TMS and the functional neuroanatomy of attention

Coordinated behaviour depends on selective attention: the ability to select a limited subset of stimuli for detailed analysis, while suppressing the stream of irrelevant information continuously received by our senses. Over the past three decades, converging evidence from neurophysiology, neuropsychology and cognitive neuroscience has suggested that selection modulates brain activity at sensory cortical levels ( [Desimone and Duncan, 1995], [Kastner and Ungerleider, 2000] and [Saalman et al., 2007]), and that potential sources of control are distributed across a frontoparietal network of brain regions ( [Corbetta and Shulman, 2002] and [Corbetta et al., 2008]). More recently, TMS studies have provided insights into the functional neuroanatomy of selective processes, revealing not only which areas of the healthy human brain are crucial for attention, but also when they are engaged during the timecourse of information processing.