Imperial College London
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DrBarrySeemungal

Faculty of Medicine, Department of Brain Sciences

Honorary Clinical Senior Lecturer
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 3311 7042b.seemungal Website

 
 
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Assistant

 

Miss Lorna Stevenson +44 (0)20 3313 5525

 
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Location

 

10L16Lab BlockCharing Cross Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Braga:2016:10.3389/fnhum.2016.00164,
author = {Braga, RM and Fu, RZ and Seemungal, BM and Wise, RJS and Leech, R},
doi = {10.3389/fnhum.2016.00164},
journal = {Frontiers in Human Neuroscience},
title = {Eye movements during auditory attention predict individual differences in dorsal attention network activity},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00164},
volume = {10},
year = {2016}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - The neural mechanisms supporting auditory attention are not fully understood. A dorsal frontoparietal network of brain regions is thought to mediate the spatial orienting of attention across all sensory modalities. Key parts of the this network, the frontal eye fields (FEF) and the superior parietal lobes (SPL), contain retinotopic maps and elicit saccades when stimulated. This suggests that their recruitment during auditory attention might reflect crossmodal oculomotor processes; however this has not been confirmed experimentally. Here we investigate whether task-evoked eye movements during an auditory task can predict the magnitude of activity within the dorsal frontoparietal network. A spatial and non-spatial listening task was used with on-line eye-tracking and functional magnetic resonance imaging. No visual stimuli or cues were used. The auditory task elicited systematic eye movements, with saccade rate and gaze position predicting attentional engagement and the cued sound location, respectively. Activity associated with these separate aspects of evoked eye-movements dissociated between the SPL and FEF. However these observed eye movements could not account for all the activation in the frontoparietal network. Our results suggest that the recruitment of the SPL and FEF during attentive listening reflects, at least partly, overt crossmodal oculomotor processes during non-visual attention. Further work is needed to establish whether the network’s remaining contribution to auditory attention is through covert crossmodal processes, or is directly involved in the manipulation of auditory information.
AU  - Braga,RM
AU  - Fu,RZ
AU  - Seemungal,BM
AU  - Wise,RJS
AU  - Leech,R
DO  - 10.3389/fnhum.2016.00164
PY  - 2016///
SN  - 1662-5161
TI  - Eye movements during auditory attention predict individual differences in dorsal attention network activity
T2  - Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2016.00164
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/30603
VL  - 10
ER  -
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