Email address: woldorff@duke.edu
Tel: 919-681-0604
Representative Publications
Dr. Marty Woldorff is currently the Associate Director of the Center for Cognitive Neurosciences at Duke, and a Professor with appointments in the Departments of Psychiatry, Psychological & Brain Sciences (PBS), and Neurobiology. He arrived at Duke in the fall of 1999.
Dr. Woldorff did his undergraduate work at Cornell University and U.C. Berkeley, receiving a Bachelors degree in Physics and Applied Mathematics from Berkeley. He received a Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from UC San Diego in 1989, gaining his training under the tutelage of Dr. Steve Hillyard.
Professor Woldorff's main research interest has been in the neural underpinnings of attention and perception. His early work employed event-related potentials (ERPs), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and structural MRI to reveal that strongly focused auditory attention can affect auditory sensory processing in primary auditory cortex at as early as 20 ms post-stimulus (Woldorff et al., 1987; Woldorff and Hillyard, 1991; Woldorff et al., 1993). Related work included the discovery that strongly focused attention can heavily attenuate the mismatch negativity, an ERP wave elicited by deviant auditory stimuli in an otherwise repeating auditory sequence, thereby providing important evidence against the strong automaticity of auditory sensory feature analysis (Woldorff et al., 1991; Woldorff et al., 1998).
In 1992, Dr. Woldorff went to the Research Imaging Center in San Antonio to pursue the study of cognitive processes using multiple brain imaging methodologies. There he headed up the ERP division and spearheaded the integration of hemodynamic brain imaging data (e.g., positron emission tomography [PET] and functional MRI [fMRI]) with electrophysiological recordings (e.g., ERPs). His research there included the use of this multi-methodological integrative approach to study visual attention, which led to work that helped map out both the timing and location of early visual spatial attention effects and their retinotopic organization (Woldorff et al., 1997, 1999).
Dr. Woldorff has also been involved in various projects developing and advancing the methodologies used for measuring brain activity. One example involves the fact that the study of attention and various other cognitive neuroscience questions is often facilitated by, or even requires, fast stimulus presentation rates. At fast rates in ERP studies, however, the ERP brain responses to successive stimuli overlap in time, thereby distorting the ERP averages. Part of Dr. Woldorff's earlier work involved analyzing and modeling such distortion and developing a deconvolution technique to remove it (the "Adjar" technique, Woldorff, 1993). More recently, this work also has turned out to be highly relevant to recent developments in event-related fMRI, and Dr. Woldorff has continued to be involved in the development of these methods for fMRI (Burock et al., 1998; Hinrichs et al., 2000; Woldorff et al., 2001).
For his work on early auditory attention and on the development of deconvolution techniques for fast-rate ERP studies, Dr. Woldorff was awarded the Sam Sutton award for Early Distinguished Contribution to Event-related Potentials and Cognition at the Tenth International Conference on ERPs [EPIC 10] in Eger, Hungary in 1992.
Dr. Woldorff has several ongoing collaborations with researchers at other institutions. These include a long-time collaboration with researchers in Magdeburg, Germany, that has focused on the use of fMRI and MEG to study auditory and visual perception and sensory processing (Baumgart et al., 1998; Woldorff et al., 1999; Hinrichs et al., 2000; Noesselt et al., 2002; Schoenfeld et al., in press). An additional ongoing collaboration with Dr. Anders Dale and colleagues at Harvard involves new ways of performing fMRI experiments and integrating fMRI and ERP data for studies of perception and attention (e.g., Burock et al., 1998; Hinrichs et al., 2000; Woldorff et al., 2001). Dr. Woldorff also has an ongoing research collaboration with Dr. G. Ron Mangun (now at the University of California at Davis) applying multi-methodological approaches to the study of attention.
Dr. Woldorff's work at Duke focuses on the study
of auditory, visual, and multisensory attention and perception,
using a combination of methodologies, including behavioral measures,
ERPs, MEG, fMRI, and electrophysiological source modeling. His
work also includes continued development of new approaches and
methods for more effectively using, coordinating, and combining
electrophysiological and hemodynamic brain imaging methods for
the study of attention and other cognitive neuroscience questions.
For the pursuit of this research at Duke, Dr. Woldorff currently
holds a major R01 grant from NIMH for the study of attention using
a combination of ERPs and fMRI, and is a P.I. or co-Investigator
of several other grants and projects using multi-methodological
approaches to study attention and perception.