Project 3

Event potential correlates of selective attentional processes in hearing

It is well known that certain brain waves evoked by sensory stimuli change in a characteristic fashion with selective attention and target recognition. In the auditory system, a clear selective attentional effect has been described which is absent in patients with vestibular nerve section. Such sectioning eliminates the efferent innervation of the hearing organ and the exciting implication of these results is that the selective attention is produced by a centrally-controlled gating of peripheral sensory input.The project plans to look at brain evoked potentials in this selective attention task in normal human subjects and possibly in vestibular nervectomy patients as well, to test the theory that peripheral gating mechanisms are indeedinvolved.