Virtual fMRI brown bag: May 7, 2021

Please join us for a talk given by Monica Rosenberg, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago.

Predicting attention across time and contexts with functional brain connectivity

Abstract: The ability to pay attention is crucial to navigating everyday life. Surprisingly, however, we have no way to characterize a person’s attentional abilities as a whole. To address this challenge, I will demonstrate that a person’s unique pattern of functional brain connectivity can provide such a measure. In particular, I will show that models based on functional brain connectivity patterns predict how well people can pay attention in a variety of contexts and generalize to novel individuals and groups. Furthermore, I will provide evidence that these models not only characterize a person's overall ability to pay attention, but also capture changes in attention over time, predicting moment-to-moment fluctuations in focus in experimental and naturalistic contexts as well as changes in cognitive and attentional states that arise from multiple pharmacological interventions. This approach can be applied to predict both inter- and intra-individual differences in other abilities and behaviors as well, which, looking ahead, offers a new way to characterize attention and cognition.