TY - JOUR T1 - The Human Basal Ganglia Modulate Frontal-Posterior Connectivity during Attention Shifting JF - The Journal of Neuroscience JO - J. Neurosci. SP - 9910 LP - 9918 DO - 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1111-10.2010 VL - 30 IS - 29 AU - Martine R. van Schouwenburg AU - Hanneke E. M. den Ouden AU - Roshan Cools Y1 - 2010/07/21 UR - http://www.jneurosci.org/content/30/29/9910.abstract N2 - Current models of flexible cognitive control emphasize the role of the prefrontal cortex. This region has been shown to control attention by biasing information processing in favor of task-relevant representations. However, the prefrontal cortex does not act in isolation. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging combined with nonlinear dynamic causal modeling to demonstrate that the basal ganglia play a role in modulating the top-down influence of the prefrontal cortex on visual processing in humans. Specifically, our results reveal that connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and stimulus-specific visual association areas depends on activity in the ventral striatopallidum, elicited by salient events leading to shifts in attention. These data integrate disparate literatures on top-down control by the prefrontal cortex and selective gating by the basal ganglia and highlight the importance of the basal ganglia for high-level cognitive control. ER -