Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention and Memory Dynamics

The ability to maintain focus and remember information varies drastically from one moment to the next. Variability in attentional and mnemonic processes is driven both by external factors and also by internal neural states. While a growing body of work in cognitive neuroscience characterizes such fluctuations, many studies do not consider these dynamics. Behavioral and neural measures that track ongoing attention and memory fluctuations and predict upcoming failures demonstrate that these processes vary across multiple time scales—at times in tandem while at other times out of sync. Patterns of synchronous fluctuations reveal that sustained attention fluctuations, in particular, impact working memory capacity—but not precision—as well as long-term memory encoding and retrieval success. Beyond measuring attentional and memory processes over time, perturbing them through closed-loop feedback can reveal insights about these processes individually as well as interactions between them.