John Nadra

Volitional Attention to Color: Breaking Willed Attention out of the Spatial Domain Attention can be guided by either voluntary (top-down) or involuntary (bottom-up) influences. In real-world vision, voluntary attention can be directed by a wide range of influences such as reward, pr...

New preprint out now focused on willed attention to color. 🧠🎨

We found that EEG activity (broadband voltage & alpha-band) differs in the cue-to-target period whether people are attending to orange or purple! Read more at the link below.

#EEG #neuroskyence #attention #cognitiveneuroscience

Come see my poster @cogneuronews.bsky.social TOMORROW @ 3pm! 🎉

"Target Enhancement Is Not Simply One Process: Different Factors for Explicit Cueing Effects and Statistical Learning Effects on Attention"

#CNS2025

Hello all, I will be at #cns2025 in Boston - feel free to drop by my poster (#A59) on Saturday titled "Choosing When and Where to Attend: Decoding the Electrophysiological Correlates of Self-Paced Willed Attention". Can't wait to meet up with all of you once again!

The time has come!!!

I will be defending my dissertation on 3/18 at 12pm ET! If you'd like to attend in person or remotely, send me a message and I can share details! :)

My dissertation is titled, "The ‘Same Coin’ Fallacy: Target Enhancement and Distractor Suppression in Human Visual Attention"

Thank you, Natalia -- glad to see this work out in the world!

Spoiler alert: Using support vector machine decoding, we can predict whether someone is going to saccade to the left or right up to two seconds preceding the onset of a visual search array using solely the broadband EEG data!

Unconscious Neural Activity Predicts Overt Attention in Visual Search Unconscious neural activity has been shown to precede both motor and cognitive acts. In the present study, we investigated the neural antecedents of overt attention during visual search, where subject...

Hello all!

New paper out on bioRxiv: 'Unconscious Neural Activity Predicts Overt Attention in Visual Search'. We looked at the EEG activity preceding the first saccade into a visual search.

#neuroskyence #PsychSciSky #EEG #neuroimaging

After many years of describing willed attention to interested folks, I can now point them to this citation!

I will also be at SfN presenting a poster on willed attention to color during the 'Attention I' section, if you want to chat!

Willed attention is self-generated, in the absence of external cues usually provided in laboratory studies. The goal in studying willed attention is to investigate free choices to attend, which more closely mirror certain scenarios in the real world.

Placing willed attention in context: a review of attention and free will Attention is the ability to focus one’s awareness on relevant events and objects while ignoring distracting ones. Laboratory studies of top-down voluntary attention commonly use predictive or instru...

Hello all, my new review paper on willed attention is out!

In this paper, we aim to review the fields of voluntary attention and self-initiated motor actions to place 'willed attention' in context!

#neuroskyence #PsychSciSky #EEG #neuroimaging

Thank you!

Always glad to hear that, and love chatting about it - a review paper explaining how willed attention fits into the field of cognitive neuroscience should be coming out any day now - I'll be sure to post a summary and link the paper when it does!

#HiSciSky! I was just getting the hang of academic twitter, but it's become stormy over there -- glad to see blue skies ahead!

I am a cognitive neuroscience PhD candidate working on willed attention (attention without external constraints -- review paper coming soon!) at UC Davis. Glad to be here!