Divergent neural mechanisms of selective attention in dichotic listening and binocular rivalry perception: Evidence from functional brain network analysis
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Although selective attention similarly modulates bistable perception in auditory and visual domains, its neural mechanisms remain unclear. Using fMRI within a naturalistic paradigm-dichotic listening (DL) with narrative stimuli and binocular rivalry (BR) with movie clips-we combined multiscale ICA-based brain network analysis (inter-/intra-subject correlation and dynamic FC) to investigate attentional mechanisms in DL and BR. In DL, when participants attended to the same narrative, the inter-SC of both right executive control network (RECN) and sensorimotor network (SMN) increased compared to when they attended to different narratives, indicating that the RECN and SMN were involved in the attentional mechanism of DL. Regardless of attentional content consistency, the auditory network (AudN) showed significant synchrony in both inter-SC and intra-SC analyses, suggesting stimulus-driven processing in DL. For BR, significant inter- and intra-SC were only observed in networks related to stimulus-driven processing, namely the higher visual network (HVN) and language network (LN), while no selective attention-related cognitive networks were identified. Furthermore, no dFC effects in the DL task were found. However, in the BR condition, the FC between the HVN and LN was significantly enhanced when attending to characters versus architecture, and the difference was robustly positively correlated with the difference in perceptual dominance duration of character-related movies between the two conditions. In summary, our results demonstrate that the modulation mechanisms of selective attention differ substantially between DL and BR. The former involves executive control, whereas the latter relies on neural circuits supporting perceptual processing.
Source: NeuroImage
Authors: Xianqing Zeng, Yan Huang, Keyu Wang, Jiujiu Wang, Ming Meng
Institution: South China Normal University
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,540
OpenAlex ID: W4414341564