Data from brain scans can now answer an age-old question asked by parents and teachers everywhere: Are you paying attention?
Using a model of fMRI data collected from 92 individuals performing several types of attention-related tasks, the lab of Yale’s Marvin Chun successfully predicted how well those individuals would perform on the tasks based on their brain scans alone.
This generalized model can also predict severity of an individual case of attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder.
The study was published March 3 in the journal Nature Human Behavior.
“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,” said Chun, the Richard M. Colgate Professor of Psychology, professor of neuroscience, and co-corresponding author of the paper. “Now we can put people in a scanner…
