Temporal expectations: the fourth dimension in attention
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1
University of Oxford, Brain & Cognition Laboratory and Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity, United Kingdom
The field of ‘selective attention’ has convincingly established that our sampling and experience of the external environment is highly selective. When all works well, dynamic regulatory mechanisms adapt sensory, cognitive, and motor mechanisms to prioritise events that are relevant to current task goals according to our expectations. The last few decades have witnessed significant advances in unveiling the neural mechanisms for attention to spatial locations and object features. The fourth dimension, time, is a relative newcomer to the field. By now it clear that we are able to orient attention flexibly in anticipation of the predicted timing of relevant events. But we still know little about the mechanisms by which we code temporal expectations and how they come to tune neural excitability to the relevant moments of our unravelling environment. In my laboratory, we have developed different experimental paradigms to manipulate temporal expectations according to informative temporal cues, probability functions, and rhythms and have demonstrated that temporal expectations can enhance speed of responses as well as perceptual discrimination of events. By recording brain activity during task performance, we have shown that these behavioural benefits come about through mechanisms that complement those for spatial attention. Interestingly, when temporal expectations are combined with spatial expectations they enhance early modulatory effects of spatial attention. Neural oscillations appear to play a major role in orchestrating the effects of temporal expectations, enabling the regulation of neural excitability associated with spatial or other features over time, in order to optimise the processing of relevant events at their expected moments.
Keywords:
Attention,
temporal expectancy,
Temporal orienting,
Neural oscillations,
anticipation
Conference:
ACNS-2012 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Conference, Brisbane, Australia, 29 Nov - 2 Dec, 2012.
Presentation Type:
Keynote Talk
Topic:
Attention
Citation:
Nobre
AC
(2012). Temporal expectations: the fourth dimension in attention.
Conference Abstract:
ACNS-2012 Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Conference.
doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2012.208.00003
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Received:
17 Oct 2012;
Published Online:
26 Oct 2012.
*
Correspondence:
Prof. Anna C Nobre, University of Oxford, Brain & Cognition Laboratory and Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity, Oxford, United Kingdom, kia.nobre@ohba.ox.ac.uk