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The Journal of Neuroscience, October 17, 2007, 27(42):11306-11314; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2939-07.2007

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Top–Down Attentional Deficits in Macaques with Lesions of Lateral Prefrontal Cortex

Andrew F. Rossi,¹ Narcisse P. Bichot,² Robert Desimone,^2,3 and Leslie G. Ungerleider¹

Laboratories of ¹Brain and Cognition and ²Neuropsychology, National Institute of Mental Health, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892, and ³McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Andrew F. Rossi, Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, 111 21st Avenue South, Room 301, Nashville, TN 37203. Email: andrew.rossi{at}vanderbilt.edu

Brain imaging, electrical stimulation, and neurophysiological studies have all implicated the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in the top–down control of attention. Specifically, feedback from PFC has been proposed to bias activity in visual cortex in favor of attended stimuli over irrelevant distracters. To identify which attentional functions are critically dependent on PFC, we removed PFC unilaterally in combination with transection of the corpus callosum and anterior commissure in two macaques. In such a preparation, the ipsilesional hemisphere is deprived of top–down feedback from PFC to visual cortex, and the contralesional hemisphere can serve as an intact normal control. Monkeys were trained to fixate a central cue and discriminate the orientation of a colored target grating presented among colored distracter gratings in either the hemifield affected by the PFC lesion or the normal control hemifield. Locations of the targets and distracters were varied, and the color of the central cue specified the color of the target on each trial. The behavioral response was a bar release, and thus attentional impairments could be distinguished from impaired oculomotor control. When the cue was held constant for many trials, task performance in the affected hemifield was nearly normal. However, the monkeys were severely impaired when the cue was switched frequently across trials. The monkeys were unimpaired in a pop-out task with changing targets that did not require top–down attentional control. The PFC thus appears to play a critical role in the ability to flexibly reallocate attention on the basis of changing task demands.

Key words: switching; primate; bottom–up; pop-out; salience; split brain

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Received June 28, 2007; revised Aug. 8, 2007; accepted Aug. 29, 2007.

Correspondence should be addressed to Dr. Andrew F. Rossi, Department of Psychology, Vanderbilt University, 111 21st Avenue South, Room 301, Nashville, TN 37203. Email: andrew.rossi{at}vanderbilt.edu

This article has been cited by other articles:

				M. Kusunoki, N. Sigala, D. Gaffan, and J. Duncan Detection of Fixed and Variable Targets in the Monkey Prefrontal Cortex Cereb Cortex, November 1, 2009; 19(11): 2522 - 2534. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

				C.-H. Luk and J. D. Wallis Dynamic Encoding of Responses and Outcomes by Neurons in Medial Prefrontal Cortex J. Neurosci., June 10, 2009; 29(23): 7526 - 7539. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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