2011 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

A novel approach to modeling neural substrates of visual attention by decoding frontal lobe function

Research Project

Project/Area Number	22700281
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Research Field	Cognitive science
Research Institution	The University of Tokyo (2011) The Institute of Physical and Chemical Research (2010)
Principal Investigator	OZAKI Takashi 東京大学, 大学院・総合文化研究科, 特任研究員 (40442941)
Project Period (FY)	2010 – 2011
Keywords	脳認知科学
Research Abstract	Recent neurophysiological and/or functional neuroimaging studies have reported that the frontal lobe function may contribute to embodying visual attention in the human. What kind of the neural mechanisms, however, underlies such a finding has been less known. In this project, we applied effective connectivity analysis with partial Granger causality analysis on human functional neuroimaging data in order to clarify the mechanism. As a result, first we demonstrated that the frontal-to-parietal lobe causal connectivity emerges at an actively attentive mental state during a simple attention task. In the next experiment, we also tested a hypothesis that such frontal-to-parietal lobe causal connectivity emerges in a representation-by-representation manner in a spatial domain. However, it could not be confirmed possibly because its sample size was relatively small. Further studies are required to confirm it.