Neural Mechanisms of Grouping and Stimulus Selection

本研究的长期目标是在个体神经元和皮层回路的水平上理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。概念的出发点是观察到大脑在任何时刻都能处理的视觉信息量有限。 例如，当观察者被要求识别一个简单呈现的场景中的物体时，随着物体数量的增加，他们变得不那么准确。 拟议的研究将使用视觉心理物理学和单单位生理学的组合来测试这种容量限制的两种替代解释，并调查使大脑能够从不相关的干扰中选择行为相关刺激的神经机制。 从拟议的研究中获得的见解预计将有助于理解，诊断和治疗注意力机制失败的神经心理障碍，如忽视，巴林特综合征，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.