Staying responsive to the world: Modality-specific and -nonspecific contributions to speeded auditory, tactile, and visual stimulus detection

• Published in: Human brain mapping Vol. 33; no. 2; pp. 398 - 418
• Main Authors: Langner, Robert, Kellermann, Thilo, Eickhoff, Simon B., Boers, Frank, Chatterjee, Anjan, Willmes, Klaus, Sturm, Walter
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Hoboken Wiley Subscription Services, Inc., A Wiley Company 01.02.2012; Wiley-Liss; John Wiley & Sons, Inc
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation; Adult; Attention - physiology; Biological and medical sciences; Brain Mapping; Female; fMRI; Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology; Humans; Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; intrinsic alertness; Investigative techniques, diagnostic techniques (general aspects); Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Medical sciences; multimodal stimulation; Nervous system; Perception; Photic Stimulation; Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry; Psychology. Psychophysiology; Radiodiagnosis. Nmr imagery. Nmr spectrometry; Reaction Time - physiology; response readiness; simple reaction time; Somatosensory Cortex - physiology; sustained attention; Touch Perception; Vision; Speed; Nervous system diseases; simple reaction time; Radiodiagnosis; sustained attention; Attention; Medical screening; Nuclear magnetic resonance imaging; multimodal stimulation; fMRI; Visual stimulus; response readiness; Reaction time; intrinsic alertness
• ISSN: 1065-9471; 1097-0193
• DOI: 10.1002/hbm.21220

Sustained responsiveness to external stimulation is fundamental to many time‐critical interactions with the outside world. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging during speeded stimulus detection to identify convergent and divergent neural correlates of maintaining the readiness to respond to auditory, tactile, and visual stimuli. In addition, using a multimodal condition, we investigated the effect of making stimulus modality unpredictable. Relative to sensorimotor control tasks, all three unimodal detection tasks elicited stronger activity in the right temporo‐parietal junction, inferior frontal cortex, anterior insula, dorsal premotor cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex as well as bilateral mid‐cingulum, midbrain, brainstem, and medial cerebellum. The multimodal detection condition additionally activated left dorsal premotor cortex and bilateral precuneus. Modality‐specific modulations were confined to respective sensory areas: we found activity increases in relevant, and decreases in irrelevant sensory cortices. Our findings corroborate the modality independence of a predominantly right‐lateralized core network for maintaining an alert (i.e., highly responsive) state and extend previous results to the somatosensory modality. Monitoring multiple sensory channels appears to induce additional processing, possibly related to stimulus‐driven shifts of intermodal attention. The results further suggest that directing attention to a given sensory modality selectively enhances and suppresses sensory processing—even in simple detection tasks, which do not require inter‐ or intra‐modal selection. Hum Brain Mapp, 2012. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.