Mechanisms of attentional gating of sensory evidence during decision-making

We are constantly bombarded with sensory inputs from the world around us. Spatial attention narrows down all of this information to positions in space we deem relevant or interesting. How the brain allows us to do this is poorly understood. What we do know is that correlates of attention are found in many brain areas. Recent advances in technologies now allow us to record from thousands of cells across the brain at millisecond resolution and control the flow of information between areas with genetic precision. These recent advances make it possible, for the first time, to explore how these many brain areas represent attended content and interact to select the content we attend to. In this project, I aim to understand the nature of distributed representations of attended content and how this is realized through communication between many brain areas - ultimately allowing us to focus on relevant sensory information.