The Interplay of Attention and Conscious Perception: Evidence from Human Intracerebral Recordings and Computational Modeling
How do attention and consciousness interact in the human brain? Rival theories of consciousness disagree on the role of fronto-parietal attentional networks in conscious perception. We recorded neural activity from 727 intracerebral contacts in 13 epileptic patients, while they detected near-threshold targets preceded by attentional cues. Unsupervised clustering revealed three patterns: (1) Attention-enhanced conscious report accompanied sustained right-hemisphere fronto-temporal activity, in networks connected by the superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF) II-III, and late accumulation in bilateral dorso-prefrontal and right-hemisphere orbitofrontal cortex (SLF I-III). (2) Attentional reorienting affected conscious report through early, sustained activity in a right-hemisphere network (SLF III). (3) Conscious report accompanied left-hemisphere dorsolateral-prefrontal activity. Task modeling with recurrent neural networks identified specific excitatory and inhibitory interactions between attention and consciousness, and their causal contribution to conscious perception of near-threshold targets. Thus, distinct, hemisphere-asymmetric fronto-parietal networks support attentional gain and reorienting in shaping human conscious experience. One-Sentence SummaryIntracerebral recordings, tractography and modeling reveal the interaction of attention and consciousness in the human brain.