Neurobiology and Anatomy - The University of Texas Medical School at Houston Dept of Neurobiology and Anatomy - The University of Texas Medical School at Houston
Dept of Neurobiology and Anatomy - The University of Texas Medical School at Houston
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Dept Home Page > Department Faculty > Anne Sereno, Ph.D.

Anne B. Sereno, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Telephone: 713.500.5615
E-mail: anne.b.sereno@uth.tmc.edu

See also: Sereno Lab Website

 

 

 

Higher Cognitive Functions of Attention, Short-Term Memory,
And The Programming Of Eye Movements

Learning And Cognition
Infrared eye tracking apparatus..
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 unfortunate people 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.

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 and search for the underlying physiological mechanism. 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. A better understanding of the characteristics and underlying physiological mechanisms of these higher cognitive functions will surely help in the diagnosis, treatment, and etiology of various diseases and disorders involving the disruption of these functions.

Selected Reading

Sereno, AB, Kosslyn, SM. (1991) Discrimination within and between hemifields: A new constraint on theories of attention. Neuropsychologia, 29(7):659-675.

Sereno, AB. (1992) Programming saccades: The role of attention. In K. Rayner (ed.), Eye Movements and Visual Cognition: Scene Perception and Reading, New York: Springer Verlag.

Sereno, AB, Holzman, PS. (1995) Antisaccades and smooth pursuit eye movements in schizophrenia. Biological Psychiatry, 37:394-401.

Sereno, AB. (1996) Parsing cognitive processes: Psychopathological and neurophysiological constraints. In S. Matthysse, D. L. Levy, J. Kagan, and F. M. Benes (eds.), Psychopathology: The Evolving Science of Mental Disorder, New York: Cambridge University Press, 407-432.

Sereno, AB, McAdams, CJ, Maunsell, JHR. (1997) Shape and spatial selective sensory and attentional effects in neurons in the macaque anterior inferotemporal cortex (AIT). Society for Neuroscience Abstracts, 23:302.

Sereno, AB, Maunsell, JHR. (1998) Shape selectivities in primate lateral intraparietal cortex. Nature, 395:500-503.

Briand, K, Strallow, D, Hening, W, Poizner, H, Sereno, AB. (1999) Control of voluntary and reflexive saccades in Parkinson's disease. Experimental Brain Research, 129:38-48.

Larrison-Faucher, A, Briand, KA, Sereno, AB. (2002) Delayed onset of inhibition of return in schizophrenia. Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry, 26:505-512.

Search PubMed for additional articles.

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