Hannah Somers, “Regions of Activation in the Posterior Parietal Cortex Based on Attention Allocated Towards a Task”
Mentor: Wendy Huddleston, Physical Therapy, Rehabilitation Sciences & Technology (School of)
Poster #168
The role of the posterior parietal cortex in motor attention and motor planning has long been debated. Our goal is to look at various regions within the parietal cortex which are activated during different types of attention tasks. With the use of an fMRI scan, participants (n=42; 20-54 years old; 9 males and 33 females) were given two separate tasks to complete. Participants completed a saccade task, which required little motor attention planning due to the sparse stimulus array. The participant also completed an intention clock task. The selection of the correct saccade target was the focus of the task, specifically, understanding how the brain selects pertinent visual stimuli from the surrounding environment when allocating attention for task completion. Results show an average of 18.06% (left) and 15.63% (right) of the total number of regions activated during the intention task were also involved in the saccadotopy task. Respectively, 22.36% (left) and 23.96% (right) of the total number of regions activated during the saccadotopy task were also involved in the intention task. Thus, these two eye movement tasks with different attentional requirements activated adjacent, but different, regions of parietal cortex. With these data, overlap maps show us the involvement of different sections of the posterior parietal cortex based on the amount and type of attention required to complete a task and what sections of the parietal cortex are involved in both motor intention and saccade tasks.