Multisensory Systems Neuroscience laboratory joelab.com
Abnormalities of attention occur in humans for many psychiatric disorders, stroke or trauma-related injury to the frontal brain regions. Patients with these attention deficits often have difficulties concentrating, are easily distracted, and fail to notice relevant aspects of their environment, while they are unable to suppress irrelevant ones (known as response inhibition). Currently the brain mechanism of these attention deficits is poorly understood and thus difficult to treat. The prefrontal cortex is important for both the direction of attention and for the selection of appropriate actions. My long-term research goals are to develop a better understanding of the PFC modulation of the oculomotor system through the examination of how eye position, preparatory set signals and visual motion signals are modulated during various tasks (e.g. anti-saccade and delayed-match-to-sample).
e.g. of BOLD activation during the anti-saccade task
When we walk or drive a car, we see an expanding optic flow pattern, a pattern that indicates our direction of motion. This sensed direction of motion does not change when we move our eyes. Consequently, to correctly judge the direction of the self-motion of our bodies, the optic flow patterns seen by the eye must be recomputed using current eye position to arrive at the correct heading direction.
e.g of BOLD activation during motion processing in area MT+
e.g. of BOLD activation for object and face processing
Jody Culham's webpage fMRI for dummies which gives you all the info you will need on fMRI
More to follow in the
future 