Selective attention facilitates our ability in detecting important information by optimizing limited attentional capacity. Previous studies have shown that a common frontoparietal network is involved in the top-down control of both spatial and feature-based attention, yet its functions in different attention tasks are not clear. In the current study, we used fMRI and multivariate pattern analysis (similarity and cluster analysis) to examine the relationship between attentional control of spatial and feature-based attention. Participants viewed a compound stimulus that contained multiple dot fields in two colors (red and green), two directions (upward and downward), and two spatial locations (left and right). An auditory cue instructed participants to attend to a particular feature or location on a given trial and to perform a change detection task on the cued dot fields. Different attention tasks activated a similar top-down attentional network in frontoparietal regions including intraparietal sulcus (IPS), frontal eye field (FEF) and ventral precentral sulcus (vPCS). There were only a few ROIs showed magnitude difference between different attention types. More importantly, cluster analysis showed clear hierarchical cluster structure in frontoparietal cortex for different attention tasks. In particular, activities belonged to same attention type shared similar multivoxel response patterns. This suggests that frontoparietal network controls different types of attentional selection with distinct, hierarchically organized neural substrates.
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