Mobilisation of attentional resources in multiple object and feature tracking: training and perturbation of circuits (B05)

• Subject Area: Human Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 425899996

Societies of today demand communication speed and density which particularly taxes our capability of tracking visual input in parallel. This capability declines with age and degenerative brain disease. Here we investigate the cortical limits on parallel processing, guided by the hypothesis that those limits arise from the speed and efficiency of cycling through representations in the visual cortex hierarchy, and by structural factors like intracortical myelination linking hierarchical levels. Parallel processing shows a hemisphere specialization for object- and location-based tracking which we investigate by perturbating underlying circuits with transcranial magnetic stimulation. We finally investigate the trainability of parallel tracking as a function of the presence or absence of tau-pathology in a group of elderly subjects.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1436: Neural resources of cognition
• Applicant Institution: Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg
• Project Heads: Professor Dr. Jens-Max Hopf; Professor Dr. Mircea Ariel Schoenfeld