Date: Thursday 7th November, 2019
Time: 12-1pm
Room: BG09A, Building 9
Dr Nick Myers (Oxford University)
Abstract
Selective attention can help overcome the
capacity limits of working memory by placing important information in the
‘focus of attention’, a representational state that improves recall. This
kind of prioritization may draw on prospective coding – that is, maintaining
WM information in a format that is suited to an upcoming requirement to
act. I will present recent behavioural
and electrophysiological data that are consistent with this view and show the
putative role of neural oscillations in this process. The existence of multiple representational
states in WM – storing information for immediate action in an active state
while holding onto less important information in a latent state that is held
in an uncorrelated neural activity pattern – may help ensure that upcoming
behaviour is only guided by currently relevant information without
interference from WM contents that are irrelevant now but may become
important later.
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This talk is aimed at anyone interested in psychology, particularly cognitive
psychology, and memory.
Students
are encouraged to attend.
Attendance
would benefit both undergraduate
and postgraduate students from psychology
and related fields ~
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Biography
Nick studied for
an undergraduate degree in Neuroscience at Columbia College and studied
psychology at the Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich, Germany. He then
received a PhD in the lab of Kia Nobre at the University of Oxford. He is
currently a Henry Wellcome research fellow at the Department of Experimental
Psychology at the University of Oxford, working with Mark Stokes and Bob
Knight (UC Berkeley).
Nick is interested
in cognitive flexibility and the role of working memory and attention in
structuring sequences of behavior. He uses EEG/MEG, intracranial recordings
in humans, and single-unit activity.
Nicholas Myers
Department of
Experimental Psychology and Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity, Wellcome
Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging, University of Oxford
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