The critical importance of fronto-parietal cortices for our ability to control and organize our thoughts and behavior (i.e. cognitive control) has been well recognized, but how these regions do so, remains unknown. It used to be thought that different subsets of regions within these cortices instantiate different kinds of control processes (or executive functions) like attention, working memory, inhibition, conflict monitoring etc. However, these different subsets could never be characterized. Instead, the same set of fronto-parietal regions, called Multiple Demand (MD) regions, is found active whenever any task, involving any control process, is executed. A key question therefore is: what do MD regions do? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Are functions of various brain regions fixed? How much can they change? Does the structure of a
region determine its function? Is it the structure or the input that determines a region\u2019s function or
neither? To gain insights into these questions, people have studied the fate of sensory cortices
deprived of their usual inputs – the \u2018visual\u2019 cortex in the blind and the \u2018auditory\u2019 cortex in the deaf.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We will study how deprived sensory cortices adapt and take on different functions and how this process relates to cognitive control and other cognitive modalities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this line of work, we are investigating working memory and it’s relation to goal directed storage of items, via online experiments using an n-back task and a picture witholding task and a line rotation memorization task.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We are investigating time perception and the representation of time under the modulation of task difficulty in an controlled experiment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n