PD. Dr. Thomas Töllner

Research focus: Our laboratory focuses on the neural mechanisms underlying (visual and crossmodal) attention and working memory in healthy young adults, healthy elderly adults, and adults with psychiatric and neurological disorders. By linking mental chronometry data to electroencephalographic brain signals, I aim at dissociating the temporal dynamics of perceptual and response-related processes as a function of, for instance, top-down expectancy, bottom-up saliency, and intertrial history biases.

Key words: attention, visual search, working memory, event-related potentials, mobile brain imaging (MoBI)

Current GSN students: Gordon Dodwell, Jan Nasemann

Selected publications:

Töllner T, Conci M and Müller HJ. (2015) Predictive distractor context facilitates attentional selection of high, but not intermediate and low, salience targets. Human Brain Mapping, 36 (3), 935-944.

Töllner T, Mink M and Müller HJ. (2015) Searching for targets in visual working memory: Investigating a "dimensional feature bundle" (DFB) model. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1339 (1), 32-44.

Cross-Villasana F, Finke K, Hennig-Fast K, Kilian B, Wiegand I, Müller HJ, Möller HJ and Töllner T. (2015) The speed of visual attention and motor-response decisions in adult attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Biological Psychiatry, 78, 107-115.

Töllner T, Rangelov D and Müller HJ. (2012) How the speed of motor-response decisions, but not focal-attentional selection, differs as a function of task set and target prevalence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (28): E1990-E1999.

Töllner T, Müller HJ and Zehetleitner M. (2012) Top-down dimensional weight set determines the capture of visual attention: Evidence from the PCN component. Cerebral Cortex 22 (7): 1554-1563.