John Reynolds is professor in the Systems Neurobiology Laboratory and the Fiona and Sanjay Jha Chair in Neuroscience at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, US. He co-led the Marmosets as a Model System of Aging and Neurodegeneration project.
Reynolds identified competitive brain circuits that enable us to attend to task-relevant objects while withdrawing attention from task-irrelevant objects.
Based on this discovery, Reynolds developed the leading computational model of attention, providing a unified, quantitative framework for understanding attentional selection in healthy brains, and how this selection fails in brain disease.
His group discovered that neuronal activity fluctuations are reduced when attention is directed to a stimulus, resulting in improved perception of that stimulus. This phenomenon accounts for the majority of the beneficial effects of attention.