Anne B. Sereno, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Telephone: 713.500.5615
E-mail: anne.b.sereno@uth.tmc.edu
See Also: Dr Sereno's Lab Website
Higher Cognitive Functions of Attention, Short-Term Memory, and the Programming of Eye Movements
We take our everyday abilities very much for granted. Yet these mundane abilities, technically referred to as "higher cognitive functions", constitute an incredibly complex system that researchers are only beginning to understand. One simple way to begin to appreciate these abilities is to consider what happens to those who suffer various types of brain damage (either through accident or disease). In many cases, despite intact general intellectual capabilities, some particular mental ability is severely impaired. They are unable to speak, to remember something from one day to the next, to recognize faces, or to find their way about.
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| Infrared eye tracking apparatus. |
My research focuses on the higher cognitive functions of attention, short-term memory, and the programming of eye movements. I attempt to define the characteristics of these behaviors, search for the underlying physiological mechanism, and develop methods to improve diagnosis, treatment, and outcome in those who suffer from these deficits. This quest involves examining these behaviors under a variety of conditions: as they normally occur in normal human subjects, as they are disrupted in various clinical populations, as well as while recording from single units in cortex of behaving rhesus monkeys. I strongly feel that the most effective way to attack a problem is to approach it from several different angles. Our research has shown that a better understanding of the characteristics and underlying physiological mechanisms of these higher cognitive functions can help in the diagnosis, treatment, and etiology of various diseases and disorders involving the disruption of these functions.
Selected Reading
Sereno, AB, and Holzman, PS. Antisaccades and smooth pursuit eye movements in schizophrenia. Biological Psychiatry. 37:394-401, 1995.
Sereno, AB, and Maunsell, JHR. Shape selectivities in primate lateral intraparietal cortex. Nature. 395:500-503, 1998.
Briand, K, Strallow, D, Hening, W, Poizner, H, and Sereno, AB. Control of voluntary and reflexive saccades in Parkinson's disease. Experimental Brain Research, 129:38-48, 1999.
Khatoon, S, Briand, KA, and Sereno, AB. The role of response in spatial attention: Direct versus indirect stimulus-response mappings. Vision Research, 42: 2693-2708, 2002.
Lehky, SR, and Sereno, AB. A comparison of shape encoding in primate dorsal and ventral visual pathways. Journal of Neurophysiology, 97:307-319, 2007.
Hood, AJ, Amador, SC, Cain, AE, Briand, KA, Al-Refai, AH, Schiess, MC, Sereno AB. Levodopa slows prosaccades and improves antisaccades: An eye movement study in Parkinson's disease. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, 78:565-570, 2007.
Peng, Sereno, Silva, Lehky, Sereno. Shape selectivity in primate frontal eye field. Journal of Neurophysiology, 100: 796-814, 2008.
Lehky, SR, Peng, X, McAdams, CJ, Sereno, AB. Spatial modulation of primate inferotemporal responses by eye position. PLoS ONE 3(10): e3492. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0003492.
Search PubMed for additional articles.
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Date Last Modified:
November 19, 2009 11:16 AM