Selectively attending to task-relevant sounds whilst ignoring background noise is one of the most amazing feats performed by the human brain. Here, we studied the underlying neural mechanisms by recording magnetoencephalographic (MEG) responses of 14 healthy human subjects while they performed a near-threshold auditory discrimination task vs. a visual control task of similar difficulty. The aud...

The mechanism by which a complex auditory scene is parsed into coherent objects depends on poorly understood interactions between task-driven and stimulus-driven attentional processes. We illuminate these interactions in a simultaneous behavioral-neurophysiological study in which we manipulate participants' attention to different features of an auditory scene (with a regular target embedded in ...

Working memory (WM) capacity is the ability to maintain attention and store information briefly in mind. However, each individual has a limited WM that varies from one person another. An can be categorized as having either normal or low capacity. This study aimed evaluate compare brain activations of healthy individuals with auditory-verbal A total 39 male young adults were recruited local univ...

Age-related deficits in visual selective attention suggest that the efficiency of inhibitory processes is particularly affected by aging. To investigate whether processing inefficiencies observed in visual attention are similar in auditory attention and when shifting attention across modalities, we conducted an fMRI study with healthy young and older adults using a task that required sustained ...

It is well established that task-irrelevant, to-be-ignored speech adversely affects serial short-term memory (STM) for visually presented items compared with a quiet control condition. However, there is an ongoing debate about whether the semantic content of the speech has the capacity to capture attention and to disrupt memory performance. In the present article, we tested whether taboo words ...

The mechanism by which a complex auditory scene is parsed into coherent objects depends on poorly-understood interactions between task-driven and stimulus-driven attentional processes. We illuminate these interactions in a simultaneous behavioral-neurophysiological study, in which we manipulate subjects' attention to different features of an auditory scene (with a regular target embedded in an ...

Rehabilitation for patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) is based on cognitive strategies that exploit attention. Parkinsonians exhibit impairments in divided attention and interference control. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of specific rehabilitation treatments based on attention suggests that other attentional functions are preserved. Data about attention are conflicting in PD, and it is n...