Into focus: How the brain guides adaptive cognition
Human behavior is uniquely flexible. At any given moment the brain uses memories from moments to years ago to anticipate, select, and prioritize contents in the world and in our minds to guide perception, learning, decision-making, and action. We are fascinated by this proactive and dynamic process of focus at the core of cognition. Understanding brain focus is a central aim within the breadth of research questions and methods in our research group.
Focus happens in deep flux. Humans are free agents, moving and acting within changing environments, updating priorities and expectations. Our senses pick up signals with different delays, process them over time in distributed cell assemblies within large networks, where signals are exchanged through forward, backward, and sideways pathways in tandem. These dispersed and asynchronous signals run alongside internally generated signals, related to goals, memories, or other types of thoughts. How the brain manages to “make sense” from all these signals is baffling. Many of our studies grapple with the dynamic, temporal dimension of focusing. We try to piece together how different types of content (e.g., in the sensory stream, working memory, and long-term memory) work together to guide flexible, proactive, dynamic, and adaptive cognition.
Current Projects
