Dr. Martinez-Trujillo's scientific work is dedicated to investigating brain mechanisms underlying cognition, more specifically underlying the allocation of attention, and how these mechanisms fail during neurological and mental disease. His work has been published and acknowledged in many scientific journals including Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron and Current Biology.

In his talk today, Dr. Martinez-Trujillo will speak about how visual attention can be described as the ability to selectively process visual stimuli that are behaviourally relevant while filtering out irrelevant ones. Attention protects brain systems from information processing overload. Although attention has been intensively studied at the level of behaviour, the neural mechanisms underlying it remain poorly understood. Over the last two decades we have made considerable progress in the study of neuronal networks involved in attention. Here Julio will present data from a series of studies conducted in his laboratory aimed at clarifying how single neurons and small and large scale neuronal networks implement attention. He will concentrate in studies of attention in the visual cortex and executives areas of the frontal lobe using a variety of techniques in animal models and humans.