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Sponsored by: |
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) |
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Information provided by: | National Institutes of Health Clinical Center (CC) |
ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: | NCT00111293 |
The NIMH is conducting studies aimed at gaining a better understanding of the areas of the brain that are involved in different types of mental processes. This study will focus on brain regions involved in visual perception and attention.
Healthy normal volunteers and people who have had a stroke or undergone neurosurgery may be eligible for this study. Candidates must be 18 years of age or older, They must not have a history of a psychiatric disorder, including depression, anxiety, psychosis, or neurological disease other than stroke or the previous neurosurgery.
Participants undergo the following tests and procedures during four or more visits to the NIH Clinical Center:
During the behavioral training or MRI scanning, special pieces of equipment that monitor eye movements may be used.
Some subjects may be asked to return to NIH for an additional visit to participate in a magnetoencephalographic scan. This test uses several sensors applied to the scalp to measure very small changes in magnetic fields. This is another way to measure brain activity.
Condition |
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Focal Lesions Focal Brain Lesion |
Study Type: | Observational |
Official Title: | Top-Down Attentional Control of Visual Processing |
Estimated Enrollment: | 198 |
Study Start Date: | May 2005 |
Attention is required for most, if not all, perceptual processes. There is a converging body of evidence from single-cell recording studies in monkeys and neuroimaging, behavioral, and clinical studies in humans showing that the processing of attended information is enhanced relative to the processing of unattended information.
What is the source of this attentional modulation? Because neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that multiple cortical regions are recruited during tasks involving selective attention, it has proven difficult thus far to determine the differential contributions of each region. A central goal of the proposed research is to characterize the contributions of prefrontal cortex and parietal cortex and test the hypothesis that these regions exert top-down modulatory influences over visual processing areas. Specifically, we wish to investigate the interaction between areas involved in attentional control and visual areas modulated by attention.
We propose to study patients with focal lesions and normal volunteers while they perform tasks requiring attention. Subjects will participate, first, in a series of behavioral studies involving selective attention; the relative performance of different patient groups and neurologically normal volunteers will be compared. Subjects will also be studied while performing similar tasks during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We hypothesize that selective attention will be heavily impaired by lesions of key prefrontal (e.g., dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) and key parietal (e.g., superior parietal lobule) sites. We also expect that brain imaging data will show decreased activation in visual regions ipsilateral to the focal lesions in prefrontal and parietal cortex, thus providing evidence that prefrontal and parietal cortex are sources of top-down modulation. Although other research groups have compared the behavior of patients with various focal lesions or have performed fMRI studies of visual attention in neurologically normal patients, we are unaware of any concerted effort to perform fMRI in patients with focal lesions in order to functionally isolate the contributions of individual cortical regions that serve as critical nodes in the attentional network.
Ages Eligible for Study: | 18 Years to 80 Years |
Genders Eligible for Study: | Both |
Accepts Healthy Volunteers: | Yes |
ALL SUBJECTS -
All subjects will be volunteers and be 18 years of age or older.
PATIENTS -
Subjects with unilateral or bilateral lesions of prefrontal or parietal cortex will be selected for participation in the behavioral and brain-imaging studies described within this protocol.
Control subjects with unilateral or bilateral lesions of temporal cortex will also be studied.
Finally, patients with amygdala lesions will also be studied to test the specific hypothesis outlined in Experiment 4.
In order to obtain a sufficient number of focal lesion patients representative of different brain regions, patients with different etiologies will be studied, provided the damage is circumscribed.
The main etiologies that we will consider are stroke, lobectomy, and tumor.
We will restrict groups to include patients with the same etiology, lesion location, and lesion volume. Lesion location will consider the two hemispheres separately.
Patients who also have non-amygdala subcortical lesions will be grouped separately from patients with cortical-only lesions.
Our goal is to not group patients with more focal brain lesions compromising a single region (e.g., middle frontal gyrus) with patients with more massive damage (e.g., large extents of superior, middle, and inferior frontal gyrus).
Focal lesion patients will not be excluded on the basis of medication.
NORMAL VOLUNTEERS -
Neurologically normal, age-matched volunteers will be recruited from the local community through normal Clinical Center channels.
EXCLUSION CRITERIA:
The following criteria will be used to exclude patients or healthy volunteers from participation in this study:
Contact: Patient Recruitment and Public Liaison Office | (800) 411-1222 | prpl@mail.cc.nih.gov |
Contact: TTY | 1-866-411-1010 |
United States, Maryland | |
National Institutes of Health Clinical Center, 9000 Rockville Pike | Recruiting |
Bethesda, Maryland, United States, 20892 |
Study ID Numbers: | 050157, 05-M-0157 |
Study First Received: | May 18, 2005 |
Last Updated: | July 18, 2008 |
ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: | NCT00111293 |
Health Authority: | United States: Federal Government |
Attention Executive Function Vision fMRI Top-Down Visual Processing |
Lesion Prefrontal Parietal Focal Brain Lesion Healthy Volunteer |
Healthy |