Human lateral frontal cortex is instrumental in higher-order cognitive tasks, including attention, decision- making, planning, and working memory. Head trauma, stroke, and neurodegenerative disorders can damage frontal lobe structures and disrupt these cognitive abilities. Individuals with severe impairments of vision or audition may also have abnormal frontal functionality arising from changes elsewhere in the nervous system. The proposed research will improve our understanding of the multiple cognitive capacities supported by lateral frontal cortex, while providing advanced research training for a young female scientist. The goal of this research is to better understand frontal lobe structures that support visual and auditory working memory, as recently identified by our laboratory. Prior research has shown that vision codes information about space more accurately than audition does, while audition codes information about timing more accurately than vision does. Intriguingly, recent work has also demonstrated crossmodal recruitment of these frontal areas, with visual-biased areas in the frontal lobe activated preferentially during purely auditory spatia tasks relative to auditory temporal tasks, and auditory-biased areas in the frontal lobe activated during visual temporal, but not visual spatial, tasks.
The first Aim of this project is to understad how sensory-biased attention regions coexist in lateral frontal cortex alongside related areas that support multisensory, general working memory capacities.
The second Aim i s to understand when and how sensory-biased frontal areas are flexibly recruited for forms of information (i.e., space or timing). The proposed research will use fMRI to measure neural activity during visual, auditory, and crossmodal working memory for spatial and temporal information. Event-related analyses and multivariate searchlight techniques will be employed. Auditory and visual psychophysical experiments will also be conducted. These studies are innovative because they incorporate a memory component into studies of visual or auditory preference in the human brain. Understanding how the brain relies on the specialization of one sensory modality in order to remember information in another is relevant to a broader understanding of how humans learn and remember new information, and will improve our understanding of healthy neural functioning. By performing these experiments, the PI will be trained in cutting-edge fMRI techniques, as well as in auditory neuroscience, supporting her career goals of becoming an independent investigator in cognitive neuroscience.
Short-term memory interacts with many higher cognitive abilities, including perception, attention, language, and decision-making. This research aims to increase our knowledge of how healthy brains organize visual and auditory information and spatial and temporal information when remembering. Improving our understanding of these mechanisms may help to support and treat future patients with specialized cognitive disruptions, such as those resulting from learning disabilities, stroke, or traumatic brain injury, and individuals with severe impairments of vision or audition.
| Tobyne, Sean M; Somers, David C; Brissenden, James A et al. (2018) Prediction of individualized task activation in sensory modality-selective frontal cortex with 'connectome fingerprinting'. Neuroimage 183:173-185 |
| Noyce, Abigail L; Cestero, Nishmar; Michalka, Samantha W et al. (2017) Sensory-Biased and Multiple-Demand Processing in Human Lateral Frontal Cortex. J Neurosci 37:8755-8766 |
