The neurocognitive basis of feature integration

Abstract

One of the most striking features of the brain is that it is modular; it consists of often highly specialized areas. This modular organization requires efficient communication in order to integrate the information that is represented in distinct brain areas. In my thesis, I studied the neural basis of this communication. With various brain imaging techniques (fMRI, EEG), I found support for the idea that fast communication is omnipresent in the brain and that cognitive control processes can influence this communication. Using a method (neurofeedback) with which subjects were trained to enhance a particular type of brain activity (gamma band activity, or ‘GBA’), I demonstrated that enhanced GBA resulted in an increase of performance on tasks measuring short-term and long-term memory of associated information and fluid intelligence. These findings suggest that GBA underlies the control of associated information, presumably originating from frontal brain regions.