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.