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. 2015 Feb 19:9:86.
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2015.00086. eCollection 2015.

Brain activity during divided and selective attention to auditory and visual sentence comprehension tasks

Mona Moisala  1 , Viljami Salmela  2 , Emma Salo  3 , Synnöve Carlson  4 , Virve Vuontela  5 , Oili Salonen  6 , Kimmo Alho  7
Affiliations

Brain activity during divided and selective attention to auditory and visual sentence comprehension tasks

Mona Moisala et al. Front Hum Neurosci. .

Abstract

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we measured brain activity of human participants while they performed a sentence congruence judgment task in either the visual or auditory modality separately, or in both modalities simultaneously. Significant performance decrements were observed when attention was divided between the two modalities compared with when one modality was selectively attended. Compared with selective attention (i.e., single tasking), divided attention (i.e., dual-tasking) did not recruit additional cortical regions, but resulted in increased activity in medial and lateral frontal regions which were also activated by the component tasks when performed separately. Areas involved in semantic language processing were revealed predominantly in the left lateral prefrontal cortex by contrasting incongruent with congruent sentences. These areas also showed significant activity increases during divided attention in relation to selective attention. In the sensory cortices, no crossmodal inhibition was observed during divided attention when compared with selective attention to one modality. Our results suggest that the observed performance decrements during dual-tasking are due to interference of the two tasks because they utilize the same part of the cortex. Moreover, semantic dual-tasking did not appear to recruit additional brain areas in comparison with single tasking, and no crossmodal inhibition was observed during intermodal divided attention.

Keywords: divided attention; dual-tasking; functional MRI; selective attention; semantic processing.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Percentages of correct responses in the unimodal conditions (data combined across auditory and visual conditions), selective attention conditions (data combined across 6 conditions: selective attention to speech with a text, nonsense text or moving fixation cross distractor and selective attention to text with a speech, nonsense speech or music distractor) and divided attention condition. Error bars indicate SEMs. Percentages of correct responses in the three condition types differed significantly from each other (in all cases, p < 0.05).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Significant activity enhancements in relation to the rest blocks in the conditions (A) selective attention to text with a speech distractor and (B) selective attention to speech with a text distractor. (C) A combination of these two contrasts is overlaid with the contrast showing activity enhancements during divided attention compared to rest. Areas showing significant activation enhancements only in the selective attention conditions are denoted with red and areas showing activation enhancements only in the divided attention condition are denoted with yellow. Areas showing overlap between these enhancements are denoted with orange. Voxel-wise height threshold t = 4.7, cluster size > 250, cluster-corrected p < 0.001.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Significant activity enhancements during divided attention in relation to selective attention to text with a speech distractor (red), selective attention to speech with a text distractor (yellow), and both (orange). Voxel-wise height threshold t = 2.5, cluster size > 250, cluster corrected p < 0.001.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Mean signal changes (%) compared with rest in the five dual-tasking ROIs during the nine experimental conditions. Top: mean signal increases in the left and right SMA ROIs. Middle: mean signal increases in the left and right anterior MFG ROIs and the right posterior MFG ROI. Bottom: mean signal increases averaged across all five dual-tasking ROIs. The conditions in each graph are grouped based on the attended modality (left bar cluster: visual modality attended, middle bar cluster: auditory modality attended, rightmost bar: both modalities attended). Error bars indicate SEMs. Conditions differing significantly from each other are indicated with asterisks (*p < 0.05). Note that the nine conditions include the three conditions which were used to select dual-tasking ROIs. (T = attention to text in a unimodal condition, T+S = attention to text with a speech distractor, T+NS = attention to text with a nonsense speech distractor, T+M = attention to text with a music distractor, S = attention to speech in a unimodal condition, S+T = attention to speech with a text distractor, S+NT = attention to speech with a nonsense text distractor, S+MF = attention to speech with a moving fixation cross distractor, D = divided attention).
Figure 5
Figure 5
Mean signal changes (%) in the visual (A) and auditory (B) cortices in the left and right hemispheres (dark gray and light gray bars, respectively) during attention to text in the unimodal condition, attention to speech in the unimodal condition, selective attention to text (with a speech distractor), selective attention to speech (with a text distractor), and divided attention. Error bars indicate SEMs. Conditions differing significantly from the divided attention condition are indicated with asterisks (*p < 0.05; **p < 0.005). (T = attention to text in a unimodal condition, S = attention to speech in a unimodal condition, T+S = attention to text with a speech distractor, S+T = attention to speech with a text distractor, D = divided attention).
Figure 6
Figure 6
Brain areas showing significant activity enhancements for attended incongruent written (red) and spoken (yellow) sentences (area overlaps shown in orange) in relation to respective congruent sentences. Data combined across all single-task conditions for each modality. Voxel-wise height threshold t = 2.5, cluster size > 250, cluster-corrected p < 0.001.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Mean signal changes (%) in the semantic ROIs for attended incongruent and congruent sentences compared with rest during the unimodal (data combined across the unimodal auditory and visual conditions), selective attention (data combined across all auditory and visual selective attention conditions), and divided attention conditions in the left (A) and right (B) hemisphere. Error bars indicate SEMs.
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