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Melissa Saenz
The Salk Institute for Biological Studies
Postdoctoral Fellow, SNL-B
Research Interests: Visual Attention
More visual information reaches our eyes than our brains can fully process. Selective
attention is one strategy the visual system uses to focus its resources on the most
relevent information.
As William James wrote "My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items
which I notice shape my mind - without selective interest, experience is utter chaos."
(Principles of Psychology, 1890).
Visual attention is currently the subject of much research. Many experiments confirm that attended
items receive improved visual processing, while unattended items can suprisingly escape perception.
My experiments use two different techniques to study visual attention. Functional MRI brain scans are used to
measure how activity in the human visual system is modulated by where or what an observer is paying
attention to in a visual display. These experiments are coupled with visual
psychophysics to explore the behavioral effects of attention.
Current experiments test the hypothesis that attention to certain elemental visual features
(e.g. color, orientation, motion direction) enhances neuronal responses to items composed
of the attended feature throughout the visual scene. For example,
this hypothesis predicts that when an observer searches a shelf for a red book, attention
would sensitize neurons tuned to the color red with receptive field locations throughout
the scene. This idea stresses that the neuronal facilitation is spatially global and not
restricted to a local region of focus. This type of global mechanism could be
useful to the visual system because the location of relevent visual items is not
always known in advance.
For more info please see the links to publications and projects below.
Projects: Global Feature-Based Attention
Projects: Attention modulates Lateral Interactions
Publications
Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
My dissertation (PDF 900KB)
MRI images
MRI tutorial
UCSD Neurosciences Graduate Program
email: saenz@salk.edu
Phone: (858) 453-4100 x 1471
Fax: (858) 455-7538
Admin. assistant: Cathy Cramer, (858) 453-4100 x1023
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