Michael I Posner

• PhD
• Professor Emeritus at University of Oregon

There is little question that specific and often mostly non-overlapping brain networks underlie a variety of skills that are constituents of intelligent behavior. At the same time there is also little doubt that a variety of tests of intelligence are correlated across domains. The specific mechanisms that underlie “g” still remain to be established...

This paper is a review of our recent studies and ideas related to the neuropsychological issues that Robert Rafal and I worked together to understand attention and hopefully improve it in a variety of patients. Rehabilitation is also a goal of my current research to determine if non invasive stimuli can improve white matter in humans. We have found...

The advent of neuroimaging of the human brain has allowed attention to be viewed as an organ system with its own specific anatomy. This approach makes possible detailed examination of the cellular, synaptic, and genetic bases of normal attentional networks. It serves to link attention to the study of brain states that change with the level of arous...

Generating a use for a visual word in comparison with reading the word aloud activates frontal attention areas first (170 ms), a left lateral frontal area next (250 ms), and then a left temporoparietal (Wernicke's) area (650 ms) A brief period of practice reduces these activations If subjects are asked to respond to a word from the same practiced l...

Recent PET studies have suggested a specific anatomy for feature identification, visual word forms and semantic associations. Our studies seek to explore the time course of access to these systems by use of reaction time and scalp electrical recording. ...

The clinical label attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) suggests that this syndrome is a disorder of attention. However, the presumed attentional deficits have not been linked either to specific cognitive operations or to specific neural systems. To provide this link, theories of the cognitive anatomy of attention were used to generate h...

MacArthur Network III, consisting of five nodes (locations) and over 100 investigators, was formed in 1983 to conduct collaborative clinical research on risk and protective factors associated with psychiatric disorders. The common measurement of attentional dysfunction associated with two specific disorders (schizophrenia and attention deficit-hype...

A recent paper by Muller and Findlay (1987) raises the important issue of how to relate the parameters d' and beta to the internal mechanisms that process visual stimuli. This commentary considers the widely held view that d' changes reflect a variety of mechanisms leading to perception, but that beta changes reflect a single high level decision me...