Neuroscience Ireland Conference 2025
Conference Speaker Profile
Prof. John Foxe
University of Rochester,
USA
Talk Title
Oscillatory Brain Activity and the Deployment of Selective Attention
Talk Abstract
Both animal intracranial recordings and human scalp electrophysiological recordings make clear that neural oscillatory mechanisms play a critical role in sensory-perceptual and cognitive functions, including selective attention, working memory, and feature binding, to name a few. A variety of cognitive effects that are associated with specific brain oscillations have been reported, which range in spectral, temporal, and spatial characteristics depending on the context.
A major focus of our group’s work has been on investigating the role of alpha-band oscillatory activity (8-14 Hz) as a potential attentional suppression mechanism. Our work has shown that: 1) phasic increases in alpha-band power are associated with suppression of visual inputs when individuals need to selectively attend to auditory inputs (i.e. cross-sensory suppression), 2) that topographically/retinotopically specific increases in alpha-power are associated with suppressing irrelevant visual inputs from specific parts of space when other parts of space contain the information to be acted upon (i.e. visuo-spatial suppression), and 3) that increases in alpha power within a given visual processing stream (i.e. dorsal versus ventral) results in feature-specific attentional deployments (i.e. feature-based suppression).
In this presentation, I will discuss the evidence for a prominent role in attentional suppression for alpha-band oscillatory activity, and present evidence for deficits in this ability in certain clinical populations (e.g. Autism Spectrum Disorder) and enhancements of it in other populations (e.g. Deafness).
Speaker Biography
John J. Foxe is an Irish neuroscientist, who is the Kilian J. and Caroline F. Schmitt Chair in Neuroscience at the University of Rochester in New York, where he is Professor and Chair of the Department of Neuroscience. At Rochester, he also serves as Director of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience, and of the NICHD-supported Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (UR-IDDRC).
He is a visiting professor at The Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, Trinity College Dublin, City University of New York, and the National University of Ireland at Maynooth.
He has been editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Neuroscience since 2015. His research focuses on the basic neurophysiology of neurological and psychiatric conditions, with an emphasis on identification of neuro-markers in childhood neuropsychiatric diseases and linking those to the underlying genetics.
He has published more than 360 peer-reviewed papers, has a h-index of 108, with more than 42,000 citations to his work.