Dr. David C. Somers will discuss how the ability to see, remember, and perform is influenced by the ability to pay attention at the next installment of Dixie State University’s weekly lecture series, Dixie Forum.
In his presentation, “Attention Networks of the Human Brain,” Somers will discuss the capabilities and limitations of human visual attention and how it impacts visual perception, working memory, and cognition. The lecture is set to take place from noon to 12:50 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 27, in the Dunford Auditorium of the Browning Resource Center on the DSU campus. The forum is free and open to the public.
Somers is the chair of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University where he uses functional magnetic resonance imaging, behavioral studies, and computational approaches to examine the interactions between attention, perception, and working memory.
By using uses functional magnetic resonance imaging, Somers’ laboratory researches the mechanisms used by the human brain to direct one’s attention. Recently, his laboratory identified new attention networks in the brain. These discoveries aid in understanding how long-term memories can guide one’s attention in familiar environments and how spatial and temporal information is encoded.
Somers earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, and a doctorate in cognitive and neural systems from Boston University. He was a post-doctoral researcher in cognitive and computational neuroscience at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Massachusetts General Hospital. The National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation now support his research and laboratory.
Dixie Forum is a weekly lecture series designed to introduce the St. George community and DSU students, faculty, and staff to diverse ideas and personalities while widening their worldviews via a 50-minute presentation. Dixie Forum will continue at noon on Tuesday, Oct. 4, when Dr. Daniel Russell, senior research scientist for search quality and user happiness at Google, presents “The Future of Asking (and Answering) Questions: How Technology Changes the Way We Think.”
More information on Dixie Forum is available from DSU forum coordinator John Burns at (435) 879-4712 or burns@dixie.edu or at humanities.dixie.edu/the-dixie-forum.
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