Associate Professor of Translational Neuroscience

This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it is primarily interested in studying the effects of attention on brain functioning and how the brain allocates attentional resources to different locations in space.

Dr. Mayer obtained his B.A. in psychology (The State University of New York at Buffalo) in 1994 and his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from The Chicago Medical School in 2001. His graduate work focused on child and adult neuropsychological assessment (ADHD, autism, learning disabilities, developmental disorders, traumatic brain injury, stroke, epilepsy, dementia and various psychiatric conditions) and on the treatment of anxiety disorders (panic disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder). He moved to New Mexico in 2001 to perform his clinical internship and post-doctoral fellowship, continuing his specialization in neuropsychological assessment. Dr. Mayer has been employed as a Research Scientist at the Mind Research Network and an Assistant Professor in the UNM Department of Neurology since 2004. He is also licensed as a clinical psychologist in the state of New Mexico.

Dr. Mayer’s main area of research interest has been the application of non-invasive neuroimaging techniques to the study of human cognition. He is particularly interested in selective attention, which refers to the ability to focus on a task while ignoring other distracting information. Selective attention is essential for everyday functioning such as trying to study in the library while ignoring a conversation occurring at the table behind you. Dr. Mayer also studies how people attend to the outside environment using both visual and auditory information. He uses non-invasive neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) to investigate the changes that occur in the brain while people focus their attention in various situations. He has authored and co-authored approximately twenty articles examining the neuronal substrates of motor sequencing, the somatotopy of the medial wall, false memory, memory for faces, the Stroop effect, object attention, time perception, visual-spatial attention, audio-spatial attention, word generation and executive functioning. His clinical research previously focused on the neurocognitive correlates of psychopathy in the areas of emotional processing, handedness and attentional functioning. More recently, he has begun to study attentional functioning in schizophrenia and other neurodegenerative disorders. His future career goals are to apply multi-modal neuroimaging techniques to study cognition in these various disease states.

If you would like more information about Dr. Mayer, please refer to his Biographical Sketch.

The animation at left depicts the different neuronal networks that mediate attentional control during reflexive orienting. Download the complete MPG file.