We cordially invite you to the following (hybrid) talk (on site as well as via zoom):

When: Tuesday, October 10, 2023 at 11:00 am

Who: Dr Paul Taylor, LMU Munich, Department of Experimental Psychology, https://www.psy.lmu.de/exp/people/ma/taylor/index.html

Where: Max-Planck-Ring 8, room 203 and via Zoom

Host: Prof. Li Zhaoping

Talk title: Non-invasive stimulation of the human visual attentional system to study its dynamics

Abstract: How is that at any one moment we are aware of some things more than others? Several cortical brain areas have been associated with the guidance of selective visual attention but it remains unclear how they interact over time in the human. In this talk I will present both published and unpublished work demonstrating that non-invasive stimulation allows perturbing the networks of the human brain and observing the consequences on behaviour and neural activity. I have selected work that I think is most relevant for the group of Prof Li in Tuebingen. For example, we showed that the effects of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) on the occipital lobe can be revealed with online EEG to closely mimic brain signatures of exogenous attention and awareness, providing hypotheses we could later test using psychophysics, and modulate with attentional state. The frontal eye fields (FEF) have been suggested to have several overlapping roles in top-down attention, bottom-up attention, oculomotor control and visual stability, and combined TMS-EEG can help dissociate between how all these functions can co-occur. I will end by discussing the key limitations of this approach e.g. that it may present artificial patterns of neural activity, and the spatial resolution of inferences that can be made. To address these limitations, future work is needed, both to develop the hardware we use for stimulating the brain, including visual flicker, tCS-EEG, and also more sophisticated analysis techniques.

If you attend via Zoom, please use https://zoom.us/j/99685111223 Passcode: 004883