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Cortical responses by attentive reading are modulated by prior attentional status. An intracranial-EEG study.
Poster A120 in Poster Session A, Tuesday, October 24, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Marcela Perrone-Bertolotti1, Vincent Dornier1, Richard Palluel-Germain1, Philippe Kahane2, Lorella Minotti2, Jean-Philippe Lachaux3, Juan R. Vidal4; 1Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, LPNC UMR 5105, 38000, Grenoble, France, 2CHU Grenoble Alpes, Pôle Neurologie Psychiatrie, 38000, Grenoble, France, 3INSERM, U1028, CNRS, UMR5292, Lyon Neuroscience Research Center, Brain Dynamics and Cognition Team, DYCOG, Lyon, F-69000, France, 4UR CONFLUENCE Sciences et Humanités (EA 1598), UCLy, Lyon Catholic University, France
While reading our attention is often switching back-and-forth between the text and surrounding events or waning thoughts, forcing us sometimes to go back a few sentences and to re-read the “missed” information. Attention manipulation involves significant brain network modification in terms of anatomical distribution and brain dynamics (Perrone-Bertolotti et al., 2012; Perrone-Bertolotti et al., 2020). In the present study we evaluated such changes in terms of local network dynamics and anatomical distribution in relation with prior attentional state of reading. Specifically, we collaborated with 140 pharmacoresistant epileptic patients and recorded brain activity, using intracranial-EEG, during a silent attentive reading task (Nobre et al, 1994). We evaluated the effect of the prior attentional status, attending or ignoring a word, on the subsequent attended word. Patients were presented with two intermixed stories, presented word for word (200ms) at a rate of 700ms per word. One of the stories was written in white (on black background) and the other in grey. The words in white were instructed to be ignored (IGNORE) and the grey words to be attended (ATTEND). At the end of the experiment patients had to tell the story formed by the grey words and were asked specific questions. Intracerebral signals were recorded and converted through bi-polar derivation. High-frequency activity (HFA, [50-150 Hz]) was extracted from the intracerebral signal with a standard Hilbert Transform procedure (Vidal et al 2010). Specifically, we evaluated the effect of attentional reading on two different conditions involving n-1 and n trials (n-1_n): ATTEND_ATTEND trials and IGNORE_ATTEND trials. We observed that networks showing a positive modulation of HFA is overall larger to ATTEND than to IGNORE reading. Moreover, more than 50% of early HFA (starting before 300ms after the word presentation) by ATTEND reading are modulated by the attentional status of the previously presented word. We also observed that early HFA elicited by ATTEND reading are stronger if the word before was IGNORE rather than ATTEND. Overall, the results showed that cortical responses by attentive reading across different brain regions are strongly modulated by the immediate prior attentional status. It seems that the attentional response is stronger if it is preceded by top-down inhibition (IGNORE) than by attentional selection (ATTEND).
Topic Areas: Reading, Control, Selection, and Executive Processes