Biasing the organism for novelty: A pervasive property of the attention system

Although the functional and anatomical independences between the orienting and the executive attention networks have been well established, surprisingly little is known about the potential neural interaction between them. Recent studies point out that spatial inhibition of return (IOR), a mechanism associated with the orienting network, and nonspatial inhibition of return, a mechanism associated with the executive network, might bias the organism for novel locations and objects, respectively. By orthogonally combining the spatial and the nonspatial IOR paradigms in this fMRI study, we demonstrate that the orienting and the executive networks interact and compensate each other in biasing the attention system for novelty. Behaviorally, participants responded slower to the target at the old location only when the color of the target was novel, and participants responded slower to the old color representation only when the target appeared at a novel spatial location. Neurally, the orienting network was involved in slowing down responses to the old location only when the nonspatial IOR mechanism in the executive network was not operative (i.e., when the color of the target was novel); the prefrontal executive network was involved in slowing down responses to the old color representation only when the spatial IOR mechanism in the orienting network was not functioning (i.e., when the target appeared at a novel location).