UCL Discovery

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed the increasing application of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to study the cognitive neuroscience of attention. As a non-invasive method of stimulating discrete cortical regions, this technique has provided new insights into the neural substrates of selection and their temporal dynamics. Key aims and discoveries have included identifying which regions in the frontal and parietal cortex are critical for gating sensory processing, what their timecourse can tell us about the neural networks that support feedforward and feedback processing, and how attentional links are coordinated and maintained between the different senses. Key future challenges will be to understand the relationship between attentional systems and recently documented 'state-dependent' effects of TMS, as well as the integration of TMS and neuroimaging methods to directly illustrate coupling between 'top-down' control regions and their sensory targets.