A recent study conducted by CIMCYC researchers in collaboration with researchers from the Université Paul Valéry de Montpellier and the CNRS in Marseille (France) has shown that the ability to orient attention in time is not affected when the activity of the left intraparietal sulcus is perturbed by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
What would happen if you were facing a traffic light and you were in a hurry to get home? Your brain would anticipate the exact moment when the traffic light will turn green so that you can quickly start the car. In other words, our brain is able to predict and anticipate when a relevant stimulus will appear, an ability that in Cognitive Neuroscience is called "attentional orienting in time". To investigate how the brain computes and uses temporal information, people are often subjected to fMRI scans and find out, through complex mathematical analysis, which regions of the brain are activated when they pay attention to a stimulus over time compared to when they do not. However, these data are correlational, i.e., they indicate that a brain area is related to a cognitive process, but data do not provide information about whether that area is indispensable for carrying out the task.
To establish causality and to determine whether a brain area is really necessary, its functioning can be interfered with in healthy individuals using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). In the current study, the authors employed TMS to perturb left intraparietal sulcus (LIPS) activity while individuals performed a temporal orientation task. The hypothesis was based on previous MRI studies showing LIPS activation during attentional orienting in time. However, the results revealed that individuals could orient their attention in time to anticipate the appearance of a target stimulus, despite the interference caused by TMS. Thus, the study suggests that LIPS is not the only brain region involved in temporal attention, as it is possibly a more complex process distributed in the brain.
Contact:
Mariagrazia Capizzi (@email)
Ana B. Chica (@email)
Reference:
Capizzi, M., Martín-Signes, M., Coull, J. T., Chica, A. B., & Charras, P. (2023). A transcranial magnetic stimulation study on the role of the left intraparietal sulcus in temporal orienting of attention. Neuropsychologia, 184, 108561. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2023.108561