Fifty years integrating neurobiology and psychology to study attention.

Overview

At the time of the start of Biological Psychology cognitive studies had developed approaches to measuring cognitive processes. However, linking these to the underlying biology in the typical human brain had hardly begun. A critical step came in 1988 when methods for imaging the human brain in cognitive tasks began. By 1990 it was possible to describe three brain networks that carried out the hypothesized cognitive functions outlined 20 years before. Their development was traced in infancy, first using age-appropriate tasks and later through resting state imaging. Imaging was applied to both voluntary and involuntary cued shifts of visual orienting in humans and primates, and a summary was presented in 2002. By 2008 these new imaging findings were used to test hypotheses about the genes involved in each network. Recently, studies of mice using optogenetics to control populations of neurons have brought us closer to a synthesis of how attention and memory networks operate together in human learning. Perhaps the coming years will bring us to an integrated theory of aspects of attention using data from all the levels that can illuminate these issues, thus fulfilling a key goal of the Journal.