Dr Dan Smith from the University of Durham will give a Seminar on Friday, November 11th at 3:30 pm in the Old Library of the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at St Andrews.
Associations
and dissociations between attention and oculomotor control
The systems used to control covert, mental
process such as spatial attention are closely linked with the systems used to
control eye-movements. However, the extent to which these cognitive
processes depend upon the oculomotor system remains
controversial. In this talk I will present data from behavioural and
neuropsychological experiments examining the interactions between motor
programming and covert attention. The results of these studies will be
interpreted in terms of a ‘Motor Bias’ theory of attention, which proposes that
activation in the oculomotor motor system feeds into the process of biased
competition in the visual system, but is not the sole arbiter of the locus of
spatial attention
