An fMRI investigation into the neural mechanisms of spatial attentional selection in a location-based negative priming task

Selective attention enables us to respond to objects and events that are relevant to our goals for adaptive interactions with the environment. Despite evidence from research addressing the selection of a target location, little is known about the neural mechanisms of attentional selection in situations in which the selection is biased in favor of the information in the irrelevant location. In this study, we combined event-related fMRI and a location-based negative priming paradigm with a prime–probe-trial design to investigate the neural mechanisms of spatial attentional selection. Participants were instructed to respond to the location of a pre-specified target while ignoring a distractor at an irrelevant location. The goal of this study was twofold. First, we identified brain regions that are linked to conflict resolution situations, in which the selection bias puts the irrelevant information in the probe trial on a selection advantage over the target. Second, we determined the mechanism of conflict resolution when the encoding conditions of stimuli are manipulated by presenting stimuli either abruptly (onset) or masked (no-onset). The results showed that the bottom-up-induced competition among stimuli in the target selection is stronger for onset than no-onset stimuli. The superior parietal lobule was sensitive to those changes in bottom-up-induced competition. Furthermore, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and inferior parietal lobe were activated to resolve the additional processing effort necessary to select the negatively biased target. In conclusion, the present study identified dissociable neural components needed to resolve the negative selection bias, which attentional modulation can be addressed in future studies by examining changes in the functional connectivity.