An fMRI study on the effect of distance in the shifting of visuospatial attention

Attentional shift (or shift of attention) occurs when directing attention to a point to increase the efficiency of processing that point and includes inhibition to decrease attentional resources to unwanted or irrelevant inputs. Shifting of attention is needed to allocate attentional resources to more efficiently process information from a stimulus. Research has shown that when an object or area is attended, processing operates more efficiently. Task switching costs occur when performance on a task suffers due to the increased effort added in shifting attention. There are competing theories that attempt to explain why and how attention is shifted as well as how attention is moved through space. But about the effect of distance in the shifting of visual spatial attention was unknown until now. In this experiment, we used a long or short distance arrow, to promote the subjects to shift attention by the arrow. And the attention was manipulated to visual spatial orienting by this visually cue stimuli. There are four experimental tasks were designed, there are LR short shifting task, RL short shifting task, LR long shifting task, RL long shifting task. In these tasks, when the visual stimuli were appeared, subjects were asked to fast and accurate to press the response key. The reaction times for spatial location attention were recorded. During the experiment, we also recorded the subject´s brain imaging results. And found the brain regions related to the shifting distance of visual spatial attention.