Functional connectivity analysis during a perceptual attention task revealed that visual cortical areas that process target information coupled with right MFG and bilateral IFJ during enhancement and with mPFC and PCC during suppression (Chadick and Gazzaley,

2011). The differences between enhancement and suppression in connectivity suggest that on-task perceptual attention contributed to enhancement effects and that off-task, self-referential attention (activating the “default network” [see below]) contributed to suppression effects. Additional studies are needed to compare such network effects for perception and reflection. Perceptual attention is controlled by two orienting systems (Corbetta and Shulman, 2002 and Corbetta et al., 2008). A dorsal system includes the frontal eye fields (FEF) and intraparietal cortex (IPS, SPL) and is involved in goal-directed,

top-down attention to stimuli. A ventral network Lonafarnib nmr includes inferior frontal cortex and IPL (TPJ) and is specialized for bottom-up detection of salient or unexpected events. The ventral network has a right hemisphere bias and CT99021 clinical trial mediates the ability to “reorient” quickly to salient events that are potentially rewarding or dangerous to an observer. Reorienting involves interruption and resetting of ongoing activity in the dorsal network, which otherwise suppresses the ventral network during focused and sustained attention to an ongoing task. One would expect that perceptual attention would be important for encoding events for long-term memory (LTM) and indeed, this is the case. For example, Uncapher et al. (2011) found that cuing top-down perceptual attention to an upcoming target location engaged the IPS and was associated with better subsequent memory, while cuing participants to an invalid Adenosine nontarget location engaged TPJ and was associated with poorer subsequent memory. Presumably, activity in TPJ reflected perceptual capture and/or reorienting necessary when the cued location did not contain a target. These

findings provide important evidence of the role during encoding of top-down and bottom-up perceptual attention, but the study did not compare perceptual and reflective attention. Whether a simple dorsal/ventral distinction applies to remembering is a subject of current debate. Lateral parietal activity is commonly found to be associated with correct recognition memory for old items ( Vilberg and Rugg, 2008). It has been proposed that the dorsal/ventral distinction in perceptual attention may generalize to the kind of reflective attention processes engaged during remembering. Cabeza et al. (2008) and Ciaramelli et al. (2008) suggested that superior parietal cortex supports retrieval search, monitoring, and verification, similar to its role in the top-down, voluntary control of perceptual attention, and that inferior parietal cortex is active when there is clear and more detailed recollection, similar to the exogenous capture of attention by salient, bottom-up perceptual events.