UC San Diego

Auditory information communicated through vocalizations, music, or sounds in the environment is commonly used to orient and direct attention to different locations in extrapersonal space. The neural networks subserving attention to auditory space remain poorly understood in comparison to our knowledge about attention in the visual system. The present study investigated whether a parietal-prefrontal right-hemisphere network controls endogenous orienting and reorienting of attention to the location of sounds just as it does for visual-spatial information. Seventeen healthy adults underwent event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) while performing an endogenous auditory orienting task, in which peripheral cues correctly (valid) or incorrectly (invalid) specified the location of a forthcoming sound. The results showed that a right precuneus and bilateral temporal-frontal network mediated the reorienting of auditory attention at both short and long stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). In contrast, the more automatic stage of auditory reorienting at the shorter SOA was associated with activation in a bilateral inferior parietal-frontal oculomotor network. These findings suggest that the reorienting of auditory attention is generally supported by a similar inferior parietal-frontal network as visual attention, but in both hemispheres. However, peripheral auditory cues also appear to elicit an automatic orienting response to the spatial location of a sound followed by a period of reduced processing of information that occurs in the same location later in time.