Gabriele Gratton received his M.D. from University of Rome in 1980 and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1991. He is a professor in the Psychology Department and a full-time faculty member in the Beckman Institute Cognitive Neuroscience group. His field of interest is Cognitive Neuroscience.

President-Elect (2008-2009), President (2009-20010) and Past-President (2010-2011) of the Society for Psychophysiological Research (SPR); 2006 Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS); SPR Early Career Contribution to Psychophysiology (1997); University of Missouri Provost Outstanding Junior Faculty Research and Creativity Award (2000).

Gabriele Gratton's interests are in cognitive neuroscience, specifically in the basic organization (spatial, temporal, and functional) of elementary cognitive processes such as those involved in sensory and working memory, attention, motor preparation, and strategy selection. Gratton has been focusing on the application of functional brain imaging methods to the study of these processes in normal adult subjects using optical, electrophysiological and hemodynamic techniques.

This research is currently developing along two major directions. The first is methodological, and involves the development of a new non-invasive brain imaging approach based on optical measures (the event-related optical signal, or EROS) as well as of a number of tools for the analysis of event-related brain potentials (ERPs). EROS allows investigators to study non-invasively of the time course of activity in localized cortical areas. Gratton's initial work has shown the feasibility and validity of this approach (Gratton et al., Psychophysiology, 1994, 1995; Gratton et al., Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 1995). Subsequent work has demonstrated that EROS has good temporal correspondence with the ERP and good spatial correspondence with functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI; Gratton et al., NeuroImage, 1997). Optical methods also allow for a direct comparison of neuronal and hemodynamic indices of brain activity. This property can be used to study the relationship between these two signals both in terms of spatial localization and of sensitivity to functional manipulations. Initial analyses suggest that the hemodynamic signal is proportional to the amplitude of the neuronal signal, providing further support for the quantitative use of hemodynamic methods in the study of brain function (Gratton et al., Human Brain Mapping, 2001).

His second research focus is on the brain implementation and organization of basic cognitive processes, including the hemispheric organization of sensory memory; and,) the organization of motor and strategic processes. Research conducted by Gratton in the last few years has uncovered physiological evidence that visual memory is organized hemispherically, at least at early stages of visual processing (see Gratton et al., Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 1997; Gratton et al., Psychophysiology, 1998). He is also expanding this line of research to the neurophysiology of auditory sensory memory (Rinne, Gratton, et al., NeuroImage, 1999), to the organization of strategic processes (Corballis & Gratton, submitted), as well as to the localization and time course of visual attention processes (Gratton, NeuroReport, 1997).

Gratton's research on the organization of motor and strategic processes has focused on the analysis of the activation of responses in conflict paradigms (such as the Eriksen flankers task and the Stroop paradigm). ERP data indicate that when the stimulus contains conflicting information (i.e., information leading to two mutually exclusive responses), subjects may temporarily show preferential activation of the incorrect response before actually emitting the correct response (Gratton et al., 1988). Recently, Gratton and his collaborators have obtained EROS data indicating that this is actually due to a brief activation of the motor cortex associated with the incorrect response (DeSoto et al., Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2001). These data indicate that task-irrelevant information is actually processed all the way to the level of the motor cortex, thus providing physiological support for late selection models. However, other research indicates that the processing of irrelevant information is not entirely obligatory, since it is influenced by expectancy effects (Gratton et al., Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 1992; Corballis & Gratton, submitted).