Dual Pathway for Controlling Attention Ability in the Central Nerve System

Activated areas in the brain necessary for attention processing have been identified by previous neuroimaging studies, however, dynamic neural mechanism for explaining complex attentional performances dependent on both task types and subjects still remains unclear. We here examined two types of continuous performance tasks (CPTs), SRT-CPT for testing simple reaction and AX-CPT for working memory to clarify the dynamic attentional mechanism. We found that statistical distribution of response time exhibited a composite function having two independent components. This indicates that attention could be controlled by dual attentional pathways switchable according to contexts. We finally presented a neural model with dual attentional pathways, taking into account background measurements of electroencephalogram and near-infrared hemoencephalogram. This model is useful for explaining the complexity of task- and subject-dependent attention performances.