Visual Spatial Attention and Excitability of Visual Cortex

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Screentime. Your visual system is constantly bombarded with visual inputs, from smartphones, computer screens, and televisions. Advertisements are specifically designed to grab your attention moment-to-moment. Even as you watch the news on television a newsfeed scrolls across the bottom of the screen, constantly updating you with even more news. While you surf the internet bright flashing ads pop up in the visual periphery, trying to draw you in. Given all these visual stimuli constantly vying for your attention, how does your brain decide when to attend, when to ignore, and when to allow attention to wander off completely? My research strives to understand these issues and to understand the neurobiological mechanisms of attention, from a cognitive neuroscience approach. This large scale, long-term program of research will include three research themes to be investigated over the next five years. Under my supervision, each research theme will be led by a graduate student in collaboration with other graduate and undergraduate students. All research themes will focus on the neural mechanisms underlying attention by studying people with migraine headache. This test group is of interest because migraineurs are known to have hyperexcitable visual cortex in between headache attacks, and we are interested in understanding how this cortical hyperexcitability influences attentional processing and what this might tell us about the neurobiology of attention. In the first research theme, which will encompass years 1-5, we will assess the impact of hyperexcitable visual cortex on activation of the attentional network. We will use neuroimaging techniques - functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and event-related potentials (ERP) - to assess attention to repeated stimuli using paradigms to study sensory habituation, cognitive habituation, and repetition suppression. In the second research theme, which will encompass years 3-5, we will assess how visual cortical hyperexcitability influences mind wandering and activity in the default network. We will use fMRI and ERP to assess activation during the rest between active tasks and mind wandering during an active task. In the third research theme, which will begin in year 5, we will assess how visual cortical hyperexcitability impacts the relationship between reading and attention. Using fMRI, we will combine visual orienting and reading to study the interaction between reading and attention. My program of research is designed to provide elite training in neuroimaging techniques (fMRI and ERP) for undergraduate and graduate students in a collaborative setting. The overall goal of the research is to understand how cortical hyperexcitability might alter attentional processing and use this information to develop a comprehensive neurobiological model of attention.