Sean Noah

• PhD
• Postdoc at University of California, Berkeley

Individuals differ in the intrinsic excitability of their corticospinal pathways and, perhaps more generally, their entire nervous system. At present, we have little understanding of the mechanisms underlying these differences and how variation in intrinsic excitability relates to behavior. Here, we examined the relationship between individual diff...

Early descriptions of attention in the psychological literature highlighted its interdependence with conscious awareness. As the study of attention developed, consciousness and attention began to be considered separable phenomena, experimentally and theoretically. In recent years, an energetic debate has developed concerning the extent to which the...

Attentional selection mechanisms in visual cortex involve changes in oscillatory activity in the EEG alpha band (8 to 12 Hz) - decreased alpha indicating focal cortical enhancement and increased alpha indicating suppression. This has been observed for spatial selective attention and attention to stimulus features such as color versus motion. We inv...

Anticipatory attention is a neurocognitive state in which attention control regions bias neural activity in sensory cortical areas to facilitate the selective processing of incoming targets. Previous electroencephalographic (EEG) studies have identified event-related potential (ERP) signatures of anticipatory attention, and implicated alpha band (8...

Selective attention prioritizes information that is relevant to behavioral goals. Previous studies have shown that attended visual information is processed and represented more efficiently, but distracting visual information is not fully suppressed, and may also continue to be represented in the brain. In natural vision, to-be-attended and to-be-ig...

Introduction Psychedelic compounds such as LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, and DMT can dramatically alter visual perception. However, the extent to which visual effects of psychedelics consistently vary for different substances is an open question. The visual effects of a given psychedelic compound can range widely both across and within individuals, s...

Recent studies suggest that sustained visual attention operates rhythmically, as if the visual system periodically samples stimuli in the environment. In this study, we find evidence for rhythmic attentional sampling of internal representations of Targets and Distractors up to almost one second after the offset of visual stimulation. Twenty partici...

ADHD is a neurocognitive disorder characterized by attention difficulties, hyperactivity, and impulsivity, often persisting into adulthood with substantial personal and societal consequences. Despite the importance of neurophysiological assessment and treatment monitoring tests, their availability outside of research settings remains limited. Cogni...

Anticipatory attention is a neurocognitive state in which attention control regions bias neural activity in sensory cortical areas to facilitate the selective processing of incoming targets. Previous electroencephalographic (EEG) studies have identified event-related potential (ERP) signatures of anticipatory attention, and implicated alpha band (8...

Selective attention prioritizes information that is relevant to behavioral goals. Previous studies have shown that attended visual information is processed and represented more efficiently, but distracting visual information is not fully suppressed, and may also continue to be represented in the brain. In natural vision, to-be-attended and to-be-ig...

Attention enhances attended targets and suppresses ignored distractors. In this study, we examined the time courses of neural representations of simultaneously presented and spatially overlapping target and distractor stimuli. We hypothesized that the strength of the cortical representation of task-irrelevant visual information would match that of...

Poster from virtual presentation – Cognitive Neuroscience Society annual conference 2020

Object-based attention is the selection of visual information from an object or object category. It may be deployed in anticipation of a task-relevant object or as a template during visual search. In this study, we investigated whether object-based attention modulates electroencephalographic (EEG) alpha-band activity across the scalp, analogously t...

Accurate and reliable quantification of brain metabolites measured in vivo using 1H magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) is a topic of continued interest. Aside from differences in the basic approach to quantification, the quantification of metabolite data acquired at different sites and on different platforms poses an additional methodological ch...

Background and purpose: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that there were 29 million falls and 7 million injuries in 2014 in the United States. Falls, decreased balance, and mobility disability are common in older adults and often result in loss of independence. Finding interventions to address these issues is important, as...

(1)H magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) provides a powerful tool to measure gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), the principle inhibitory neurotransmitter in the human brain. We asked whether individual differences in MRS estimates of GABA are uniform across the cortex or vary between regions. In two sessions, resting GABA concentrations in the later...

There is a great need for brain-based measures in the assessment of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) for better diagnosis and treatment evaluation, and for development of brain-based models (in keeping with RDoC). Withinindividual variability in performance is commonly cited as reflecting inconsistent control of attention in ADHD, an...

Adults with amblyopia, a condition characterized by reduced visual acuity (VA) and stereopsis, may benefit from playing action video games with the non-amblyopic eye patched (e.g. Li et al., 2011). However, it is unclear whether these patients can benefit merely from patching of the non-amblyopic eye (i.e. no game), the gold standard for amblyopia...