These are the kinds of questions that fascinate Ralph Benedict, an assistant professor in the Department of Neurology. A neuropsychologist at the Erie County Medical Center, Benedict specializes in research into memory and attention. "What's most intriguing to me," he said, "are questions about the relationship between our minds and our brains, and what systems in the brain are contributing to memory, attention, thoughts, feelings or ideas."

These concerns led Benedict to do memory research. In 1988, shortly before completing his doctorate in clinical psychology at Arizona State University, he began to develop the Brief Visuospatial Memory Test, now used by neuropsychologists to test patient memory.

Recently, Benedict has been part of a UB team studying aural attention. He notes that there has been a shortage of studies that emphasize the "aural modality," in which the subject is asked to concentrate on sounds and spoken words, as opposed to studies emphasizing the "visual modality," which asks the subject to concentrate on images or written words. Using positron emission tomography (PET), Benedict and his co-researchers have been able to map the parts of the brain that become active when people listen attentively.

"The classic description (of this study) would be the cocktail-party-phenomenon," said Benedict, "where someone is talking to someone, but there is another conversation going on within hearing distance. We wanted to watch how the mind shifts from one conversation to another, trying to screen that out. It's easy to screen it out as long as they're talking about something that's not interesting, but as soon as they say your name or 'Buffalo,' your mind shifts."

Instead of cocktail party conversation, said Benedict, "we gave our subjects a primary aural attention task (such as picking out a specific syllable from a series of syllables), and then we superimposed stories on top of that....The stories were very engaging, and would be subject to spontaneous memory processes."

The study reproduced the three types of attention: sustained, focused and divided. "Sustained" attention means detecting the target syllable without the distraction of the stories, "focused" means ignoring the stories in favor of the target syllable and "divided" means paying attention to both the stories and the target syllable.

"We asked people to lie in the PET scanner while they did the attention task," Benedict said, "and for the 60 seconds while they were doing that, we were taking images of their brain to see which parts were utilizing relatively high amounts of oxygen."

The results suggest that parts of the brain called the anterior cingulate gyrus and the left inferior parietal lobule may be involved in auditory attention. "The primary result of the study," said Benedict, "is that we now know that the interior cingulate is involved in high capacity demand attention tasks in all sensory modalities."

While the results might only interest specialists in the field, establishing exactly where attention processes take place in the brain could lead to benefits in clinical neurology. "The findings could have a lot of implications for how we conceptualize and understand many attention impairments," he said, "including schizophrenia, attention deficit disorder, mild closed-head injury and multiple sclerosis."

Benedict's co-researchers included Janet and David Shucard from the Department of Neurology, Alan Lockwood from the Department of Nuclear Medicine and Brian Murphy and David Wack from the Center for Positron Emission Tomography.

The team hopes to conduct a follow-up study; in the meantime, Benedict continues to investigate the mystery of human awareness. "We were studying attention," he said, "but we were also studying consciousness...this is really what I've always wanted to do. The research is what drove me into this field," he added. "It's exciting to be curious about something and then to be able to pursue a project to answer a question."

Ralph Benedict, assistant professor in the Department of Neurology, works on research studies in memory and attention in the Neuropsychology and Neurophysiology Suite at Erie County Medical Center.