Corticale mechanismen voor aandachtsverschuivingen naar visuele objecten tegen een drukke achtergrond: een geïntegreerde EEG-fMRI studie.

The aim is to investigate the brain mechanisms involved in detection and discrimination of simple objects in optimal and noisy environments in different attention conditions. We will look at the role of primary visual cortex, lateral occipital cortex, dorsal and ventral frontal cortices, and dorsal parietal cortices. We also expect to obtain amplitude enhancement of the P1-N1 components in ERP to the attended stimulus as compared to the unattended one. Since our previous experience with simultaneous fMRI/ERP measurement demonstrated a great deal of possible technical obstacles in terms of data acquisition and analysis, the first stage of the project will consist of testing the set-up with simple, standard attention paradigms. In the second stage, we will then introduce objects embedded in noisy backgrounds to investigate the interplay between brain mechanisms involved in attention and in object perception. More specifically, we will examine how temporal, frontal and parietal areas jointly contribute to object perception in different attention conditions and how their contributions change over time. This project is innovative in combining simple attention paradigms with more complex object perception paradigms and in combining fMRI and ERP measurements.

Trefwoorden:Cognitive neuroscience