Functional imaging studies of attention

Functional organization of the human brain involved in attention has been determined in many human brain imaging studies. Most of these studies focused on brain mechanisms related to selective attention using different sensory modality or sub-modality stimuli. Recently, we have shown other aspects of human attentional system, that is spatial attention, using event-related functional MRI. In this study, using delayed sequential saccade paradigm, subjects were forced to pay their attention towards right or left visual field. We could not find significant difference in brain activation patterns between right and left visual field attention tasks. The results are inconsistent to the findings of the previous lesion studies of humans showing spatial neglect. Further collaborative studies of neurological and brain mapping researches should be necessary to understand human higher cognitive functions.