Abstract
Attention is central to many functions such as vision, emotion, reward, memory, and consciousness. Attention is a neural signal that modulates main signals. Main signals are sensory signals in feed forward pathways (e.g., vision related ventral and dorsal pathways) and signals related to memory, emotion, reward, and so on. The attentional modulating signal could be in forward (bottom-up) or backward (top-down) direction from attentional sources such as thalamic reticular nucleus or fronto-parietal network, respectively. This attentional signal is disturbed in schizophrenia. Attention deficits in schizophrenia are critically reviewed. Schizophrenics appear to have deficit mostly in switching and selective (salience) attention. Attention modulates main signals via dopamine and glutamate neuromodulators in schizophrenia. An experimental design, based on switching attention deficit and functional magnetic resonance imaging, is proposed.
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