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Neural
Mechanisms
of
Selective
Visual
Attention
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The
long-range goal of our laboratory is to understand the neural mechanisms
of selective visual attention at the level of the individual neuron and
the cortical circuit, and to relate these to perception and conscious
awareness. We take as our starting point the observation that the brain is
limited in the amount of visual information it can process at any moment
in time. For instance, when people are asked to identify the objects in a
briefly presented scene, they become less accurate as the number of
objects increases. This inability to process more than a few objects at a
time reflects the limited capacity of some stage (or stages) of sensory
processing, decision-making, or behavioral control. Somewhere between
stimulating the retina and generating a behavioral response, objects
compete with one another to pass through this computational bottleneck. We
seek to understand this selection process using a combination of visual
psychophysics, neurophysiology, and computational neural modeling.
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