The endogenous, or voluntary, control of visuospatial attention relies upon
interactions within a frontoparietal dorsal attention network (DAN) and this network’s
top-down influence on visual occipital cortex (VOC). While these interactions have been
shown to occur during attention tasks, they are also known to occur to some extent at rest,
but the degree to which task-related interactions reflect either modulation or
reorganization of such ongoing intrinsic interactions is poorly understood. In addition, it
is known that in spatial neglect—a syndrome following unilateral brain lesions in which
patients fail to attend to the contralesional side of space—symptom severity covaries with
disruptions to intrinsic interhemispheric interactions between left and right homologous
regions of the DAN; however, similar covariance with disruptions to intrahemispheric
interactions within the DAN, and between the DAN and VOC, has not been demonstrated.
These issues are addressed herein via the measurement of both undirected and directed
functional connectivity (UFC, DFC) within the DAN and between the DAN and VOC. UFC and DFC were derived from correlations of, and multivariate vector autoregressive
modeling of, fMRI BOLD time-series, respectively. Time-series were recorded from
individuals performing an anticipatory visuospatial attention task and individuals at rest,
as well as from stroke patients either with or without neglect and age-matched healthy
controls. With regard to the first issue, the results show that relative to rest, top-down
DAN-to-VOC influence and within-DAN coupling are elevated during task performance,
but also that intrinsic connectivity patterns are largely preserved during the task. With
regard to the second issue, results show that interhemispheric imbalances of
intrahemispheric UFC and DFC both within the DAN and between the DAN and VOC
strongly correlate with neglect severity, and may co-occur with functional decoupling of
the hemispheres. This work thus demonstrates that the intrinsic functional integrity of the
DAN and its relationship to VOC is crucial for the endogenous control of visuospatial
attention during tasks, and that the compromise of this integrity due to stroke likely plays
a role in producing spatial neglect. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fau.edu/oai:fau.digital.flvc.org:fau_33472 |
| Contributors | Meehan, Timothy Patrick (author), Bressler, Steven L. (Thesis advisor), Florida Atlantic University (Degree grantor), Charles E. Schmidt College of Science, Center for Complex Systems and Brain Sciences |
| Publisher | Florida Atlantic University |
| Source Sets | Florida Atlantic University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, Text |
| Format | 319 p., application/pdf |
| Rights | Copyright © is held by the author, with permission granted to Florida Atlantic University to digitize, archive and distribute this item for non-profit research and educational purposes. Any reuse of this item in excess of fair use or other copyright exemptions requires permission of the copyright holder., http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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