Directed Attention At Encoding Facilitates Response Preparation To High Probability Events
RESEARCH BACKGROUND
What is the relation between awareness, attention, and memory? Currently, I am investigating the dynamic interplay between attention and memory. My work uses EEG and behavioural measures to examine how auditory experience and memory can optimize attention and performance during online perception of real-world scenes. Specifically, I am interested both in how everyday auditory experience and implicit memory can bias spatial attention in complex scenes and in how these effects appear in different populations, for example, in older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and in congenitally blind individuals. This area of research is fascinating, and constantly pushes me to see the complexity of things.
My background in psychoacoustics and auditory cognitive neuroscience includes, also, examinations of 1) the role of timbre and attention in the perceptual organization of sound (auditory scene analysis) and 2) the neural encoding and cross-modal plasticity of audio-motor sequences in music learning.
My work is co-supervised by Dr. Morris Moscovitch and Dr. Claude Alain.
Email: manda.fischer@mail.utoronto.ca
Website: http://www2.psych.utoronto.ca/Neuropsychologylab/manda.html
Directed Attention At Encoding Facilitates Response Preparation To High Probability Events
Long-term memory (LTM) of learned target locations can facilitate target detection. Here, we examined whether this benefit is related to attentional or motor-related processes by comparing lateralized readiness potentials (LRP). Participants heard audio-clips (half included a lateralized tone) and classified the target tone as high or low. A surprise test followed, in which participants detected a faint lateralized tone now embedded in each audio-clip. Target detection was faster for clips previously associated with the target location (memory-cue) compared to those that were not (neutral-cue).
The stimulus-locked LRP was greatest for the memory-cue condition. There was no difference in response-locked activity between the conditions. Time-frequency analysis complemented these findings, revealing a difference in the delta frequency band during the period of expectation prior to target onset. Together, these results suggest that directed attention aids “expectation for perception” rather than motor-related processes.