Neural Bases of Attention in Action and Emotion
Anthony Singhal
University of Alberta

Our attention systems critically mediate perception and action as we interact with our environment. Understanding the neural bases of attention has been a major theme in cognitive neuroscience, and it remains important to elucidate how various neural attention systems interact and shape our multisensory abilities. Recent work in my lab has investigated the nature of cross-modal attention during multitasking and workload, showing early links between attention and memory for spatial processing as well as controlled and automatic attentional influences on various types of action. We are also examining interactions between emotion circuits in the brain and those underlying attentional control to further understand maladaptive behavior in patients suffering from affective disorders. In this talk I will present a series of cognitive neuroscience studies that explore attention in the face of distraction, with healthy and clinical populations.