Motor and fronto-parietal cortices' involvement in sustained attention

What is it about?

Try to sustain attention on a task: after a couple of minutes, attention deficits inevitably occur. You are then more likely to show long reaction times in response to imperative signals (e.g., a red light while driving), or you would even miss these signals. Such situations would eventually lead to accidents and error-driven incidents in real world environments. This study shows how the brain adapts to such sustained attention-related deficiencies.

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Why is it important?

This study shows that when attention deficits appear during a sustained attention task, the activity of a number of task-relevant brain areas increases. This is really surprising as traditional theories of sustained attention have viewed the occurrence of attention deficits as resulting from a depletion of resources in the brain leading, it was believed, to a disengagement of the very same areas that we found over-engaged over time-on-task. An interesting discussion is provided regarding this striking finding in the paper!