CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 882Neural and Behavioral Psychology StudiesNeurotransmitter Receptor Influence on BehaviorVisual Attention and Saliency Detection

Neural correlates of attention and arousal: insights from electrophysiology, functional neuroimaging and psychopharmacology

Coull, J.T·1998·Progress in Neurobiology
DOI 10.1016/s0301-0082(98)00011-2
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

Attention and arousal are multi-dimensional psychological processes, which interact closely with one another. The neural substrates of attention, as well as the interaction between arousal and attention, are discussed in this review. After a brief discussion of psychological and neuropsychological theories of attention, event-related potential correlates of attention are discussed. Essentially, attention acts to modulate stimulus-induced electrical potentials (N100/P100, P300, N400), rather than generating any unique potentials of its own. Functional neuroimaging studies of attentional orienting, selective attention, divided attention and sustained attention (and its inter-dependence on underlying levels of arousal) are then reviewed. A distinction is drawn between the brain areas which are crucially involved in the top-down modulation of attention (the 'sources' of attention) and those sensory-association areas whose activity is modulated by attention (the 'sites' of attentional expression). Frontal and parietal (usually right-lateralised) cortices and thalamus are most often associated with the source of attentional modulation. Also, the use of functional neuroimaging to test explicit hypotheses about psychological theories of attention is emphasised. These experimental paradigms form the basis for a 'new generation' of functional imaging studies which exploit the dynamic aspect of imaging and demonstrate how it can be used as more than just a 'brain mapping' device. Finally, a review of psychopharmacological studies in healthy human volunteers outlines the contributions of the noradrenergic, cholinergic and dopaminergic neurotransmitter systems to the neurochemical modulation of human attention and arousal. While, noradrenergic and cholinergic systems are involved in 'low-level' aspects of attention (e.g. attentional orienting), the dopaminergic system is associated with more 'executive' aspects of attention such as attentional set-shifting or working memory.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1016/s0301-0082(98)00011-2

Cites

110 of 110 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • A higher N1 amplitude reflects more intensive visual processing of the emotional content of negative pictures even at a very early stage.

    “A higher N1 amplitude reflects more intensive visual processing of the emotional content of negative pictures even at a very early stage (Coull, 1998).”

    From Repetitive Religious Chanting Modulates the Late-Stage Brain Response to Fear- and Stress-Provoking Pictures (2017) · cites this paper as Coull, 1998

  • Fluctuations in arousal are present throughout the animal kingdom and influence physiological processes and behaviors across many timescales.

    “Fluctuations in arousal are present throughout the animal kingdom and influence physiological processes and behaviors across many timescales (Coull, 1998; Pfaff et al., 2008; Anderson and Adolphs, 2014).”

    From Ancestral Circuits for the Coordinated Modulation of Brain State (2017) · cites this paper as Coull, 1998

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Coull, J. T.
Affiliations
Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives (FR)
Corresponding author
Coull, J.T
ORCID
Coull, J.T
Venue
Progress in Neurobiology
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
1998-07-01
Volume
55
Issue
4
Pages
343-361
ISSN
0301-0082 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.1016/s0301-0082(98)00011-2
OpenAlex
W2075931307
Cited by
882
References
110
Citations by year
2026: 16 · 2025: 21 · 2024: 24 · 2023: 15 · 2022: 28 · 2021: 24 · 2020: 26 · 2019: 23 · 2018: 42 · 2017: 33 · 2016: 29 · 2015: 37 · 2014: 34 · 2013: 41 · 2012: 43
FWCI
10.40
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
www.elsevier.com/tdm/userlicense/1.0/ (tdm)
Locations
  • Progress in Neurobiology (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • HAL (submittedVersion)
Funders
Wellcome Trust
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience › Neurotransmitter Receptor Influence on Behavior
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Visual Attention and Saliency Detection
Keywords
attention, arousal, neural correlates of attention, event-related potentials, P300, N400, attentional orienting, selective attention, divided attention, sustained attention, thalamus, noradrenergic system, cholinergic system, dopaminergic system, set-shifting, working memory
MeSH terms
Animals, Arousal, Attention, Dopamine, Electroencephalography, Humans, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Norepinephrine, Tomography, Emission-Computed, Event-Related Potentials, P300

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review