Grant: Canada Research Chairs

Dr. John McDonald is a leading researcher in the field of cognitive neuroscience. He studies how people pay attention to potentially relevant information in their environments while ignoring irrelevant distractions that have the potential to cause substantial interference with their daily tasks. Working in his Human Electrophysiology Laboratory at Simon Fraser University, he and his trainees record electroencephalographic (EEG) brain activity from sensors placed on the scalps of healthy adult volunteers as they participate in attention-demanding perceptual tasks. His team extracts from the EEG recordings electrical brain activities associated with specific sensory, attentional, cognitive, and motor processes as processing rapidly unfolds across the human brain. The overall goal of Dr. McDonald’s CRC research program is to advance our understanding of fundamental attention processes that are critically important for perception, action, and higher-level cognition. These processes include the covert orienting of attention (i.e., shifts of attention that are not accompanied by changes in head or eye position), the selective enhancement of attended objects of interests, and the suppression of irrelevant but potentially distracting stimuli. In addition to making discoveries about fundamental attention processes, Dr. McDonald and his students will test the limits of typical attentional capabilities when healthy adults engage in multi-tasking, and they will identify the sources of attentional impairment that are evident with workers switching from daytime shifts to nighttime shifts. The team will also link the attentional processes under investigation back to specific EEG events that precede the appearance of to-be-attended or to-be-ignored stimuli in order to determine how moment-to-moment fluctuations in an individual’s brain affect his or her ability to process impending targets and distractors. Using attention-related components of the EEG that he and his team recently discovered, Dr. McDonald and his students will advance the field of cognitive neuroscience in entirely new directions. In fact, findings from this research program are expected to enable further study of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and degenerative diseases that affect one’s ability to pay attention, generating significant scientific and health impacts.