Functional interactions between primate cortical areas in tasks involving attention and short-term memory

Funding Activity

Website
http://purl.org/au-research/grants/nhmrc/454676

Funding Status
Closed

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Funded Activity Summary

To navigate and operate in the cluttered and dynamic sensory world around us, our brains need to be able to attend to specific objects or features in the environment, identify them and also know where they exist at any one instant of time, prior to performing the appropriate action. The attention, memory, decision and motor components involved in this process possibly involve a variety of cortical areas and neuronal operations. The special primate preparation we have developed permits us to elucidate at a neuronal level many of these brain mechanisms. By recording neuronal activities in two different cortical areas simultaneously as the monkey performs a memory task that he has been trained on, we will test the following ideas: (1) A cortical region in the dorsal, parietal stream directs spatial attention by gating other visual areas to process only a selected region of the visual world (2) A region in the ventral, temporal stream directs attention to specific features in the visual world by gating earlier cortical areas (3) The parietal cortical areas that mediate intention for action hold the relevant information in working memory till it is forwarded to the more anterior premotor areas. These experiments have the potential to reveal the basic neuronal scheme that underpins functions such as attention, visual recognition and memory, which are impaired in many neurological disorders.

Funded Activity Details

Start Date: 01-01-2007

End Date: 01-01-2009

Funding Scheme: NHMRC Project Grants

Funding Amount: $267,280.00

Funder: National Health and Medical Research Council

Research Topics

ANZSRC Field of Research (FoR)

Sensory Systems

ANZSRC Socio-Economic Objective (SEO)

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Other Keywords

Attention Deficits | Electrophysiology | Memory | Neurobiology | Neurological Disorders | Visual attention | Visual cortex | Visual function

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