Frontopolar activity carries feature information of novel stimuli during unconscious reweighting of selective attention
Lasse Güldener, Antonia Jüllig, David Soto, Stefan Pollmann, Frontopolar activity carries feature information of novel stimuli during unconscious reweighting of selective attention, Cortex, Volume 153, 2022, Pages 146-165, ISSN 0010-9452, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2022.03.024
Cortex
Cortex
Laburpena
Adapting to novelty is essential for an organism's survival in an uncertain world. Neuroimaging
evidence consistently links the anterior prefrontal, specifically the frontopolar
cortex (FPC; BA10), to exploratory reweighting of attentional weights thereby underscoring
the role of the FPC in responding to environmental changes that are often complex and
may occur very rapidly. Here we report new evidence showing that the FPC serves a role in
attentional reallocation even in the absence of conscious awareness. Both mass-univariate
and multivariate pattern analyses of fMRI data revealed that the right FPC and other
attention-related areas not only are sensitive to unaware changes in the relevant stimulus
dimension, but also that unconsciously processed information of the novel stimulus was
globally represented across these regions. Our results indicate that unconsciously processed
information can reach a global level of representation outside the occipitotemporal
cortex, and that the FPC is crucial for the reweighting of selection biases in the absence of
visual awareness.