Area of Research

Cognitive/Systems Neuroscience

Specialization

Neural mechanisms of space perception, spatial attention, and visually guided movement.

RESEARCH THEME

Our laboratory investigates the neurophysiological mechanisms by which the posterior parietal cortex controls spatial attention. Attention - the ability to concentrate - is critically important for normal perception and behavior. Although the posterior parietal lobe (an area located on the dorsal aspect of each cortical hemisphere) has been known for over a century to be important for directing attention in humans, relatively little is known about the neurophysiological mechanisms that underlie this function in the monkey. Our laboratory uses psychophysical and neurophysiological techniques to elucidate the parietal mechanisms of attention in trained rhesus monkeys. Our immediate goals are three-fold: to devise psychophysical tasks appropriate for measuring attention in the monkey, to establish correlations between attention and the activity of parietal neurons (both at the single-neuron and at the population levels), and to establish whether parietal activity is causally related to attentional orienting by measuring the effects of experimental manipulations of parietal activity on attention. Currently experiments focus on a subdivision of posterior parietal cortex, the lateral intraparietal area (LIP), which has been implicated in attentional orienting and rapid eye movements (saccades). In the future, these experiments will most likely be extended to other parietal and temporal areas implicated in attention. The experiments are crucial for understanding of the normal mechanisms of attention as well as for establishing an animal model of spatial neglect a severe attentional deficit which, in humans, is associated with damage to the parietal lobe.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Gottlieb, J., Balan P.F., Oristaglio, J, Suzuki M (2008): Parietal control of attentional guidance: The significance of sensory, motivational and motor factors, Neurobiol. Learning and Memory, Oct. 14.

Balan P.F., Oristaglio, J, Schneider D and Gottlieb, J. (2008): 
Neural correlates of the set-size effect in monkey lateral intraparietal area, PLoS Biology Vol. 6, No. 7, e158
doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0060158

Gottlieb, J., Balan P.F., Oristaglio, J and Schneider D (2008): 
Task specific computations in attentional maps. Vision Research, May 23.

Gottlieb, J. (2007): From thought to action: the parietal cortex as a bridge between perception, action and cognition. Neuron, 53(1): 9-16.

Oristaglio J., Schneider D. M., Balan P. F. and Gottlieb J. (2006): 
Integration of visuospatial and effector information during symbolically cued movements in monkey lateral intraparietal area. 
Journal of Neuroscience, Aug 9;26(32):8310-9.

Balan PF and Gottlieb, J. (2006) Integration of exogenous input into a dynamic salience map revealed by perturbing attention, Journal of Neuroscience, Sept 6; 26(36): 9239-49.