Source Sets | University of Toronto |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 3905477 bytes, application/pdf |
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