Spatial-attentional priorities as an emerging property of dynamic brain networks and robustness to focal damage.

The external environment and our inner mental state consist of a large number of discrete elements, too many to process in detail at the same time and most of them irrelevant to our goals or interests. For that reason, when we are awake, we continuously select input from the external environment or from our inner mental states. This selection process happens spontaneously and determines, for instance, which stimuli we are aware of and which remain below the threshold of awareness. This fundamental process of selection between competing stimuli is based on an ’attentional priority map’. In our previous research we have focused on the contribution of different areas in the superior parietal cortex to the attentional priority map. Now we want to put these superior parietal areas into the context of a ’brain-wide’ network, including areas in frontal, temporal and occipital lobe as well as subcortical structures. Our aim is no longer to examine the differences in contribution between the superior parietal areas but how the superior parietal areas are positioned within a network that is distributed over the brain. This will also allow us to determine how damage to parts of the network, caused by stroke, affects the activity and connections of the network nodes that are structurally preserved. We will also try to derive from activity patterns in superior parietal cortex where the attentional priorities of the subject at any given time lie and evaluate how this changes due to lesions caused by stroke.