Hosted by Friederike Schlaghecken

Refreshments in Common room at 3.30pm

“The control of attentional object selection in perception and working memory”

Attention and working memory (WM) are closely linked, and these links are bidirectional. On the one hand, attentional object selection processes are guided by target templates that are assumed to be stored in WM (WM controls attention). On the other hand, the selective maintenance of objects in WM depends on attention (attention controls WM). In this talk, I will discuss both types of links. First, I will present recent results from event-related brain potential (ERP) studies that investigated the content and capacity of attentional templates, and the time course of template activation during the preparation for attentional selection tasks. In the second part, I will focus on the attentional control of WM. I will discuss recent studies using ERP markers of WM activation in unimodal visual or tactile WM tasks and in bimodal visual/tactile tasks. These studies show that these activation states reflect the current focus of spatial attention, and that attentional control mechanisms in WM operate independently for different sensory modalities, with no evidence that storage capacity limitations are shared across modalities. 

Martin Eimer is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Brain and Behaviour Lab at Birkbeck, University of London. He and his research group investigate attention and working memory in vision and across sensory modalities, as well as face perception and recognition and its impairments in prosopagnosia. He has published more than 200 research articles, has held numerous research grants, and is a Fellow of the British Academy and the German National Academy of Sciences.