Neural Mechanisms of Grouping and Stimulus Selection

本研究的长期目标是在单个神经元和皮层回路的水平上了解选择性视觉注意的神经机制，并确定这些机制如何影响感知和行为。概念上的出发点是观察到大脑在任何时刻能够处理的视觉信息数量是有限的。例如，当观察者被要求在一个简短的场景中识别物体时，随着物体数量的增加，他们的准确性会降低。这项拟议的研究将结合视觉心理物理学和单单元生理学来测试这种能力限制的两种解释，并研究使大脑从无关的干扰物中选择与行为相关的刺激的神经机制。从拟议的研究中获得的见解有望有助于理解、诊断和治疗由注意力机制失效引起的神经心理障碍，如忽视、巴林氏综合征、多动症和自闭症的注意力方面。

The long-range goal of this research is to understand the neural mechanisms of selective visual attention at the level of the individual neuron and the cortical circuit, and to determine how these mechanisms affect perception and behavior. The conceptual starting point is the observation that the brain is limited in the amount of visual information it can process at any moment in time. For instance, when observers are asked to identify the objects in a briefly presented scene, they become less accurate as the number of objects increases. The proposed research will use a combination of visual psychophysics and single-unit physiology to test two alternative explanations for this capacity limitation, and to investigate the neural mechanisms that enable the brain to select behaviorally relevant stimuli from among irrelevant distracters. Insights from the proposed research are expected to help in understanding, diagnosis and treatment of neuropsychological disorders in which attentional mechanisms fail, such as neglect, Balint's syndrome, ADHD, and attentional aspects of autism.