Predicting Normal People’s Reaction Time based on Hippocampal Local Efficiency During a Memory-Guided Attention Task

Background: There are some convincing shreds of evidence indicating thatmemory can direct attention. The local efficiency of an area in the brain, as aquantitative feature in a complex network, indicates how the surrounding nodescan transfer the information when a specific node is omitted. This feature is ascale for measuring efficient integration of information in the brain.Objectives: The purpose of the present study is to predict the reaction timeusing the local efficiency variable while doing memory-guided attention task.Materials and Methods: The fMRI database of a research done in New YorkUniversity during a visual search task was used for this study. Thirty-five righthandedhealthy participants (51% female, mean age= 21.7 years) were recruitedat New York University. SPM was used for pre-processing fMRI images, andCONN was used for calculating the values of local efficiency. SPSS was alsoused for statistical analysis of the study.Results: Results of the study revealed that local efficiency of the righthippocampus can positively predict the reaction time during memory-guidedattention tasks.Conclusion: The findings of the study demonstrated that the hippocampus areahas a significant role in the performance of memory-guided attention, and thissignificant role of the hippocampus reveals that long-term memory uses thehippocampus and affects the movement and attention of eyes on the target.

Keywords:

Reaction Time , Memory , Hippocampus , Attention , Functional Neuroimaging