Ekaterina Lebayle
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My goal is to get into and complete a Neuroscience Ph.D. Program. Future goal is to study neural mechanisms of psychiatric and neurological disorders using human brain imaging. Another future goal is to investigate how Yoga (Postures, Meditation, breathing techniques) affects the brain and its implementation in treatment of psychiatric disorders.
Cognitive and perceptual resources are limited due to the high neuronal metabolic cost. Optimizing attention is essential for reducing the bioenergetic cost of neuronal activity, and improving the ability to process information. Attending to a point in space or time results in benefits of enhanced visual perception respectively, but it also has a cost of impairment at unattended ones. A lot is known about mechanisms of spatial and temporal attention when they are deployed alone, but it is not well understood how these types of attention interact with each other: what mechanisms do they have in common, and what are the costs and benefits (subadditive, additive, or superadditive) of combining them in the same task? We developed an experimental protocol where participants were asked to report the orientation of tilted Gabors at one of four locations at a specific period of time. At the beginning of each trial, they were given a pre-cue (valid, invalid, or neutral) which indicated space, time, both, or none. We examined sensitivity (d') and reaction times for every combination of the location and time. We hypothesized that combining spatial and temporal attention in this high-difficulty task will result in a superadditive benefit to performance. Given our preliminary results, we found spatial effects (costs and benefits) across all pre-cue conditions, but we did not see clear temporal effects at this time. With more data, we will be able to clarify how humans combine spatial and temporal attention to optimize behavior. Our results will also give insight into whether spatial and temporal attention mechanisms are independent, or do they depend on each other. |