Sonia Baloni

Date of birth
04.09.1980

Place of birth
Delhi, India

EDUCATION

Sonia Baloni

College / University
1999 - 2002 Delhi University, India
2002 - 2005 University of Allahabad

Degree
Bachelor in Zoology
Master in Bioinformatics

Major Subjects
Attention is a cognitive process of selectively concentrating on one aspect of the environment while ignoring other things. We, employ attention to various aspects of our visual environment, which can either be described by a spatial location, a feature or an event in time depending on behavioral requirements.

Lab Experience
Cell cultures
Immunohistochemistry

Single Cell Electrophysiological Recordings

PROJECTS / RESEARCH

Titel of Thesis "Role of attention in processing of visual motion stimuli"

SCIENTIFIC INTERESTS AND GOALS

My project aims to study how attention helps processing motion stimuli in our environment.  I basically employ two methodologies for my study: Psychophysics and electrophysiology.

Through psychophysical methods I study ‘attentional blink’ in humans which is a phenomenon observed when in a rapid sequence of brief visual stimuli presented at the same spatial location, the subjects fail to detect a second salient target in the sequence when presented within 200-500ms after the first target. By studying the ‘attentional blink ‘I would like to investigate whether this processing deficit exists in the motion domain and if so its possible mechanisms. The second aspect of my project involves extracellular electrophysiological recordings from single neurons in a motion processing area of the visual cortex of trained Monkeys. The monkeys are trained to perform attentional demanding task, which requires them to shift their attention either to different spatial location or different feature in visual space and while they are performing these task we record the responses of neurons to different attentional conditions.   By comparing the responses o neurons under different attentional conditions I would like to evaluate the qualitative and quantitative effects of attention on the responses of the neurons of the visual cortex.