My long term objective is to understand the neural mechanisms underlying attention. Considerable progress has been made in the study of attention in cognitive psychological studies, single unit recordings from animals, and human and animal lesion-behavior studies. Position emission tomographic (PET) studies of local cerebral blood flow (CBF) change in the brains of normal humans will be used to address remaining questions about the identification and contribution of specific brain areas activated during the performance of tasks related to different aspects of attention. The proposed research will focus on three aspects of selective attention: 1) activation of areas related to the direction of visual spatial attention, and the relation of spatial attention to visual orienting in the form of saccadic (rapid), and smooth pursuit eye movements; 2) to identify areas that are related to attentional effects on pattern recognition through a comparison of the areas activated by the search for targets in arrays of elements that require little effort (or can take place preattentively), with areas activated when target detection in similar arrays requires exhaustive search; 3) to study the conditions necessary to activate a region (or regions) along the anterior midline that have been shown to be activated during the performance of many different tasks, and in particular to test the hypothesis that the activation of this region is concurrent with focal attention. While the main purpose of these experiments is to further our basic understanding of mechanisms underlying attention, there are clinical implications as well. There is diagnostic significance in the ability to more clearly define structure-function relationships in the brain, and the ability to determine the anatomical location, within an individual, of areas related to important functions can allow for the avoidance of these areas during neurosurgical procedures.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Eye Institute (NEI)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01EY008775-06
Application #
3266141
Study Section
Visual Sciences B Study Section (VISB)
Project Start
1990-07-01
Project End
1995-06-30
Budget Start
1992-07-01
Budget End
1993-06-30
Support Year
6
Fiscal Year
1992
Total Cost
Indirect Cost
Name
Washington University
Department
Type
Schools of Medicine
DUNS #
062761671
City
Saint Louis
State
MO
Country
United States
Zip Code
63130
Fiez, J A; Balota, D A; Raichle, M E et al. (1999) Effects of lexicality, frequency, and spelling-to-sound consistency on the functional anatomy of reading. Neuron 24:205-18
Fiez, J A; Petersen, S E (1998) Neuroimaging studies of word reading. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 95:914-21
Shulman, G L; Schwarz, J; Miezin, F M et al. (1998) Effect of motion contrast on human cortical responses to moving stimuli. J Neurophysiol 79:2794-803
Shulman, G L; Corbetta, M; Buckner, R L et al. (1997) Top-down modulation of early sensory cortex. Cereb Cortex 7:193-206
Buckner, R L; Raichle, M E; Miezin, F M et al. (1996) Functional anatomic studies of memory retrieval for auditory words and visual pictures. J Neurosci 16:6219-35
Fiez, J A; Raife, E A; Balota, D A et al. (1996) A positron emission tomography study of the short-term maintenance of verbal information. J Neurosci 16:808-22
Buckner, R L; Corbetta, M; Schatz, J et al. (1996) Preserved speech abilities and compensation following prefrontal damage. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 93:1249-53
Fiez, J A; Raichle, M E; Balota, D A et al. (1996) PET activation of posterior temporal regions during auditory word presentation and verb generation. Cereb Cortex 6:1-10
Corbetta, M; Shulman, G L; Miezin, F M et al. (1995) Superior parietal cortex activation during spatial attention shifts and visual feature conjunction. Science 270:802-5
Buckner, R L; Raichle, M E; Petersen, S E (1995) Dissociation of human prefrontal cortical areas across different speech production tasks and gender groups. J Neurophysiol 74:2163-73

Showing the most recent 10 out of 17 publications