The University of British Columbia

Core Area(s): Cognitive Science

Biographical Sketch & Research Interests
Cognitive neuroscience of attention and consciousness with special emphasis on EEG and MEG studies of neuronal synchronization; psychophysics, biophysics and general theory of stochastic resonance; psychophysics and cognitive neuroscience of tinnitus; neural plasticity; nonlinear dynamical systems theory and its applications in cognitive neuroscience.

Courses Taught
PSYC 465 Computer Modeling of Psychological Theories, COGS 401 Seminar in Cognitive Systems, PSYC 583 Special Topics in Cognitive Science: Consciousness, COGS 300 Understanding and Designing Cognitive Systems

Representative Publications
Ward, L.M. (2002). Dynamical Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (355+xv pages).

Wright, R. D., & Ward, L. M. (2008). Orienting of Attention. New York: Oxford University Press. (292+xiv pages)

Ward, L.M. (2003). Synchronous neural oscillations and cognitive processes. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 553-559.

Ward, L.M. (2011). The thalamic dynamic core theory of conscious experience. Consciousness & Cognition, 20, 464–486.

McDonnell, M.D. & Ward, L.M. (2011). The benefits of noise in neural systems: bridging theory and experiment. Nature Reviews: Neuroscience, 12, 415-425.

Erland, S., Greenwood, P.E. & Ward, L.M. (2011). “1/f noise” is equivalent to an eigenstructure power relation. Europhysics Letters, 95, 60006 (1-5).

Doesburg, S.M., Green, J.J., McDonald, J.J. & Ward, L.M. (2009) Rhythms of consciousness: Binocular rivalry reveals large-scale oscillatory network dynamics mediating visual perception. PLoS One,7, e6142 (1-14).

McDonnell, M.D., Mohan, A., Stricker, C. & Ward, L.M. (2011) Input-rate modulation of gamma oscillations is sensitive to network topology, delays and short-term plasticity. Brain Research,

Doesburg, S.M., Roggeveen, A.B., Kitajo, K. & Ward, L.M. (2008) Large-scale gamma-band phase synchronization and selective attention. Cerebral Cortex, 18(2), 386-396.

Doesburg, S.M., Emberson, L., Rahi, A., Cameron, D. & Ward, L.M. (2008). Asynchrony from synchrony: Gamma-band neural synchrony and perception of audiovisual speech asynchrony. Experimental Brain Research, 185(1): 11-20.