Dissociable laminar profiles of concurrent bottom-up and top-down modulation in the human visual cortex

Abstract
Data availability
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Abstract

Recent developments in human neuroimaging make it possible to non-invasively measure neural activity from different cortical layers. This can potentially reveal not only which brain areas are engaged by a task, but also how. Specifically, bottom-up and top-down responses are associated with distinct laminar profiles. Here, we measured lamina-resolved fMRI responses during a visual task designed to induce concurrent bottom-up and top-down modulations via orthogonal manipulations of stimulus contrast and feature-based attention. BOLD responses were modulated by both stimulus contrast (bottom-up) and by engaging feature-based attention (top-down). Crucially, these effects operated at different cortical depths: Bottom-up modulations were strongest in the middle cortical layer and weaker in deep and superficial layers, while top-down modulations were strongest in the superficial layers. As such, we demonstrate that laminar activity profiles can discriminate between concurrent top-down and bottom-up processing, and are diagnostic of how a brain region is activated.

Data availability

Data and code used for stimulus presentation and analysis are available online at the Donders Research Data Repository: https://data.donders.ru.nl/collections/di/dccn/DSC_3018028.04_752

The following data sets were generated

(2019) Dissociable laminar profiles of bottom-up and top-down modulation in the human visual cortex
Donders Repository, http://hdl.handle.net/11633/di.dccn.DSC_3018028.04_752.

https://data.donders.ru.nl/collections/di/dccn/DSC_3018028.04_752

Article and author information

Author details

Samuel JD Lawrence

Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
David G Norris

Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands

Competing interests
No competing interests declared.
Floris P de Lange

Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands

For correspondence
floris.delange@donders.ru.nl

Competing interests
Floris P de Lange, Reviewing editor, eLife.

"This ORCID iD identifies the author of this article:" 0000-0002-6730-1452

Funding

Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (Vidi)

Floris P de Lange

European Research Council Starting Grant (CONTEXTVISION)

Floris P de Lange

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.

Ethics

Human subjects: All participants gave written informed consent and the study was approved by the local ethics committees (CMO region Arnhem-Nijmegen, The Netherlands, and ethics committee of the University Duisburg-Essen, Germany). Protocol CMO 2014/288

Copyright

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.