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Full-Text Articles in Neuroscience and Neurobiology

The Functional Role Of Anatomical Feedback Connections In Visual Attention, Samantha Debes Aug 2022

The Functional Role Of Anatomical Feedback Connections In Visual Attention, Samantha Debes

Dissertations & Theses (Open Access)

Entrenched in a dense, highly connected network, cortical neurons receive heterogeneous inputs from diverse connections, including local feedforward and feedback signals. Over the years, neuroscientists have focused on feedforward and local connections, amassing a wealth of information on the purpose of these signals. However, the functional role of feedback connections remains a mystery, despite their sheer abundance and prevalence when compared to feedforward connections. The field has long hypothesized that feedback acts as a conduit for attentional signals, carrying them throughout the brain. Previous work on this topic has been variable. Though cognitively demanding neural processes, like attention, have traditionally …


The Impact Of Focused Attention And Opening Monitoring Meditation Styles On Attention, Jennifer Wheary Jun 2022

The Impact Of Focused Attention And Opening Monitoring Meditation Styles On Attention, Jennifer Wheary

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Mindfulness meditation – often broken down into two distinct types, focused attention (FA) and open monitoring (OM) – has been associated with a range of affective and attentional benefits. Using an attentional blink (AB) paradigm that demonstrated improved attention for novice FA meditators, we explored whether novices who engaged in a single, brief bout of meditation exhibited any differences in alpha or theta power during meditation, and whether these differences were apparent by meditation type. In the AB paradigm, participants are asked to identify two targets, T1 and T2, which are separated by 200-500 ms. Our results showed no significant …


Classical Conditioning Of Cognitive States, Arthur Burns Apr 2022

Classical Conditioning Of Cognitive States, Arthur Burns

Neuroscience Honors Papers

Classical conditioning has been a fundamental concept and practice throughout the history of psychology. While classical conditioning traditionally seeks to elicit target behaviors in correlation to specific stimuli, we sought to do the same with cognitive states in place of behaviors. Specifically, we wanted to determine the effectiveness of conditioning states of cognitive arousal in human participants in conjunction with cues presented in a designed learning task. We designed a cognitive task specifically for this research, referred to as “the Tone Pitching Task”, which utilized a combination of working memory and mental processing in order to elicit cognitive arousal and …


Are Neuronal Mechanisms Of Attentional Modulation Universal Across Human Sensory And Motor Brain Maps?, Edgar A. Deyoe, Wendy E. Huddleston, Adam S. Greenberg Jan 2022

Are Neuronal Mechanisms Of Attentional Modulation Universal Across Human Sensory And Motor Brain Maps?, Edgar A. Deyoe, Wendy E. Huddleston, Adam S. Greenberg

Kinesiology Faculty Articles

One's experience of shifting attention from the color to the smell to the act of picking a flower seems like a unitary process applied, at will, to one modality after another. Yet, the unique experience of sight vs smell vs movement might suggest that the neural mechanisms of attention have been selectively optimized to employ each modality to greatest advantage. Relevant experimental data can be difficult to compare across modalities due to design and methodological heterogeneity. Here we outline some of the issues related to this problem and suggest how experimental data can be obtained across modalities using more uniform …