Woldorff Labwoldorff
Personal information
- Real name
- Marty Woldorff
- Position
- Principal Investigator
- Research Aims
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Dr. Marty Woldorff is a Professor in the departments of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, and Neurobiology. He arrived at Duke in the fall of 1999.
Dr. Woldorff did his undergraduate work at Cornell University and U.C. Berkeley, receiving a Bachelors degree in Physics and Applied Mathematics from Berkeley. He received a Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from UC San Diego in 1989, gaining his training under the tutelage of Dr. Steve Hillyard.
Professor Woldorff's main research interest has been in the neural underpinnings of attention and perception. His early work employed event-related potentials (ERPs), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and structural MRI to reveal that strongly focused auditory attention can affect auditory sensory processing in primary auditory cortex as early as 20 ms post-stimulus (Woldorff et al., 1987; Woldorff and Hillyard, 1991; Woldorff et al., 1993). Related work included the discovery that strongly focused attention can heavily attenuate the mismatch negativity, an ERP wave elicited by deviant auditory stimuli in an otherwise repeating auditory sequence, thereby providing important evidence against the strong automaticity of auditory sensory feature analysis (Woldorff et al., 1991; Woldorff et al., 1998).
In 1992, Dr. Woldorff went to the Research Imaging Center in San Antonio to pursue the study of cognitive processes using multiple brain imaging methodologies. There he headed up the ERP division and spearheaded the integration of hemodynamic brain imaging data (e.g., positron emission tomography [PET] and functional MRI [fMRI]) with electrophysiological recordings (e.g., ERPs). His research there included the use of this multi-methodological integrative approach to study visual attention, which led to work that helped map out both the timing and location of early visual spatial attention effects and their retinotopic organization (Woldorff et al., 1997, 1999).
Dr. Woldorff has also been involved in various projects developing and advancing the methodologies used for measuring brain activity. One example involves the fact that the study of attention and various other cognitive neuroscience questions is often facilitated by, or even requires, fast stimulus presentation rates. At fast rates in ERP studies, however, the ERP brain responses to successive stimuli overlap in time, thereby distorting the ERP averages. Part of Dr. Woldorff's earlier work involved analyzing and modeling such distortion and developing a deconvolution technique to remove it (the "Adjar" technique, Woldorff, 1993). More recently, this work also has turned out to be highly relevant to recent developments in event-related fMRI, and Dr. Woldorff has continued to be involved in the development of these methods for fMRI (Burock et al., 1998; Hinrichs et al., 2000; Woldorff et al., 2004).
For his work on early auditory attention and on the development of deconvolution techniques for fast-rate ERP studies, Dr. Woldorff was awarded the Sam Sutton award for Early Distinguished Contribution to Event-related Potentials and Cognition at the Tenth International Conference on ERPs [EPIC 10] in Eger, Hungary in 1992.
Dr. Woldorff has had several ongoing collaborations with researchers at other institutions. These include a long-time collaboration with researchers in Magdeburg, Germany, that has focused on the use of fMRI, MEG, and EEG to study auditory and visual attentional and perceptual (Baumgart et al., 1998; Woldorff et al., 1999; Hinrichs et al., 2000; Noesselt et al., 2002; Schoenfeld et al., 2003; Krebs et al., 2010). An additional ongoing collaboration with Dr. Anders Dale and colleagues at Harvard involves new ways of performing fMRI experiments and integrating fMRI and ERP data for studies of perception and attention (e.g., Burock et al., 1998; Hinrichs et al., 2000; Woldorff et al., 2004).
Dr. Woldorff's work at Duke has been focused on the continuing study of auditory, visual, and multisensory attention and perception, using a combination of methodologies, including behavioral measures, ERPs, MEG, fMRI, and electrophysiological source modeling. Recent work from his lab includes systems-levels studies of the control of visual spatial attention (Woldorff et al., 2004; Grent-‘t-Jong & Woldorff, 2007; Weissman et al., 2006, 2009), the influence of attention on multisensory processing (Talsma et al., 2005, 2006, 2007; Senkowski et al., 2007), the spread of attention across a multisensory object (Busse et al., 2005), and the interactions of attention, stimulus conflict, and cognitive control (Weissman et al., 2004, 2005, 2008; Appelbaum et al., 2009). Dr. Woldorff’s work also includes continued development of new approaches and methods, with a recent focus on developing new ways to analyze and integrate EEG and fMRI data collected simultaneously.
For the pursuit of this research at Duke, Dr. Woldorff is currently funded by a grant from NIMH for the study of attentional control and conflict processing using a combination of ERPs and fMRI and by a grant from NINDS for the study of attention in multisensory environments. He is also a project P.I. on an NINDS program grant based at the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center at the Duke University Medical Center studying the interactions of social perception and attention.
History
- Member for
- 4 years 25 weeks
My publications
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2012(2012). Strategic allocation of attention reduces temporally predictable stimulus conflict. J Cogn Neurosci. 24, 1834-48. Abstract
Export: Tagged XML BibTex(2012). Is conflict monitoring supramodal? Spatiotemporal dynamics of cognitive control processes in an auditory Stroop task. Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci. Abstract
Export: Tagged XML BibTex(2012). Electrophysiological recordings in humans reveal reduced location-specific attentional-shift activity prior to recentering saccades. J Neurophysiol. 107, 1393-402. Abstract
Export: Tagged XML BibTex(2012). The Involvement of the Dopaminergic Midbrain and Cortico-Striatal-Thalamic Circuits in the Integration of Reward Prospect and Attentional Task Demands. Cereb Cortex. Abstract
Export: Tagged XML BibTex(2012). The influence of different Stop-signal response time estimation procedures on behavior-behavior and brain-behavior correlations. Behav Brain Res. 229, 123-30. Abstract
Export: Tagged XML BibTex(2012). Arrow-elicited cueing effects at short intervals: Rapid attentional orienting or cue-target stimulus conflict?. Cognition. 122(1), 96-101. Abstract
Export: Tagged XML BibTex2011(2011). Overlapping parietal activity in memory and perception: evidence for the attention to memory model. J Cogn Neurosci. 23, 3209-17. Abstract
Export: Tagged XML BibTex(2011). The Temporal Dynamics of Object Processing in Visual Cortex during the Transition from Distributed to Focused Spatial Attention. J Cogn Neurosci. Abstract
Export: Tagged XML BibTex(2011). The neural underpinnings of how reward associations can both guide and misguide attention. J Neurosci. 31, 9752-9. Abstract
Export: Tagged XML BibTex(2011). The cross-modal spread of attention reveals differential constraints for the temporal and spatial linking of visual and auditory stimulus events. J Neurosci. 31, 7982-90. Abstract
Export: Tagged XML BibTex(2011). Cochlear implants matching the prosthesis to the brain and facilitating desired plastic changes in brain function. Prog Brain Res. 194, 117-29. Abstract
Export: Tagged XML BibTex(2011). Differential Functional Roles of Slow-Wave and Oscillatory-Alpha Activity in Visual Sensory Cortex during Anticipatory Visual-Spatial Attention.. Cerebral Cortex. 21(10), 2204-2216. Abstract
Export: Tagged XML BibTex(2011). Parallels in stimulus-driven oscillatory brain responses to numerosity changes in adults and seven-month-old infants. Dev Neuropsychol. 36, 651-67. Abstract
Export: Tagged XML BibTex(2011). Substantia nigra activity level predicts trial-to-trial adjustments in cognitive control. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 23(2), 362-373. Abstract
Export: Tagged XML BibTex(2011). Sandwich masking eliminates both visual awareness of faces and face-specific brain activity through a feedforward mechanism. J Vis. 11, Abstract
Export: Tagged XML BibTex2010(2010). Multisensory conflict modulates the spread of visual attention across a multisensory object. Neuroimage. 52(2), 606-616. Abstract
Export: Tagged XML BibTex(2010). The multifaceted interplay between attention and multisensory integration. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 14(9), 400-410. Abstract
Export: Tagged XML BibTex(2010). The Electrophysiological Time Course of the Interaction of Stimulus Conflict and the Multisensory Spread of Attention. European Journal of Neuroscience. 31(10), 1744-54. Abstract
Export: Tagged XML BibTex(2010). High-Field fMRI Reveals Brain Activation Patterns Underlying Saccade Execution in the Human Superior Colliculus. PloS ONE. 5(1), Abstract
Export: Tagged XML BibTex(2010). Pinning down response inhibition in the brain - conjunction analyses of the Stop-signal task. NeuroImage. 52(4), 1621-1632. Abstract
Export: Tagged XML BibTex(2010). Rapid modulation of sensory processing induced by stimulus conflict. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 23(9), 2620-8. Abstract
Export: Tagged XML BibTex(2010). The influence of reward associations on conflict processing in the Stroop task. Cognition. 117(3), 341-347. Abstract
Export: Tagged XML BibTex(2010). The saccadic re-centering bias is associated with activity changes in the human superior colliculus . Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 4(193), 1-12. Abstract
Export: Tagged XML BibTex(2010). Video game players show more precise multisensory temporal processing abilities. Attention, Perception & Psychophysics. 72(4), 1120-1129.
Export: Tagged XML BibTex2009(2009). Intermodal attention affects the processing of the temporal alignment of audiovisual stimuli. Exp Brain Res. 198, 313-28. Abstract
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