Cognitive Science and Social Psychology Seminar (CSSP) ~ Dr. Rachel Denison, Faculty, Boston University

Cognitive Science and Social Psychology Seminar (CSSP)

Rachel Denison ~ Assistant Professor, Boston University

Title: Attending to moments in time

Abstract: Our brains receive a continuous flow of sensory information. From this incoming stream, attention allows us to prioritize the information that is most relevant for our behavioral goals. We can attend not only to locations in space but also to moments in time when we expect something relevant to appear. But how we attend in time—and why we do not simply attend continuously—are not well understood. Here we investigated the computational principles and neural mechanisms underlying temporal attention. First, we developed a dynamic vision and attention model. The model showed that temporal normalization—a computation hypothesized to govern stimulus interactions across time—suffices to incentivize attending to specific time points. Next, using MEG we found evidence for two neural mechanisms that support the attentional selection of visual information at precise moments. First, anticipatory periodic modulations shift in time to enhance visual activity at attended time points. Second, visual information from attended time points appears to be selectively routed from sensory to downstream brain regions. These attentional mechanisms reflect the specific demands of processing dynamic input. Altogether these findings illuminate why and how we attend selectively to moments in time.