Abstract
Functional connectivity in resting state has became the dominantway of understanding brain functions. However, the definition of resting states is ambiguous. A previous study have shown that low-passed dynamic random-dot patterns (DRDs) have some effects on controlling resting state, but it has not been verified enough. The purpose of this study is to define the brain activity derived from observation of DRDs. We measured NIRS signals from subjects' prefrontal cortex (PFC) and right-lateral temporal cortex (rLTC) during a block design paradigm which composed from iteration of cross hairs target and a DRD. Subjects were instructed to maintain their gaze on the cross target and to think nothing as much as possible. The DRDs were filtered by three types of Gaussian filters. As a result, the activities of ventrolateral PFC and rLTC significantly decreased when the display had been switched from the cross target to the DRD, and the effects were more intense as blurriness of DRDs increased. This suggests that observation of DRDs could be able to inhibit mind wandering and to derive attention disengagement, because these brain areas are associated with defaultmode network and working memory.
