Research

The overarching aim of my research is to understand the neural and psychological mechanisms of human attention and perception. To do this, I utilize a variety of behavioural and neuroimaging techniques to link brain activity to cognitive processes, including non-invasively recording the brain's electrical activity (EEG/ERPs), functional neuroimaging (fMRI), and simultaneous EEG/fMRI. This combined approach enables us to link distinct spatio-temporal patterns of EEG activity to unique portions of the fMRI-identified attention network, providing a more complete picture of the complex network dynamics involved in controlling what we attend to. 

My primary line of research involves examining voluntary, goal-driven attention processes and the neural mechanisms that underlie our ability to voluntarily attend to things in our environment. As part of this line of research, I have been investigating the role sensory modality plays in our attention processes (e.g., is the brain’s attention network the same for attending to visual and auditory stimuli?). Upcoming projects in the lab will expand on this multisensory aspect to investigate the integration of visual and auditory information into the perception of a single multisensory object and the influence of cognitive processes (e.g., attention, emotion) on this multisensory integration. In addition, I am currently working on a series of studies related to attentional deficits in dyslexia, within the visual and auditory modalities individually as well as in multimodal contexts. 

Representative Publications

Green, J. J. & Woldorff, M. G. (2012). Arrow-elicited cueing effects at short intervals: Rapid attentional orienting or cue-target stimulus conflict?. Cognition, 122(1), 96-101.

Green, J. J., Doesburg, S. M., Ward, L. M., & McDonald, J. J. (2011). Electrical neuroimaging of voluntary audio-spatial attention: Evidence for a supramodal attention control network. Journal of Neuroscience, 31(10), 3560-3564.

McDonald, J. J., Green, J. J., Stoermer, V. S., & Hillyard, S. A. (2011). Cross-modal spatial cueing of attention influences visual perception. In M. M. Murray & M. T. Wallace (Eds.), Frontiers in the neural basis of multisensory processes. CRC Press: Boca Raton, FL.

Green, J. J. & McDonald, J. J. (2009). A practical guide to beamformer source reconstruction for EEG. In T. C. Handy (Eds.), Brain signal analysis: Advances in neuroelectric and neuromagnetic methods. The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.

Green, J. J. & McDonald, J. J. (2008). Electrical neuroimaging reveals timing of attentional control activity in human brain. PLoS Biology, 6(4), e81.