A Conversation with Robert Desimone

Dr. Desimone: We always start with human behavior. Something in human behavior that we want to try to explain is related to attention these days. Often the human behavioral work has been done—we’ve done a little bit ourselves, but there’s a huge field of human behavioral work and attention. Then we look at how human neuroscience studies have informed us. Sometimes there are open questions in which case we jump in ourselves. In other situations, there’s sufficient information that we can go to an animal study because there the goal is to try to link what we see in humans to the underlying neuronal circuitry, which you can’t do in human beings. We’re getting much better at human techniques like magnetoencephalography (MEG) combined with fMRI. We don’t do electrocorticography recordings, but a lot of labs are starting to do that and I think that’s super exciting, but you can’t get to that level of neural circuits in humans, so we do the monkey studies to provide that link.