Social Neuroscience of Attention

Locking eyes is probably one of the most intimate social interactions humans engage in all the time. Mutual eye contact is very important for social development and intimacy. There are a number of reasons why we would want to make eye contact with others: to offer our undivided attention, to communicate more effectively, to express emotion and empathy, to understand another persons intentions, to connect intimately, and so on. There are also many disorders that negatively affect the ability to make eye contact, such as Autism, Schizophrenia, Social Anxiety, and Anorexia Nervosa. So what are the behavioural and neuropsychological characteristics of mutual eye gaze? Why do we need it? Can we learn to function without it? What occurs physiologically and psychologically when we make contact with another person for an extended period of time? These are just some of the questions I hope to answer over the course of my postdoctoral studies.

Multisensory Speech Perception

During my Master's, my main interest was in multisensory integration and where in the brain multimodal areas are located. In particular, my research was focused on how we integrate auditory and visual speech information and how speech perception was related to speech production. My studies centered on testing the assumptions proposed by the Motor Theory of Speech Perception and some of the assumptions surrounding the “mirror neuron” system. I tested these assumptions behaviourally using a stimulus-response compatibility paradigm and analyzing verbal response time data. With the recent work demonstrating the existence of a observation-execution matching system (“mirror neurons”) in the brain shown to process actions we observe as well as those actions we produce, I explored whether this system is recruited for speech comprehension. 

 

Synaesthesia

Synaesthesia is a special condition whereby individuals have reported extraordinary experiences during the perception of ordinary stimuli. For instance, some people have reported experiencing different colours associated with digits and letters of the alphabet (referred to as 'grapheme-colour synaesthesia'), or experience a variety of colours with different frequencies of sound ('sound-colour synaesthesia'). The focus of my doctoral research pertained to individuals who experienced numbers in space ('number-form synaesthesia') and/or experience a vivid mental calendar of months, days, hours, etc. ('time-space synaesthesia'). My interest was in the behavioural consequences associated with such a fascinating condition, and what this "crossing of the senses" could potentially tell us about how the brain is organized in terms of integrating multimodal stimuli. I investigated these questions using spatial cueing paradigms, as well as electroencephalographic recording to measure the event-related potentials (ERPs) associated with shifts in spatial attention in the synaesthetic brain. My other interests included whether or not there are neural differences associated with projector (perceptual) and associator (conceptual) synaesthetes, and the neural underpinnings of mirror-touch synaesthesia - in particular, the role of 'mirror neurons'.

Gambling Addiction

As a side project during my PhD studies, I became interested in the electrophysiological brain differences between problem and non-problem gamblers while playing slot machines. Using electroencephalographic recording (ERPs), I examined the brain activity that is produced by different slot machine outcomes (e.g., wins, losses, near misses, and losses disguised as wins) as soon as they occur. Through this research, I aimed to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying different gambling outcomes to discover whether or not some outcomes, for example “near misses”, are interpreted (incorrectly) by the brain as “wins” or (correctly) as “losses”. As well, I was interested in the differences in brain activation patterns between problem and non-problem gamblers, as it is possible that the brain activity across the different outcomes could be mediated by the amount of gambling experience.

 

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