Dissecting the neural substrates of spatial attention

在空间中有效地分配注意力对人类的学习和表现至关重要。虽然人们认识到空间注意力受到唤醒状态的影响，但我们对相关的大脑机制和动力学缺乏了解。该项目旨在监测空间注意力任务中唤醒水平（瞳孔测量）和离散信息处理阶段（脑电图）在毫秒级的变化。建立这些方法对自发和外部驱动的觉醒波动的敏感性，预计将产生对空间注意的神经基础的机制解释，对人类学习和表现以及注意力障碍的诊断和治疗具有重要意义。

Effectively distributing attention in space is critical to human learning and performance. Although it is recognised that spatial attention is influenced by arousal states, we lack an understanding of the associated brain mechanisms and dynamics. This project aims to monitor changes in arousal levels (pupillometry) and discrete stages of information processing (EEG) at the millisecond level during a spatial attention task. Establishing the sensitivity of these methods to spontaneous and externally driven fluctuations of arousal is expected to yield a mechanistic account of the neural substrates of spatial attention with implications for human learning and performance, and diagnosis and treatment of attention disorders.