The study used a model of fMRI data collected from 92 individuals who were performing several types of attention-related tasks.
“Attention is such a fundamentally important ability for school, sports, work, and even happiness, but it is hard to put a number on it like blood pressure or IQ. Now we can put people in a scanner and get a score that represents how well an individual will do on attention tasks relative to other people,” says Chun, the Richard M. Colgate professor of psychology, professor of neuroscience, Yale University, and co-corresponding author of the paper.
“The brain is all interconnected, and is always running like a beating heart. What we can do is take all those complex patterns and analyze the data to create a fingerprint of the brain’s ability to pay attention,” says Chun.
The study may help diagnose ADHD and be used as neurofeedback to help improve an individual’s focus.
Source: Medindia
