There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Abstract
Alertness, the most basic intensity aspect of attention, probably is a prerequisite
for the more complex and capacity demanding domains of attention selectivity. Behaviorally,
intrinsic alertness represents the internal (cognitive) control of wakefulness and
arousal; typical tasks to assess optimal levels of intrinsic alertness are simple
reaction time measurements without preceding warning stimuli. Up until now only parts
of the cerebral network subserving alertness have been revealed in animal, lesion,
and functional imaging studies. Here, in a 15O-butanol PET activation study in 15
right-handed young healthy male volunteers for this basic attention function we found
an extended right hemisphere network including frontal (anterior cingulate-dorsolateral
cortical)-inferior parietal-thalamic (pulvinar and possibly the reticular nucleus)
and brainstem (ponto-mesencephalic tegmentum, possibly involving the locus coeruleus)
structures, when subjects waited for and rapidly responded to a centrally presented
white dot by pressing a response key with the right-hand thumb.