Grant: CIHR New Investigator

Our brains contain billions of cells. These cells need to interact to ensure that we successfully achieve our aims in a dynamically changing environment. When aiming to read a newspaper article we narrow our attention to the words and sentences ahead, but we are influenced by the value of alternative actions, like grasping the cup of coffee that promises to be tasteful. Thus, controlling what to attend to at any moment in time is effortful, and it is influenced by the reward promised by alternatives. This control is achieved by brain cells. Some cells are known to be crucial to control where to attend to, whereas other cells are crucial to evaluate the reward value of the current and alternative goals. Our research program aims to understand how these two gross types of brain cells interact to control successfully attention to achieve our goals. Our research program is particularly innovative in focusing on the dynamic interplay between brain cells in different regions of the brain. This interplay is known to involve rhythmic coordination among many cells from many different regions. And disturbance of rhythmic coordination during attentional control has been implicated in many severe neurological diseases. Despite clear indications of its importance, it is unknown whether rhythmic coordination of brain activity has causal consequences for failures of attentional control. We aim to uncover this missing knowledge by recording brain activation patterns at the highest spatial resolution in monkeys while they perform a selective attention tasks in a dynamic environment.