Regional topography of auditory and visual attention: an fMRI-based meta-analysis

Three decades of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has gathered extensive evidence of auditory and visual attention effects in the human brain. However, a meta-analysis covering both modalities is lacking. The present activation likelihood estimation (ALE) based meta-analysis reports overlap and segregation of attention effects in the auditory vs. visual modalities further dividing those to effects of orienting vs. maintenance of attention, top-down controlled vs. bottom-up triggered attention, and attention to spatial vs. linguistic stimuli. Fourty-four eligible auditory and 96 visual studies reporting a total of 1884 activation foci were found with PubMed and Scopus search. ALE meta-analysis revealed multimodal attention-related convergence zones with specific regional specialization in the dorsal and ventral parietal and frontal cortices and supplementary motor area / anterior cingulate cortex. Overall, visual attention was biased towards the dorsal attention network and auditory attention towards the ventral attention network. In both sensory modalities, posterior-anterior bias was observed for spatial and linguistic tasks, respectively. Attention effects in the language-related left inferior frontal and inferior temporal cortices were specific to audition. Besides the cerebral cortex, attention effects were found in the cerebellum, striatum and thalamus. In conclusion, the present study showcases the regional topography of attention effects in the brain, identifying brain areas dependent or independent of sensory modality, subprocess of attention, and type of stimulus. The proposed evidence-based multimodal model of attention can be used for interpreting future brain imaging findings as well as clinical observations.