|
Visual attention deficits after damage to the right side of the brain
(Thomas Habekost)
The aim of the study is to provide the first large scale investigation of how right sided brain damage affects attentional function, as measured by TVA. During 2003, 30 patients with focal, apoplectic lesions will be recruited from university hospitals and rehabilitation centers in Copenhagen. Each patient's attentional function is extensively tested using whole and partial report experiments, and the data are TVA modelled. The resulting estimates of attentional function are compared to the performance of an age-matched control group. In addition, each patient is MR scanned to obtain high resolution images of the lesion (3T scanner; T1- and T2-weighted sequences, spectroscopy). The anatomical and psychological (TVA-) data are combined to test whether specific regions in the right side of the brain are critical to various aspects of attentional function (i.e., capacity of visual short-term memory, rate of encoding, left-right weighting, and efficiency of attentional control).
|
Visual attention, visual short-term memory, and the fronto-parietal network
(Søren Kyllingsbæk)
During the last 20 years cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and cognitive neuroscience have discovered a broad spectrum of findings regarding the neural basis of visual attention and visual short-term memory. Surprisingly, both mental phenomena seem to be mediated by a network comprising parts of the frontal and the parietal cortex, the so-called fronto-parietal network.
The project aims to reach a deeper understanding of visual attention and visual short-term memory and the link between the two. Specifically, we wish to integrate descriptions of the two phenomena at both the cognitive as well as at the neurobiological level. We aim to do this through a neurobiological implementation of the TVA model, which we hope will yield a better understanding of visual attention and visual short-term memory and why the two phenomena are mediated by the same network in the brain. The project is supported by the Carlsberg Foundation.
|