EEG COHERENCE BIOMARKERS FOR DIFFERENTIATING ATTENTION STATES

Abstract

Selective Attention is an integral mental function and helps us in focusing on relevant stimuli or tasks. Current research shows that the ability to pay attention depends on interactions between specific areas of the brain ¿ mostly in the frontal and parietal lobes. The actual mechanisms of how these areas control and direct attention is incompletely understood and the studies done during this work facilitate the understanding of these processes. EEG functional connectivity measures are estimated using Inter-Electrode Event Related Coherence to study brain¿s inner functioning. Experiment participants perform cognitive tasks which engage various important aspects of attention ¿ like, the ability to focus on a particular sensory domain while ignoring the other, emotional modulation of attention and detrimental effects of distraction on attention demanding tasks. Statistically significant connectivity differences are observed in these experiments and provide new insights into the neural dynamics underlying the attention processes of the brain.