A Frontoparietal Network for Cognitive Control of Gaze Following

Abstract

Gaze following is an essential part of non-verbal communication and indispensable for successful social interactions. Human gaze following is a fast and almost reflex-like behavior, yet, it can be volitionally controlled and suppressed to some extent if inappropriate or unnecessary given the social context. In order to identify the neural basis of the cognitive control of gaze following, we carried out an event-related fMRI experiment, in which human subjects were exposed to social gaze cues in two distinct contexts: a baseline gaze following condition in which subjects were instructed to use gaze cues to shift their attention to a gazed-at spatial target and a control condition in which the subjects were required to ignore the gaze cue and instead to shift their attention to a distinct spatial target to be selected based on a color mapping rule, requiring the suppression of gaze following. We could identify suppression-related BOLD activity in a frontoparietal network with dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), insula, precuneus and posterior parietal cortex (PPC) as its foci. Activation of this network led to the suppression of the activation in the gaze following patch (GFP), an area previously shown to be essential in social gaze following behavior.