Research Project
Full description The human visual system has a limited capacity to process visual inputs, yet is constantly confronted with an overwhelming amount of visual information. Visual selective attention, the ability to selectively filter these visual inputs to prioritise the processing of relevant features and spatial locations, is critical to functioning in a visually cluttered world. Strengthening this cognitive function could improve a person's safety and efficiency for many everyday tasks, such as driving. This might be especially relevant for clinical groups with attentional deficits or people seeking to boost their cognitive abilities, such as professional video game players. One potential avenue to improving cognitive functioning is neurofeedback, which involves training subjects to change selected patterns of neural activity using the principles of operant conditioning. This approach has recently been applied to successfully improve sustained attention (DeBettencourt et. al., 2015). Visual selective attention is strongly associated with the amplitude of a reliable electrophysiological signal, the steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP). While SSVEPs have not historically been targeted by neurofeedback training, we recently applied neurofeedback to successfully train a bias in SSVEPs, shifting attention toward one feature and away from another. Aim: We aim to determine whether spatial and/or feature-based attention can be improved by neurofeedback training.