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2023 |
Carla A. Wall; Frederick Shic; Sreeja Varanasi; Jane E. Roberts Distinct social attention profiles in preschoolers with autism contrasted to fragile X syndrome Journal Article In: Autism Research, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 340–354, 2023. @article{Wall2023, Social attention is a critical skill for learning and development. Social attention difficulties are present in both non-syndromic autism spectrum disorder (nsASD) and fragile X syndrome (FXS), and our understanding of these difficulties is complicated by heterogeneity in both disorders, including co-occurring diagnoses like intellectual disability and social anxiety. Existing research largely utilizes a single index of social attention and rarely includes children with intellectual impairment or uses a cross-syndrome approach. This study investigated whether multi-trait social attention profiles including naturalistic initial eye contact, facial attention, and social scene attention differ in preschool children with nsASD and FXS matched on developmental ability (DQ) and contrasted to neurotypical (NT) controls. The relationship between DQ, ASD severity, and social anxiety and social attention profiles was also examined. Initial eye contact related to social scene attention, implicating that naturalistic social attention is consistent with responses during experimental conditions. Reduced eye contact and lower social scene attention characterized nsASD and FXS. Children with nsASD displayed less facial attention than FXS and NT children, who did not differ. Lower DQ and elevated ASD severity associated with decreased eye contact in nsASD and FXS, and lower DQ was associated with lower social scene attention in FXS. Sex, social anxiety, and age were not associated with social attention. These findings suggest social attention profiles of children with nsASD are highly similar to, yet distinct from, children with FXS. Children with nsASD may present with a global social attention deficit whereas FXS profiles may reflect context-dependent social avoidance. |
Josefine Waldthaler; Lena Stock; Charlotte Krüger-Zechlin; Zain Deeb; Lars Timmermann Cluster analysis reveals distinct patterns of saccade impairment and their relation to cognitive profiles in Parkinson's disease Journal Article In: Journal of Neuropsychology, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 251–263, 2023. @article{Waldthaler2023b, Saccade performance has been reported to be altered in Parkinson's disease (PD), however, with a large variability between studies as both motor and cognitive impairment interfere with oculomotor control. The aim of this study was to identify different patterns in saccade alterations in PD using a data-driven approach and to explore their relationship with cognitive phenotypes. Sixty-one participants with PD and 25 controls performed eye-tracking (horizontal and vertical prosaccades, antisaccades) and neuropsychological testing. Hierarchical cluster analysis was applied to the eye-tracking data to subsequently compare the clusters based on demographical, clinical and cognitive characteristics. The three identified clusters of saccade alterations differed in cognitive profiles from healthy controls, but not in PD-related motor symptoms or demographics. The rate of directive errors in the antisaccade task was increased in clusters 1 and 2. Further, cluster 1 was defined by a general disinhibition of reflexive saccades and executive dysfunction in the neuropsychological evaluation. In cluster 2, prolonged saccade latencies and hypometria were accompanied by multidomain cognitive impairment. The cluster 3 showed increased antisaccade latency and vertical hypometria despite lack of evidence for cognitive impairment. Our results suggest that there may be at least two opposing patterns of saccade alterations associated with cognitive impairment in PD, which may explain some of the contradictory results of previous studies. |
Josefine Waldthaler; Alexander Sperlich; Charlotte Stüssel; Kenan Steidel; Lars Timmermann; David J. Pedrosa Stimulation of non-motor subthalamic nucleus impairs selective response inhibition via prefrontal connectivity Journal Article In: Brain Communications, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 1–13, 2023. @article{Waldthaler2023a, Given the inconsistent results in the past, there is an ongoing debate whether and how deep brain stimulation in the subthalamic nucleus modifies cognitive control processes like response inhibition in persons with Parkinson's disease. In this study, we examined how the location of the stimulation volume within the subthalamic nucleus affects the performance in an antisaccade task but also how its structural connectivity is related to response inhibition. Antisaccade error rates and latencies were collected in 14 participants on and off deep brain stimulation in a randomized order. Stimulation volumes were computed based on patient-specific lead localizations using preoperative MRI and postoperative CT scans. Structural connectivity of the stimulation volumes with pre-defined cortical oculomotor control regions as well as whole-brain connectivity was estimated using a normative connectome. We showed that the detrimental effect of deep brain stimulation on response inhibition, measured as antisaccade error rate, depended upon the magnitude of the intersection of volumes of activated tissue with the non-motor subregion of the subthalamic nucleus and on its structural connectivity with regions of the prefrontal oculomotor network including bilateral frontal eye fields and right anterior cingulate cortex. Our results corroborate previous recommendations for avoidance of stimulation in the ventromedial non-motor subregion of the subthalamic nucleus which connects to the prefrontal cortex to prevent stimulation-induced impulsivity. Furthermore, antisaccades were initiated faster with deep brain stimulation when the stimulation volume was connected to fibres passing the subthalamic nucleus laterally and projecting onto the prefrontal cortex, indicating that improvement of voluntary saccade generation with deep brain stimulation may be an off-target effect driven by stimulation of corticotectal fibres directly projecting from the frontal and supplementary eye fields onto brainstem gaze control areas. Taken together, these findings could help implement individualized circuit-based deep brain stimulation strategies that avoid impulsive side effects while improving voluntary oculomotor control. |
Josefine Waldthaler; Alexander Sperlich; Aylin König; Charlotte Stüssel; Frank Bremmer; Lars Timmermann; David Pedrosa In: NeuroImage: Clinical, vol. 37, pp. 1–11, 2023. @article{Waldthaler2023, While deep brain stimulation (DBS) in the subthalamic nucleus (STN) improves motor functions in Parkinson's disease (PD), it may also increase impulsivity by interfering with the inhibition of reflexive responses. The aim of this study was to investigate if varying the pulse frequency of STN-DBS has a modulating effect on response inhibition and its neural correlates. For this purpose, 14 persons with PD repeated an antisaccade task in three stimulation settings (DBS off, high-frequency DBS (130 Hz), mid-frequency DBS (60 Hz)) in a randomized order, while eye movements and brain activity via high-density EEG were recorded. On a behavioral level, 130 Hz DBS stimulation had no effect on response inhibition measured as antisaccade error rate, while 60 Hz DBS induced a slight but significant reduction of directional errors compared with the DBS-off state and 130 Hz DBS. Further, stimulation with both frequencies decreased the onset latency of correct antisaccades, while increasing the latency of directional errors. Time-frequency domain analysis of the EEG data revealed that 60 Hz DBS was associated with an increase in preparatory theta power over a midfrontal region of interest compared with the off-DBS state which is generally regarded as a marker of increased cognitive control. While no significant differences in brain activity over mid- and lateral prefrontal regions of interest emerged between the 60 Hz and 130 Hz conditions, both stimulation frequencies were associated with a stronger midfrontal beta desynchronization during the mental preparation for correct antisaccades compared with DBS off-state which is discussed in the context of potentially enhanced proactive recruitment of the oculomotor network. Our preliminary findings suggest that mid-frequency STN-DBS may provide beneficial effects on response inhibition, while both 130 Hz- and 60 Hz STN-DBS may promote voluntary actions at the expense of slower reflexive responses. |
Sonja Walcher; Živa Korda; Christof Körner; Mathias Benedek The effects of type and workload of internal tasks on voluntary saccades in a targetdistractor saccade task Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 18, pp. 1–27, 2023. @article{Walcher2023, When we engage in internally directed cognition, like doing mental arithmetic or mind wandering, fewer cognitive resources are assigned for other activities like reacting to perceptual input-an effect termed perceptual decoupling. However, the exact conditions under which perceptual decoupling occurs and its underlying cognitive mechanisms are still unclear. Hence, the present study systematically manipulated the task type (arithmetic, visuospatial) and workload (control, low, high) of the internal task in a within-subject design and tested its effects on voluntary saccades in a target-distractor saccade task. As expected, engagement in internal tasks delayed saccades to the target. This effect was moderated by time, task, and workload: The delay was largest right after internal task onset and then decreased, potentially reflecting the intensity of internal task demands. Saccades were also more delayed for the high compared to the low workload condition in the arithmetic task, whereas workload conditions had similarly high effects in the visuospatial task. Findings suggests that perceptual decoupling of eye behavior gradually increases with internal demands on general resources and that perceptual decoupling is specifically sensitive to internal demands on visuospatial resources. The latter may be mediated by interference due to eye behavior elicited by the internal task itself. Internal tasks did not affect the saccade latencydeviation trade-off, indicating that while the internal tasks delayed the execution of the saccade, the perception of the saccade stimuli and spatial planning of the saccade continued unaffected in parallel to the internal tasks. Together, these findings shed further light on the specific mechanisms underlying perceptual decoupling by suggesting that perceptual decoupling of eye behavior increases as internal demands on cognitive resources overlap more strongly with demands of the external task. |
Nicholas Wagner; Emily Perkins; Yuheiry Rodriguez; Cora Ordway; Michaela Flum; Lucia Hernandez-Pena; Polina Perelstein; Kathy Sem; Yael Paz; Rista Plate; Ayomide Popoola; Sarah Lynch; Kristina Astone; Ethan Goldstein; Wanjikũ F. M. Njoroge; Adriane Raine; Donna Pincus; Koraly Pérez-Edgar; Rebecca Waller In: BMJ Open, vol. 13, no. 10, pp. 1–13, 2023. @article{Wagner2023b, Introduction: Children with callous-unemotional (CU) traits are at high lifetime risk of antisocial behaviour. Low affiliation (ie, social bonding difficulties) and fearlessness (ie, low threat sensitivity) are proposed risk factors for CU traits. Parenting practices (eg, harshness and low warmth) also predict risk for CU traits. However, few studies in early childhood have identified attentional or physiological markers of low affiliation and fearlessness. Moreover, no studies have tested whether parenting practices are underpinned by low affiliation or fearlessness shared by parents, which could further shape parent-child interactions and exacerbate risk for CU traits. Addressing these questions will inform knowledge of how CU traits develop and isolate novel parent and child targets for future specialised treatments for CU traits. Methods and analysis: The Promoting Empathy and Affiliation in Relationships (PEAR) study aims to establish risk factors for CU traits in children aged 3-6 years. The PEAR study will recruit 500 parent-child dyads from two metropolitan areas of the USA. Parents and children will complete questionnaires, computer tasks and observational assessments, alongside collection of eye-tracking and physiological data, when children are aged 3-4 (time 1) and 5-6 (time 2) years. The moderating roles of child sex, race and ethnicity, family and neighbourhood disadvantage, and parental psychopathology will also be assessed. Study aims will be addressed using structural equation modelling, which will allow for flexible characterisation of low affiliation, fearlessness and parenting practices as risk factors for CU traits across multiple domains. Ethics and dissemination: Ethical approval was granted by Boston University (#6158E) and the University of Pennsylvania (#850638). Results will be disseminated through conferences and open-access publications. All study and task materials will be made freely available on lab websites and through the Open Science Framework (OSF). |
Isabella C. Wagner; Luise P. Graichen; Boryana Todorova; Andre Lüttig; David B. Omer; Matthias Stangl; Claus Lamm Entorhinal grid-like codes and time-locked network dynamics track others navigating through space Journal Article In: Nature Communications, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 1–18, 2023. @article{Wagner2023a, Navigating through crowded, dynamically changing environments requires the ability to keep track of other individuals. Grid cells in the entorhinal cortex are a central component of self-related navigation but whether they also track others' movement is unclear. Here, we propose that entorhinal grid-like codes make an essential contribution to socio-spatial navigation. Sixty human participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while observing and re-tracing different paths of a demonstrator that navigated a virtual reality environment. Results revealed that grid-like codes in the entorhinal cortex tracked the other individual navigating through space. The activity of grid-like codes was time-locked to increases in co-activation and entorhinal-cortical connectivity that included the striatum, the hippocampus, parahippocampal and right posterior parietal cortices. Surprisingly, the grid-related effects during observation were stronger the worse participants performed when subsequently re-tracing the demonstrator's paths. Our findings suggests that network dynamics time-locked to entorhinal grid-cell-related activity might serve to distribute information about the location of others throughout the brain. |
Ilja Wagner; Alexander C. Sch€utz Interaction of dynamic error signals in saccade adaptation Journal Article In: Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 129, no. 3, pp. 717–732, 2023. @article{Wagner2023, Motor adaptation maintains movement accuracy. To evaluate movement accuracy, motor adaptation relies on an error signal, generated by the movement target, while suppressing error signals from irrelevant objects in the vicinity. Previous work used static testing environments, where all information required to evaluate movement accuracy was available simultaneously. Using saccadic eye movements as a model for motor adaptation, we tested how movement accuracy is maintained in dynamic environments, where the availability of conflicting error signals varied over time. Participants made a vertical saccade toward a target (either a small square or a large ring). Upon saccade detection, two candidate stimuli were shown left and right of the target, and participants were instructed to discriminate a feature on one of the candidates. Critically, candidate stimuli were presented sequentially, and saccade adaptation, thus, had to resolve a conflict between a task-relevant and a task-irrelevant error signal that were separated in space and time. We found that the saccade target influenced several aspects of oculomotor learning. In presence of a small target, saccade adaptation evaluated movement accuracy based on the first available error signal after the saccade, irrespective of its task relevance. However, a large target not only allowed for greater flexibility when evaluating movement accuracy, but it also promoted a stronger contribution of strategic behavior when compensating inaccurate saccades. Our results demonstrate how motor adaptation maintains movement accuracy in dynamic environments, and how properties of the visual environment modulate the relative contribution of different learning processes. |
A. C. L. Vrijling; M. J. Boer; R. J. Renken; J. B. C. Marsman; A. Grillini; C. E. Petrillo; J. Heutink; N. M. Jansonius; F. W. Cornelissen Stimulus contrast, pursuit mode, and age strongly influence tracking performance on a continuous visual tracking task Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 205, pp. 1–11, 2023. @article{Vrijling2023, Human observers tend to naturally track moving stimuli. This tendency may be exploited towards an intuitive means of screening visual function as an impairment induced reduction in stimulus visibility will decrease tracking performance. Yet, to be able to detect subtle impairments, stimulus contrast is critical. If too high, the decrease in performance may remain undetected. Therefore, for this approach to become reliable and sensitive, we need a detailed understanding of how age, stimulus contrast, and the type of stimulus movement affect continuous tracking performance. To do so, we evaluated how well twenty younger and twenty older participants tracked a semi-randomly moving stimulus (Goldmann size III, 0.43 degrees of visual angle), presented at five contrast levels (5%-10%-20%-40%-80%). The stimulus could move smoothly only (smooth pursuit mode) or in alternation with displacements (saccadic pursuit mode). Additionally, we assessed static foveal and peripheral contrast thresholds. For all participants, tracking performance improved with increasing contrast in both pursuit modes. To reach threshold performance levels, older participants required about twice as much contrast (20% vs. 10% and 40% vs. 20% in smooth and saccadic modes respectively). Saccadic pursuit detection thresholds correlated significantly with static peripheral contrast thresholds (rho = 0.64). Smooth pursuit detection thresholds were uncorrelated with static foveal contrast thresholds (rho = 0.29). We conclude that continuous visual stimulus tracking is strongly affected by stimulus contrast, pursuit mode, and age. This provides essential insights that can be applied towards new and intuitive approaches of screening visual function. |
Jelena Vranjes; Bart Defrancq To repair or not to repair? Repairs and risk taking in video remote interpreting Journal Article In: Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice, pp. 1–22, 2023. @article{Vranjes2023, The importance of video remote interpreting (VRI) for providing interpreting services has drastically increased over the last decade. Empirical research has shown, however, that interpreting through video link may have a significant impact on the interaction and the interpreting performance in dialogue interpreting contexts. The present study contributes to this growing field of research by focusing on interpreters' repair initiations in the context of VRI. Although repairs are an important mechanism for addressing problems in communication, very little research has been devoted to the study of interpreter-initiated repair in dialogue settings. Based on a corpus of video-recorded interpreted interactions (Dutch-Russian), where the interpreter is either present onsite or connected through video link, we analyse interpreters' repair initiations and related risk taking behaviour. More specifically, we examine how interpreters manage a specific type of repair initiations in video remote interpreting, namely postponed repairs. The analysis reveals differences in repair patterns between video remote and onsite interpreting and we propose that these differences result from differential risk management in the two settings. |
Dimitris Voudouris; Immo Schuetz; Tabea Schinke; Katja Fiehler Pupil dilation scales with movement distance of real but not of imagined reaching movements Journal Article In: Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 130, no. 1, pp. 104–116, 2023. @article{Voudouris2023, Pupillary responses have been reliably identified for cognitive and motor tasks, but less is known about their relation to mentally simulated movements (known as motor imagery). Previous work found pupil dilations during the execution of simple finger movements, where peak pupillary dilation scaled with the complexity of the finger movement and force required. Recently, pupillary dilations were reported during imagery of grasping and piano playing. Here, we examined whether pupillary responses are sensitive to the dynamics of the underlying motor task for both executed and imagined reach movements. Participants reached or imagined reaching to one of three targets placed at different distances from a start position. Both executed and imagined movement times scaled with target distance, and they were highly correlated, confirming previous work and suggesting that participants did imagine the respective movement. Increased pupillary dilation was evident during motor execution compared with rest, with stronger dilations for larger movements. Pupil dilations also occurred during motor imagery, however, they were generally weaker than those during motor execution and they were not influenced by imagined movement distance. Instead, dilations during motor imagery resembled pupil responses obtained during a nonmotor imagery task (imagining a previously viewed painting). Our results demonstrate that pupillary responses can reliably capture the dynamics of an executed goal-directed reaching movement, but suggest that pupillary responses during imagined reaching movements reflect general cognitive processes, rather than motor-specific components related to the simulated dynamics of the sensorimotor system.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Pupil size is influenced by the performance of cognitive and motor tasks. Here, we demonstrate that pupil size increases not only during execution but also during mental simulation of goal-directed reaching movements. However, pupil dilations scale with movement amplitude of executed but not of imagined movement, whereas they are similar during motor imagery and a nonmotor imagery task. |
Ria Vormbrock; Maximilian Bruchmann; Lucas Menne; Thomas Straube; Sebastian Schindler Testing stimulus exposure time as the critical factor of increased EPN and LPP amplitudes for fearful faces during perceptual distraction tasks Journal Article In: Cortex, vol. 160, pp. 9–23, 2023. @article{Vormbrock2023, Fearful facial expressions are prioritized across different information processing stages, as evident in early, intermediate, and late components of event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Recent studies showed that, in contrast to early N170 modulations, mid-latency (Early Posterior Negativity, EPN) and late (Late Positive Potential, LPP) emotional modula- tions depend on the attended perceptual feature. Nevertheless, several studies reported significant differences between emotional and neutral faces for the EPN or LPP components during distraction tasks. One cause for these conflicting findings might be that when faces are presented sufficiently long, participants attend to task-irrelevant features of the faces. In this registered report, we tested whether the presentation duration of faces is the critical factor for differences between reported emotional modulations during perceptual distraction tasks. To this end, 48 participants were required to discriminate the orientation of lines overlaid onto fearful or neutral faces, while face presentation varied (100 msec, 300 msec, 1,000 msec, 2,000 msec). While participants did not need to pay attention to the faces, we observed main effects of emotion for the EPN and LPP, but no interaction between emotion and presentation duration. Of note, unregistered exploratory tests per presentation duration showed no significant EPN and LPP emotion differences during short durations (100 and 300 msec) but significant differences with longer durations. While the presentation duration seems not to be a critical factor for EPN and LPP emotion effects, future studies are needed to investigate the role of threshold effects and the applied analytic designs to explain conflicting findings in the literature. |
Lara Koch; Norbert Kathmann; Benedikt Reuter Lack of speeded disengagement from facial expressions of disgust in remitted major depressive disorder: Evidence from an eye-movement study Journal Article In: Behaviour Research and Therapy, vol. 160, pp. 1–11, 2023. @article{Koch2023a, Acute major depression is characterized by specific abnormalities in the way emotional material is attended to. In late stages of stimulus processing, clinically depressed and dysphoric individuals show difficulties to disengage attention from emotionally negative material. It is unclear, however, whether aberrant disengagement is a transitory attentional phenomenon tied to depressive symptoms, or whether it constitutes a more stable disposition that outlast the symptomatic episode. To address this issue, the current study examined 39 currently euthymic individuals previously affected by major depression (RMD) and 40 healthy control participants reporting no lifetime psychopathology (ND). We used a gaze-contingent eye tracking paradigm designed to separately assess the attentional components of engagement and disengagement when viewing facial expressions of sadness, disgust and happiness. Never-depressed healthy participants, but not remitted euthymic individuals, showed speeded disengagement from facial expressions of disgust. We propose that the lack of this distinct acceleration in previously depressed but fully remitted individuals might reflect an attentional disposition that carries over to euthymic phases of the disease. On the other hand, a tendency to disengage quickly from areas in the visual field that convey social disdain could potentially act as a protective, possibly mood-stabilizing bias in resilient individuals. |
Katie Von Holzen; Sandrien Ommen; Katherine S. White; Thierry Nazzi The impact of phonological biases on mispronunciation sensitivity and novel accent adaptation Journal Article In: Language Learning and Development, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 303–322, 2023. @article{VonHolzen2023, Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature mispronunciations typically disrupt English-learning toddlers' lexical access, they no longer do after toddlers are exposed to a novel accent in which these changes occur systematically. The flexibility to deal with different types of variation may not be the same for toddlers learning different first languages, however, as language structure shapes early phonological biases. We examined French-learning 19-month-olds' sensitivity and adaptation to a novel accent that shifted either the standard pronunciation of /a/ from [a] to [ɛ] (Experiment 1) or the standard pronunciation of /p/ from [p] to [t] (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, French-learning toddlers recognized words with /a/ produced as [ɛ], regardless of whether they were previously exposed to an accent that contained this vowel shift or not. In Experiment 2, toddlers did not recognize words with /p/ pronounced as [t] at test unless they were first familiarized with an accent that contained this consonant shift. These findings are consistent with evidence that French-learning toddlers privilege consonants over vowels in lexical processing. Together with previous work, these results demonstrate both differences and similarities in how French- and English-learning children treat variation, in line with their language-specific phonological biases. |
Christoph J. Völter; Ana Tomašić; Laura Nipperdey; Ludwig Huber Dogs' expectations about occlusion events: From expectancy violation to exploration Journal Article In: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, vol. 290, no. 2003, pp. 1–12, 2023. @article{Voelter2023, Previous research on human infants has shown that violations of basic physical regularities can stimulate exploration, which may represent a type of hypothesis testing aimed at acquiring knowledge about new causal relationships. In this study, we examined whether a similar connection between expectancy violation and exploration exists in nonhuman animals. Specifically, we investigated how dogs react to expectancy violations in the context of occlusion events. Throughout three experiments, dogs exhibited longer looking times at expectancy-inconsistent events than at consistent ones. This finding was further supported by pupil size analyses in the first two eye-tracking experiments. Our results suggest that dogs expect objects to reappear when they are not obstructed by a screen and consider the size of the occluding screen in relation to the occluded object. In Experiment 3, expectancy violations increased the dogs' exploration of the target object, similar to the findings with human infants. We conclude that expectancy violations can provide learning opportunities for nonhuman animals as well. |
Vera A. Voigtlaender; Florian Sandhaeger; David J. Hawellek; Steffen R. Hage; Markus Siegel Neural representations of the content and production of human vocalization Journal Article In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 120, no. 23, pp. 1–9, 2023. @article{Voigtlaender2023, Speech, as the spoken form of language, is fundamental for human communication. The phenomenon of covert inner speech implies functional independence of speech content and motor production. However, it remains unclear how a flexible mapping between speech content and production is achieved on the neural level. To address this, we recorded magnetoencephalography in humans performing a rule-based vocalization task. On each trial, vocalization content (one of two vowels) and production form (overt or covert) were instructed independently. Using multivariate pattern analysis, we found robust neural information about vocalization content and produc- tion, mostly originating from speech areas of the left hemisphere. Production signals dynamically transformed upon presentation of the content cue, whereas content signals remained largely stable throughout the trial. In sum, our results show dissociable neural representations of vocalization content and production in the human brain and provide insights into the neural dynamics underlying human vocalization. |
Margreet Vogelzang; Nanna Fuhrhop; Tobias Mundhenk; Esther Ruigendijk Influence of capitalisation and presence of an article in noun phrase recognition in German: Evidence from eye-tracking Journal Article In: Journal of Research in Reading, vol. 46, no. 3, pp. 294–311, 2023. @article{Vogelzang2023, Background: German is exceptional in its use of noun capitalisation. It has been suggested that sentence-internal capitalisation as in German may benefit processing by specifically marking a noun and thus a noun phrase (NP). However, other cues, such as a determiner, can also indicate an NP. The influence of capitalisation on processing may thus be context-dependent, that is, dependent on other cues. Precisely this context dependency is investigated in the current study: Is there an effect of capitalisation on reading and is this affected by the presence of other cues such as a determiner (specifically, an article)?. Methods: We ran an eye-tracking study with 30 German-speaking adults, measuring fixations during sentence reading. Critical NPs either contained correctly capitalised nouns or not and were presented either with or without a determiner. Results: The results show that both the presence of capitalisation on the noun and the presence of a determiner led to faster reading. When no determiner was present to signal the NP, the presence of noun capitalisation aided reading most. Conclusions: From these results, we conclude that the influence of capitalisation is indeed context dependent: Capitalisation aids processing most when no other cue is present. Thus, different cues play a role in NP recognition. Based on these findings, we argue that noun capitalisation should not be studied in isolation. We argue that a better understanding of capitalisation as a reading aid is relevant for teaching reading strategies. |
Valldeflors Vinuela-Navarro; Joan Goset; Mikel Aldaba; Clara Mestre; Cristina Rovira-Gay; Neus Cano; Mar Ariza; Bàrbara Delàs; Maite Garolera; Meritxell Vilaseca Eye movements in patients with post-COVID condition Journal Article In: Biomedical Optics Express, vol. 14, no. 8, pp. 1–14, 2023. @article{VinuelaNavarro2023, Eye movement control is impaired in some neurological conditions, but the impact of COVID-19 on eye movements remains unknown. This study aims to investigate differences in oculomotor function and pupil response in individuals who suffer post-COVID-19 condition (PCC) with cognitive deficits. Saccades, smooth pursuit, fixation, vergence and pupillary response were recorded using an eye tracker. Eye movements and pupil response parameters were computed. Data from 16 controls, 38 COVID mild (home recovery) and 19 COVID severe (hospital admission) participants were analyzed. Saccadic latencies were shorter in controls (183 ± 54 ms) than in COVID mild (236 ± 83 ms) and COVID severe (227 ± 42 ms) participants (p = 0.017). Fixation stability was poorer in COVID mild participants (Bivariate Contour Ellipse Area of 0.80 ± 1.61° 2 vs 0.36 ± 0.65 ° 2 for controls |
Sarah Villard; Tyler K. Perrachione; Sung-Joo Lim; Ayesha Alam; Gerald Kidd In: The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, vol. 154, no. 2, pp. 1152–1167, 2023. @article{Villard2023, The task of processing speech masked by concurrent speech/noise can pose a substantial challenge to listeners. However, performance on such tasks may not directly reflect the amount of listening effort they elicit. Changes in pupil size and neural oscillatory power in the alpha range (8–12 Hz) are prominent neurophysiological signals known to reflect listening effort; however, measurements obtained through these two approaches are rarely correlated, suggesting that they may respond differently depending on the specific cognitive demands (and, by extension, the specific type of effort) elicited by specific tasks. This study aimed to compare changes in pupil size and alpha power elicited by different types of auditory maskers (highly confusable intelligible speech maskers, speech-envelope-modulated speech-shaped noise, and unmodulated speech-shaped noise maskers) in young, normal-hearing listeners. Within each condition, the target-to-masker ratio was set at the participant's individually estimated 75% correct point on the psychometric function. The speech masking condition elicited a significantly greater increase in pupil size than either of the noise masking conditions, whereas the unmodulated noise masking condition elicited a significantly greater increase in alpha oscillatory power than the speech masking condition, suggesting that the effort needed to solve these respective tasks may have different neural origins. |
Audrey Vialatte; Eric Chabanat; Agnès Witko; Laure Pisella In: Cognitive Neuropsychology, pp. 1–28, 2023. @article{Vialatte2023, Some dyslexics cannot process multiple letters simultaneously. It has been argued that this reduced visuo-attentional (VA) letter span could result from poor reading ability and experience. Here, moving away from reading context, we showed that dyslexic group exhibited slower visual search than normal readers group for “symbols”, defined as graphic stimuli made up of separable visual features, but not for filled objects. Slowness in symbol visual search was explained by reduced VA field and atypical ocular behaviour when processing those letter-like stimuli and was associated with reduced VA letter span and impaired elementary visuo-spatial perception. Such a basic visual search deficit can hardly be attributed to poor reading ability and experience. Moreover, because it is specific to letter-like stimuli (i.e., “symbols”), it can specifically hinder reading acquisition. Symbol visual search can easily be tested in the pre-reading phase, opening up prospects for early risk detection and prevention of VA dyslexia. |
Marie Vernet; Stéphanie Bellocchi; Jérémy Danna; Delphine Massendari; Marianne Jover; Yves Chaix; Stéphanie Ducrot The determinants of saccade targeting strategy in neurodevelopmental disorders: The influence of suboptimal reading experience Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 204, pp. 1–14, 2023. @article{Vernet2023, Whether eye-movements deficits are causal in reading disorders (RD) or rather a consequence of linguistic processing difficulty experienced by disabled readers has been extensively debated. Since RD are frequently comorbid with the Neurofibromatosis type1 (NF1), children with NF1 were used as a comparison group for children with dyslexia in this study. Eye movements were recorded while 21 dyslexic, 20 NF1, and 20 typically developing children performed an oculomotor lateralized bisection task. In this experiment, we manipulated the type of stimulus - discrete (words and strings of hashes) versus continuous (solid lines) - and the visual field where the stimulus was displayed (left vs right). The results showed that (1) only proficient readers (TD and NF1 without RD) showed fully developed oculomotor mechanisms for efficient reading, with a clear preferred viewing location located to the left of the word's centre in both visual fields, and fine-tuned saccade targeting guided by the between-character space information and (2) NF1 poor readers mirrored the dyslexic eye movement behaviour, with less accuracy and more variability in saccadic programming, no sensitivity to the discreteness of the stimuli, particularly in the left visual field. We concluded that disruption to oculomotor behaviour reflects the fact that many of the processes involved in reading are not yet automatized for children with RD, independently of NF1. This suggests that the differences in saccade targeting strategy between children with and without RD would be secondary consequences of their reduced reading experience. |
Anca Velisar; Natela M. Shanidze Noise estimation for head-mounted 3D binocular eye tracking using Pupil Core eye-tracking goggles Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, pp. 1–27, 2023. @article{Velisar2023, Head-mounted, video-based eye tracking is becoming increasingly common and has promise in a range of applications. Here, we provide a practical and systematic assessment of the sources of measurement uncertainty for one such device – the Pupil Core – in three eye-tracking domains: (1) the 2D scene camera image; (2) the physical rotation of the eye relative to the scene camera 3D space; and (3) the external projection of the estimated gaze point location onto the target plane or in relation to world coordinates. We also assess eye camera motion during active tasks relative to the eye and the scene camera, an important consideration as the rigid arrangement of eye and scene camera is essential for proper alignment of the detected gaze. We find that eye camera motion, improper gaze point depth estimation, and erroneous eye models can all lead to added noise that must be considered in the experimental design. Further, while calibration accuracy and precision estimates can help assess data quality in the scene camera image, they may not be reflective of errors and variability in gaze point estimation. These findings support the importance of eye model constancy for comparisons across experimental conditions and suggest additional assessments of data reliability may be warranted for experiments that require the gaze point or measure eye movements relative to the external world. |
Aaron Veldre; Erik D. Reichle; Lili Yu; Sally Andrews Understanding the visual constraints on lexical processing: New empirical and simulation results Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 152, no. 3, pp. 693–722, 2023. @article{Veldre2023, Word identification is slower and less accurate outside central vision, but the precise relationship between retinal eccentricity and lexical processing is not well specified by models of either word identification or reading. In a seminal eye-movement study, Rayner and Morrison (1981) found that participants made remarkably accurate naming and lexical-decision responses to words displayed more than 3 degrees from the center of vision—even under conditions requiring fixed gaze. However, the validity of these findings is challenged by a range of methodological limitations. We report a series of gaze-contingent lexical-decision and naming experiments that replicate and extend Rayner and Morrison's study to provide a more accurate estimate of how visual constraints delimit lexical processing. Simulations were conducted using the E-Z Reader model (Reichle et al., 2012) to assess the implications for understanding eye-movement control during reading. Augmenting the model's assumptions about the impact of both eccentricity and visual crowding on the rate of lexical processing provided good fits to the observed data without impairing the model's ability to simulate benchmark eye-movement effects. The findings are discussed with a view toward the development of a complete model of reading |
Martin R. Vasilev; Michael Lowman; Katherine Bills; Fabrice B. R. Parmentier; Julie A. Kirkby Unexpected sounds inhibit the movement of the eyes during reading and letter scanning Journal Article In: Psychophysiology, vol. 60, no. 12, pp. 1–19, 2023. @article{Vasilev2023, Novel sounds that unexpectedly deviate from a repetitive sound sequence are well known to cause distraction. Such unexpected sounds have also been shown to cause global motor inhibition, suggesting that they trigger a neurophysiological response aimed at stopping ongoing actions. Recently, evidence from eye movements has suggested that unexpected sounds also temporarily pause the movements of the eyes during reading, though it is unclear if this effect is due to inhibition of oculomotor planning or inhibition of language processes. Here, we sought to distinguish between these two possibilities by comparing a natural reading task to a letter scanning task that involves similar oculomotor demands to reading, but no higher level lexical processing. Participants either read sentences for comprehension or scanned letter strings of these sentences for the letter ‘o' in three auditory conditions: silence, standard, and novel sounds. The results showed that novel sounds were equally distracting in both tasks, suggesting that they generally inhibit ongoing oculomotor processes independent of lexical processing. These results suggest that novel sounds may have a global suppressive effect on eye-movement control. |
Nele Vanbilsen; Valentina Pergher; Marc M. Van Hulle Effects of task-specific strategy on attentional control game training: Preliminary data from healthy adults Journal Article In: Current Psychology, pp. 1–15, 2023. @article{Vanbilsen2023, Although recent studies showed the beneficial effect of video game training, it is still unclear whether the used strategy plays an important role in enhancing performance in the trained cognitive ability and in promoting transfers to other cognitive domains. We investigated behaviourally the effect of strategy on the outcomes of visual attentional control game training and both behaviourally and in terms of EEG-based event-related potentials (ERPs), the effect on other cognitive domains. We recruited 21 healthy adults, divided into three groups: a strategy-training group (STG) instructed to use a specific strategy, a non-strategy training group (NSTG) that self-developed their strategy, and a passive control group (PCG) that underwent only pre- and post-tests. Our results showed that the use of a specific strategy made the STG participants respond faster to the trained contrast level task, but not on the contour exercises task. Furthermore, both STG and NSTG showed pre- and post-transfers, however no significant differences were found when comparing the groups, for both behaviour and ERP responses. In conclusion, we believe these preliminary results provide evidence for the importance of strategy choice in cognitive training protocols. |
Bas Opheusden; Ionatan Kuperwajs; Gianni Galbiati; Zahy Bnaya; Yunqi Li; Wei Ji Ma Expertise increases planning depth in human gameplay Journal Article In: Nature, vol. 618, no. 7967, pp. 1000–1005, 2023. @article{Opheusden2023, A hallmark of human intelligence is the ability to plan multiple steps into the future1,2. Despite decades of research3–5, it is still debated whether skilled decision-makers plan more steps ahead than novices6–8. Traditionally, the study of expertise in planning has used board games such as chess, but the complexity of these games poses a barrier to quantitative estimates of planning depth. Conversely, common planning tasks in cognitive science often have a lower complexity9,10 and impose a ceiling for the depth to which any player can plan. Here we investigate expertise in a complex board game that offers ample opportunity for skilled players to plan deeply. We use model fitting methods to show that human behaviour can be captured using a computational cognitive model based on heuristic search. To validate this model, we predict human choices, response times and eye movements. We also perform a Turing test and a reconstruction experiment. Using the model, we find robust evidence for increased planning depth with expertise in both laboratory and large-scale mobile data. Experts memorize and reconstruct board features more accurately. Using complex tasks combined with precise behavioural modelling might expand our understanding of human planning and help to bridge the gap with progress in artificial intelligence. |
Dirk Moorselaar; Changrun Huang; Jan Theeuwes Electrophysiological indices of distractor processing in visual search are shaped by target expectations Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 35, no. 6, pp. 1032–1044, 2023. @article{Moorselaar2023, Although in many cases salient stimuli capture attention involuntarily, it has been proposed recently that under certain conditions, the bottom–up signal generated by such stimuli can be proactively suppressed. In support of this signal suppression hypothesis, ERP studies have demonstrated that salient stimuli that do not capture attention elicit a distractor positivity (PD), a putative neural index of suppression. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly clear that regularities across preceding search episodes have a large influence on attentional selection. Yet to date, studies in support of the signal suppression hypothesis have largely ignored the role of selection history on the processing of distractors. The current study addressed this issue by examining how electrophysiological markers of attentional selection (N2pc) and suppression (PD) elicited by targets and dis-tractors, respectively, were modulated when the search target randomly varied instead of being fixed across trials. Results showed that although target selection was unaffected by this manipulation, both in terms of manual response times, as well as in terms of the N2pc component, the PD component was reliably attenuated when the target features varied randomly across trials. This result demonstrates that the distractor PD, which is typically considered the marker of selective distractor processing, cannot unequivocally be attributed to suppression only, as it also, at least in part, reflects the upweighting of target features. |
Florence Van Meenen; Nicolas Masson; Leen Catrysse; Liesje Coertjens Taking a closer look at how higher education students process and use (discrepant) peer feedback Journal Article In: Learning and Instruction, vol. 84, pp. 1–11, 2023. @article{VanMeenen2023, Little is known on how students process peer feedback (PF) and use it to improve their work. We asked 59 participants to read the feedback of two peers on a fictional essay and to revise it, while we recorded their gaze behaviour. Regarding the PF processing subphase, discrepant PF led to more transitions, but only for participants who reported the discrepancy afterwards. Counterintuitively, participants who did not report the discrepancy, showed longer first-pass reading times. Concerning the PF use subphase, dwell time on essay correlated positively with the quality of the revised essays assessed by professors. Participants with a high-quality revision spent more time addressing higher order comments, corrected one or two lower order aspects at a time and proofread in the end, in which they went beyond the suggestions provided in the PF. These insights can be used when designing training to foster students' uptake of (discrepant) PF. |
Janneke E. P. Leeuwen; Amy McDougall; Dimitris Mylonas; Aida Suárez-González; Sebastian J. Crutch; Jason D. Warren Pupil responses to colorfulness are selectively reduced in healthy older adults Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1–16, 2023. @article{Leeuwen2023a, The alignment between visual pathway signaling and pupil dynamics offers a promising non-invasive method to further illuminate the mechanisms of human color perception. However, only limited research has been done in this area and the effects of healthy aging on pupil responses to the different color components have not been studied yet. Here we aim to address this by modelling the effects of color lightness and chroma (colorfulness) on pupil responses in young and older adults, in a closely controlled passive viewing experiment with 26 broad-spectrum digital color fields. We show that pupil responses to color lightness and chroma are independent from each other in both young and older adults. Pupil responses to color lightness levels are unaffected by healthy aging, when correcting for smaller baseline pupil sizes in older adults. Older adults exhibit weaker pupil responses to chroma increases, predominantly along the Green–Magenta axis, while relatively sparing the Blue–Yellow axis. Our findings complement behavioral studies in providing physiological evidence that colors fade with age, with implications for color-based applications and interventions both in healthy aging and later-life neurodegenerative disorders. |
Janneke E. P. Leeuwen; Sebastian J. Crutch; Jason D. Warren Thinking eyes: Visual thinking strategies and the social brain Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 14, pp. 1–16, 2023. @article{Leeuwen2023, The foundation of art processes in the social brain can guide the scientific study of how human beings perceive and interact with their environment. Here, we applied the theoretical frameworks of the social and artistic brain connectomes to an eye-tracking paradigm with the aim to elucidate how different viewing conditions and social cues influence gaze patterns and personal resonance with artworks and complex imagery in healthy adults. We compared two viewing conditions that encourage personal or social perspective taking—modeled on the well-known Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) method—to a viewing condition during which only contextual information about the image was provided. Our findings showed that the viewing conditions that used VTS techniques directed the gaze more toward highly salient social cues (Animate elements) in artworks and complex imagery, compared to when only contextual information was provided. We furthermore found that audio cues also directed visual attention, whereby listening to a personal reflection by another person (VTS) had a stronger effect than contextual information. However, we found no effect of viewing condition on the personal resonance with the artworks and complex images when taking the random effects of the image selection into account. Our study provides a neurobiological grounding of the VTS method in the social brain, revealing that this pedagogical method of engaging viewers with artworks measurably shapes people's visual exploration patterns. This is not only of relevance to (art) education but also has implications for art-based diagnostic and therapeutic applications. |
Elle Heusden; Christian N. L. Olivers; Mieke Donk The eyes prefer targets nearby fixation: Quantifying eccentricity-dependent attentional biases in oculomotor selection Journal Article In: Vision Research, vol. 205, pp. 1–11, 2023. @article{Heusden2023, An important function of peripheral vision is to provide the target of the next eye movement. Here we investigate the extent to which the eyes are biased to select a target closer to fixation over one further away. Participants were presented with displays containing two identical singleton targets and were asked to move their eyes to either one of them. The targets could be presented at three different eccentricities relative to central fixation. In one condition both singletons were presented at the same eccentricity, providing an estimate of the speed of selection at each of the eccentricities. The saccadic latency distributions from this same-eccentricity condition were then used to predict the selection bias when both targets were presented at different eccentricities. The results show that when targets are presented at different eccentricities, participants are biased to select the item closest to fixation. This eccentricity-based bias was considerably stronger than predicted on the basis of saccadic latency distributions in the same-eccentricity condition. This rules out speed of processing per se as a sole explanation for such a bias. Instead, the results are consistent with attentional competition being weighted in favour of items close to fixation. |
Elle Heusden; Christian N. L. Olivers; Mieke Donk The effects of eccentricity on attentional capture Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, pp. 1–17, 2023. @article{Heusden2023a, Visual attention may be captured by an irrelevant yet salient distractor, thereby slowing search for a relevant target. This phenomenon has been widely studied using the additional singleton paradigm in which search items are typically all presented at one and the same eccentricity. Yet, differences in eccentricity may well bias the competition between target and distractor. Here we investigate how attentional capture is affected by the relative eccentricities of a target and a distractor. Participants searched for a shape-defined target in a grid of homogeneous nontargets of the same color. On 75% of trials, one of the nontarget items was replaced by a salient color-defined distractor. Crucially, target and distractor eccentricities were independently manipulated across three levels of eccentricity (i.e., near, middle, and far). Replicating previous work, we show that the presence of a distractor slows down search. Interestingly, capture as measured by manual reaction times was not affected by target and distractor eccentricity, whereas capture as measured by the eyes was: items close to fixation were more likely to be selected than items presented further away. Furthermore, the effects of target and distractor eccentricity were largely additive, suggesting that the competition between saliency- and relevance-driven selection was modulated by an independent eccentricity-based spatial component. Implications of the dissociation between manual and oculomotor responses are also discussed. |
Joeri F. L. Helden; Marnix Naber In: Neuroscience, vol. 509, pp. 201–209, 2023. @article{Helden2023, The inversion of a picture of a face hampers the accuracy and speed at which observers can perceptually process it. Event-related potentials and pupillary responses, successfully used as biomarkers of face inversion in the past, suggest that the perception of visual features, that are organized in an unfamiliar manner, recruits demanding additional processes. However, it remains unclear whether such inversion effects generalize beyond face stimuli and whether indeed more mental effort is needed to process inverted images. Here we aimed to study the effects of natural scene inversion on visual evoked potentials and pupil dilations. We simultaneously measured responses of 47 human participants to presentations of images showing upright or inverted natural scenes. For inverted scenes, we observed relatively stronger occipito-temporo-parietal N1 peak amplitudes and larger pupil dilations (on top of an initial orienting response) than for upright scenes. This study revealed neural and physiological markers of natural scene inversion that are in line with inversion effects of other stimulus types and demonstrates the robustness and generalizability of the phenomenon that unfamiliar configurations of visual content require increased processing effort. |
Olof J. Werf; Teresa Schuhmann; Tom Graaf; Sanne Ten Oever; Alexander T. Sack Investigating the role of task relevance during rhythmic sampling of spatial locations Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1–11, 2023. @article{Werf2023, Recently it has been discovered that visuospatial attention operates rhythmically, rather than being stably employed over time. A low-frequency 7–8 Hz rhythmic mechanism coordinates periodic windows to sample relevant locations and to shift towards other, less relevant locations in a visual scene. Rhythmic sampling theories would predict that when two locations are relevant 8 Hz sampling mechanisms split into two, effectively resulting in a 4 Hz sampling frequency at each location. Therefore, it is expected that rhythmic sampling is influenced by the relative importance of locations for the task at hand. To test this, we employed an orienting task with an arrow cue, where participants were asked to respond to a target presented in one visual field. The cue-to-target interval was systematically varied, allowing us to assess whether performance follows a rhythmic pattern across cue-to-target delays. We manipulated a location's task relevance by altering the validity of the cue, thereby predicting the correct location in 60%, 80% or 100% of trials. Results revealed significant 4 Hz performance fluctuations at cued right visual field targets with low cue validity (60%), suggesting regular sampling of both locations. With high cue validity (80%), we observed a peak at 8 Hz towards non-cued targets, although not significant. These results were in line with our hypothesis suggesting a goal-directed balancing of attentional sampling (cued location) and shifting (non-cued location) depending on the relevance of locations in a visual scene. However, considering the hemifield specificity of the effect together with the absence of expected effects for cued trials in the high valid conditions we further discuss the interpretation of the data. |
Susanne M. Veen; Robert A. Perera; Laura Manning-Franke; Amma A. Agyemang; Karen Skop; Scott R. Sponheim; Elisabeth A. Wilde; Alexander Stamenkovic; James S. Thomas; William C. Walker Executive function and relation to static balance metrics in chronic mild TBI: A LIMBIC-CENC secondary analysis Journal Article In: Frontiers in Neurology, vol. 13, pp. 1–16, 2023. @article{Veen2023, Introduction: Among patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI), postural instability often persists chronically with negative consequences such as higher fall risk. One explanation may be reduced executive function (EF) required to effectively process, interpret and combine, sensory information. In other populations, a decline in higher cognitive functions are associated with a decline in walking and balance skills. Considering the link between EF decline and reduction in functional capacity, we investigated whether specific tests of executive function could predict balance function in a cohort of individuals with a history of chronic mild TBI (mTBI) and compared to individuals with a negative history of mTBI. Methods: Secondary analysis was performed on the local LIMBIC-CENC cohort (N = 338, 259 mTBI, mean 45 ± STD 10 age). Static balance was assessed with the sensory organization test (SOT). Hierarchical regression was used for each EF test outcome using the following blocks: (1) the number of TBIs sustained, age, and sex; (2) the separate Trail making test (TMT); (3) anti-saccade eye tracking items (error, latency, and accuracy); (4) Oddball distractor stimulus P300 and N200 at PZ and FZ response; and (5) Oddball target stimulus P300 and N200 at PZ and FZ response. Results: The full model with all predictors accounted for between 15.2% and 21.5% of the variability in the balance measures. The number of TBI's) showed a negative association with the SOT2 score (p = 0.002). Additionally, longer times to complete TMT part B were shown to be related to a worse SOT1 score (p = 0.038). EEG distractors had the most influence on the SOT3 score (p = 0.019). Lastly, the SOT-composite and SOT5 scores were shown to be associated with longer inhibition latencies and errors (anti-saccade latency and error |
Ine Van der Cruyssen; Gershon Ben-Shakhar; Yoni Pertzov; Bruno Verschuere Detecting concealed familiarity using eye movements: The effect of leakage of mock crime details to innocents Journal Article In: Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{VanderCruyssen2023a, The present study examined the eye-tracking Concealed Information Test (CIT) in a mock crime scenario. Participants were instructed to either commit a mock crime on campus (guilty participants; n = 42), read an article about this mock crime (informed innocents; n = 45), or read an unrelated article (naïve innocent participants; n = 46). Afterward, all participants were presented with an eye-tracking CIT task. Based on preregistered analyses of participants' gaze behavior, we were able to distinguish the guilty participants from the naïve innocents (area under the curve [AUC] = .71, 95% CI [.60, .82]). Interestingly, we were also able to distinguish the guilty participants from the informed innocent ones (AUC = .65, 95% CI [.53, .77]). Although these results are promising, the observed detection efficiency was lower than both previous eye-tracking CIT studies that used highly familiar stimuli as well as mock crime CIT studies relying on physiological measures. |
Ine Van der Cruyssen; Gershon Ben-Shakhar; Yoni Pertzov; Nitzan Guy; Quinn Cabooter; Lukas J. Gunschera; Bruno Verschuere The validation of online webcam-based eye-tracking: The replication of the cascade effect, the novelty preference, and the visual world paradigm Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, pp. 1–14, 2023. @article{VanderCruyssen2023, The many benefits of online research and the recent emergence of open-source eye-tracking libraries have sparked an interest in transferring time-consuming and expensive eye-tracking studies from the lab to the web. In the current study, we validate online webcam-based eye-tracking by conceptually replicating three robust eye-tracking studies (the cascade effect |
Ruud L. Brink; Keno Hagena; Niklas Wilming; Peter R. Murphy; Christian Büchel; Tobias H. Donner Flexible sensory-motor mapping rules manifest in correlated variability of stimulus and action codes across the brain Journal Article In: Neuron, vol. 111, no. 4, pp. 571–584, 2023. @article{Brink2023, Humans and non-human primates can flexibly switch between different arbitrary mappings from sensation to action to solve a cognitive task. It has remained unknown how the brain implements such flexible sensory-motor mapping rules. Here, we uncovered a dynamic reconfiguration of task-specific correlated variability between sensory and motor brain regions. Human participants switched between two rules for reporting visual orientation judgments during fMRI recordings. Rule switches were either signaled explicitly or inferred by the participants from ambiguous cues. We used behavioral modeling to reconstruct the time course of their belief about the active rule. In both contexts, the patterns of correlations between ongoing fluctuations in stimulus- and action-selective activity across visual- and action-related brain regions tracked participants' belief about the active rule. The rule-specific correlation patterns broke down around the time of behavioral errors. We conclude that internal beliefs about task state are instantiated in brain-wide, selective patterns of correlated variability. |
Willem S. Boxtel; Briana N. Cox; Austin Keen; Jiyeon Lee Planning sentence production in aphasia: Evidence from structural priming and eye-tracking Journal Article In: Frontiers in Language Sciences, vol. 2, pp. 1–16, 2023. @article{Boxtel2023, Background: Grammatical encoding is impaired in many persons with aphasia (PWA), resulting in deficits in sentence production accuracies and underlying planning processes. However, relatively little is known on how these grammatical encoding deficits can be mediated in PWA. This study aimed to facilitate off-line (accuracy) and real-time (eye fixations) encoding of passive sentences through implicit structural priming, a tendency to better process a current sentence because of its grammatical similarity to a previously experienced (prime) sentence. Method: Sixteen PWA and Sixteen age-matched controls completed an eyetracking-while-speaking task, where they described a target transitive picture preceded by a comprehension prime involving either an active or passive form. We measured immediate and cumulative priming effects on proportions of passives produced for the target pictures and proportions of eye fixations made to the theme actor in the target scene before speech onset of the sentence production. Results and conclusion: Both PWA and controls produced cumulatively more passives as the experiment progressed despite an absence of immediate priming effects in PWA. Both groups also showed cumulative changes in the pre-speech eye fixations associated with passive productions, with this cumulative priming effect greater for the PWA group. These findings suggest that structural priming results in gradual adaptation of the grammatical encoding processes of PWA and that structural priming may be used as a treatment component for improving grammatical deficits in aphasia. |
Alessandra Valentini; Rachel E. Pye; Carmel Houston-Price; Jessie Ricketts; Julie A. Kirkby Onlineprocessing shows advantages of bimodal listening-while-reading for vocabulary learning: An eye-tracking study Journal Article In: Reading Research Quarterly, vol. 59, no. 1, pp. 79–101, 2023. @article{Valentini2023, Children can learn words incidentally from stories. This kind of learning is enhanced when stories are presented both aurally and in written format, compared to just a written presentation. However, we do not know why this bimodal presentation is beneficial. This study explores two possible explanations: whether the bimodal advantage manifests online during story exposure, or later, at word retrieval. We collected eye-movement data from 34 8-to 9-year-old children exposed to two stories, one presented in written format (reading condition), and the second presented aurally and written at the same time (bimodal condition). Each story included six unfamiliar words (non-words) that were repeated three times, as well as definitions and clues to their meaning. Following exposure, the learning of the new words' meanings was assessed. Results showed that, during story presentation, children spent less time fixating the new words in the bimodal condition, compared to the reading condition, indicating that the bimodal advantage occurs online. Learning was greater in the bimodal condition than the reading condition, which may reflect either an online bimodal advantage during story presentation or an advantage at retrieval. The results also suggest that the bimodal condition was more conducive to learning than the reading condition when children looked at the new words for a shorter amount of time. This is in line with an online advantage of the bimodal condition, as it suggests that less effort is required to learn words in this condition. These results support educational strategies that routinely present new vocabulary in two modalities simultaneously. |
Roman Vakhrushev; Felicia Pei-Hsin Cheng; Anne Schacht; Arezoo Pooresmaeili Differential effects of intra-modal and crossmodal reward value on perception: ERP evidence Journal Article In: PLoS ONE, vol. 18, pp. 1–25, 2023. @article{Vakhrushev2023, In natural environments objects comprise multiple features from the same or different sensory modalities but it is not known how perception of an object is affected by the value associations of its constituent parts. The present study compares intra- and cross-modal valuedriven effects on behavioral and electrophysiological correlates of perception. Human participants first learned the reward associations of visual and auditory cues. Subsequently, they performed a visual discrimination task in the presence of previously rewarded, task irrelevant visual or auditory cues (intra- and cross-modal cues, respectively). During the conditioning phase, when reward associations were learned and reward cues were the target of the task, high value stimuli of both modalities enhanced the electrophysiological correlates of sensory processing in posterior electrodes. During the post-conditioning phase, when reward delivery was halted and previously rewarded stimuli were task-irrelevant, cross-modal value significantly enhanced the behavioral measures of visual sensitivity, whereas intra-modal value produced only an insignificant decrement. Analysis of the simultaneously recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) of posterior electrodes revealed similar findings. We found an early (90-120 ms) suppression of ERPs evoked by high-value, intramodal stimuli. Cross-modal stimuli led to a later value-driven modulation, with an enhancement of response positivity for high- compared to low-value stimuli starting at the N1 window (180-250 ms) and extending to the P3 (300-600 ms) responses. These results indicate that sensory processing of a compound stimulus comprising a visual target and task-irrelevant visual or auditory cues is modulated by the reward value of both sensory modalities, but such modulations rely on distinct underlying mechanisms. |
Aditya Upadhyayula; John M. Henderson Spatiotemporal jump detection during continuous film viewing Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 1–17, 2023. @article{Upadhyayula2023, Prior research on film viewing has demonstrated that participants frequently fail to notice spatiotemporal disruptions, such as scene edits in the movies.Whether such insensitivity to spatiotemporal disruptions extends beyond scene edits in film viewing is not well understood. Across three experiments, we created spatiotemporal disruptions by presenting participants with minute long movie clips, and occasionally jumping the movie clips ahead or backward in time. Participants were instructed to press a button when they noticed any disruptions while watching the clips. The results from experiments 1 and 2 indicate that participants failed to notice the disruptions in continuity about 10% to 30% of the time depending on the magnitude of the jump. In addition, detection rates were lower by approximately 10% when the videos jumped ahead in time compared to the backward jumps across all jump magnitudes, suggesting a role of knowledge about the future affects jump detection. An additional analysis used optic flow similarity during these disruptions. Our findings suggest that insensitivity to spatiotemporal disruptions during film viewing is influenced by knowledge about future states. |
Yoshiyuki Ueda; Tsung-Ren Huang; Zixin Shen; Chifumi Sakata; Su-Ling Yeh; Satoru Saito Sequential processing facilitates Hebb repetition learning in visuospatial domains Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol. 152, no. 9, pp. 2559–2577, 2023. @article{Ueda2023, Exposure to the same information improves auditory/verbal short-term memory performance, but such improvement is not always observed in visual short-term memory. In this study, we demonstrate that sequential processing makes visuospatial repetition learning efficient in a paradigm that employs a similar design previously used for an auditory/verbal domain. When we presented sets of color patches simultaneously in Experiments 1–4, recall accuracy did not increase with repetition; however, once color patches were presented sequentially in Experiment 5, accuracy did increase rapidly with repetition, even when participants engaged in articulatory suppression. Moreover, these learning dynamics matched those in Experiment 6, which used verbal materials. These findings suggest that (a) sequential focus on each item facilitates a repetition learning effect, indicating a temporal bottleneck is involved early in this process and (b) repetition learning is mechanistically similar across sensory modalities even though these modalities differently specialize in processing spatial or temporal information. |
Sandra Tyralla; Antonella Pomè; Eckart Zimmermann Motor recalibration of visual and saccadic maps Journal Article In: Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, vol. 290, no. 1994, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Tyralla2023, How does the brain maintain an accurate visual representation of external space? Movement errors following saccade execution provide sufficient information to recalibrate motor and visual space. Here, we asked whether spatial information for vision and saccades is processed in shared or in separate resources. We used saccade adaptation to modify both, saccade amplitudes and visual mislocalization. After saccade adaptation was induced, we compared participants' saccadic and perceptual localization before and after we inserted 'no error' trials. In these trials, we clamped the post-saccadic error online to the predicted endpoints of saccades. In separate experiments, we either annulled the retinal or the prediction error. We also varied the number of 'no error' trials across conditions. In all conditions, we found that saccade adaptation remained undisturbed by the insertion of 'no error' trials. However, mislocalization decreased as a function of the number of trials in which zero retinal error was displayed. When the prediction error was clamped to zero, no mislocalization was observed at all. The results demonstrate the post-saccadic error is used separately to recalibrate visual and saccadic space. |
Tawny Tsang; Adam J. Naples; Erin C. Barney; Minhang Xie; Raphael Bernier; Geraldine Dawson; James Dziura; Susan Faja; Shafali Spurling Jeste; James C. McPartland; Charles A. Nelson; Michael Murias; Helen Seow; Catherine Sugar; Sara J. Webb; Frederick Shic; Scott P. Johnson Attention allocation during exploration of visual arrays in ASD: Results from the ABC-CT feasibility study Journal Article In: Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, vol. 53, no. 8, pp. 3220–3229, 2023. @article{Tsang2023, Visual exploration paradigms involving object arrays have been used to examine salience of social stimuli such as faces in ASD. Recent work suggests performance on these paradigms may associate with clinical features of ASD. We evaluate metrics from a visual exploration paradigm in 4-to-11-year-old children with ASD (n = 23; 18 males) and typical development (TD; n = 23; 13 males). Presented with arrays containing faces and nonsocial stimuli, children with ASD looked less at (p = 0.002) and showed fewer fixations to (p = 0.022) faces than TD children, and spent less time looking at each object on average (p = 0.004). Attention to the screen and faces correlated positively with social and cognitive skills in the ASD group (ps <.05). This work furthers our understanding of objective measures of visual exploration in ASD and its potential for quantifying features of ASD. |
Caterina Trentin; Heleen A. Slagter; Christian N. L. Olivers Visual working memory representations bias attention more when they are the target of an action plan Journal Article In: Cognition, vol. 230, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Trentin2023, Attention has frequently been regarded as an emergent property of linking sensory representations to action plans. It has recently been proposed that similar mechanisms may operate within visual working memory (VWM), such that linking an object in VWM to an action plan strengthens its sensory memory representation, which then expresses as an attentional bias. Here we directly tested this hypothesis by comparing attentional biases induced by VWM representations which were the target of a future action, to those induced by VWM representations that were equally task-relevant, but not the direct target of action. We predicted that the first condition would result in a more prioritized memory state and hence stronger attentional biases. Specifically, participants memorized a geometric shape for a subsequent memory test. At test, in case of a match, participants either had to perform a grip movement on the matching object (action condition), or perform the same movement, but on an unrelated object (control condition). To assess any attentional biases, during the delay period between memorandum and test, participants performed a visual selection task in which either the target was surrounded by the memorized shape (congruent trials) or a distractor (incongruent trials). Eye movements were measured as a proxy for attentional priority. We found a significant interaction for saccade latencies between action condition and shape congruency, reflecting more pronounced VWM-based attentional biases in the action condition. Our results are consistent with the idea that action plans prioritize sensory representations in VWM. |
Sébastien Tremblay; Camille Testard; Ron W. Ditullio; Jeanne Inchauspé; Michael Petrides Neural cognitive signals during spontaneous movements in the macaque Journal Article In: Nature Neuroscience, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 295–305, 2023. @article{Tremblay2023, The single-neuron basis of cognitive processing in primates has mostly been studied in laboratory settings where movements are severely restricted. It is unclear, therefore, how natural movements might affect neural signatures of cognition in the brain. Moreover, studies in mice indicate that body movements, when measured, account for most of the neural dynamics in the cortex. To examine these issues, we recorded from single-neuron ensembles in the prefrontal cortex in moving monkeys performing a cognitive task and characterized eye, head and body movements using video tracking. Despite considerable trial-to-trial movement variability, single-neuron tuning could be precisely measured and decision signals accurately decoded on a single-trial basis. Creating or abolishing spontaneous movements through head restraint and task manipulations had no measurable impact on neural responses. However, encoding models showed that uninstructed movements explained as much neural variance as task variables, with most movements aligned to task events. These results demonstrate that cognitive signals in the cortex are robust to natural movements, but also that unmeasured movements are potential confounds in cognitive neurophysiology experiments. |
Tobiasz Trawiński; Natalie Mestry; Nick Donnelly The effect of prior viewing position and spatial scale on the viewing of paintings Journal Article In: Vision, vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 36–39, 2023. @article{Trawinski2023, The visual inspection of scenes is disrupted when participants are forced to begin inspection away from the centre of an image. The present study explored the effect of the starting point on the visual inspection of paintings. Eye movements were recorded while participants viewed paintings for later identification in a yes/no discrimination task. The viewing of each painting was preceded by the presentation of a pseudo-randomly positioned Navon figure. Participants were instructed using a cue to attend to either the local or global level of the Navon figure. Each painting was split into regions of interest (ROIs) defined by face, theme, and context to allow the analysis of eye movements. These data were directly compared with a subset of those initially reported in our previous study in which the same experiment was run but without the inclusion of the Navon figure. The inclusion of the Navon task lowered the discrimination accuracy in the yes/no discrimination task. More importantly, eye movements to the paintings were disrupted across the entire period over which they were viewed and not just in the period following the offset of the Navon figure. The results show the sensitivity of eye movements to the conditions present at the beginning of viewing. The results have implications for the viewing of paintings (and other images) in the real world, where the starting conditions for inspection cannot be controlled. |
David Torrents-Rodas; Stephan Koenig; Metin Uengoer; Harald Lachnit The effect of prediction error on overt attention and learning in humans Journal Article In: Behavioural Processes, vol. 206, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{TorrentsRodas2023, It has been suggested that attention modulates the speed at which cues come to predict contingent outcomes, and that attention changes with the prediction errors generated by cues. Evidence for this interaction in humans is inconsistent, with divergent findings depending on whether attention was measured with eye fixations or learning speed. We included both measures in our experiment. Initially, predictive cues (A and B) were consistently followed by one outcome (o1), while nonpredictive cues (X and Y) were followed by two randomly alternating outcomes (o1 and o2). Consistent with an effect of prediction error, participants' fixated for longer on the nonpredictive cues than on the predictive ones. Then, the cues were combined in three pairs: AX, followed by o1, and AY and BX, followed by o2. Discrimination of AX and AY depended on the previously nonpredictive cues and, given that these received more attention during initial training, it should proceed faster than discrimination of AX and BX, which depended on the previously predictive cues. However, participants learned to predict the outcomes of AY and BX at a similar rate. The fixation times were similar for the previously predictive and previously nonpredictive cues. We discuss reasons that could explain these findings. |
Christof Elias Topfstedt; Luca Wollenberg; Thomas Schenk The role of habitual learning in premotor attention allocation Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 23, no. 5, pp. 1–18, 2023. @article{Topfstedt2023, Dual-task studies have demonstrated that goal-directed actions are typically preceded by a premotor shift of visual attention toward the movement goal location. This finding is often taken as evidence for an obligatory coupling between attention and motor preparation. Here, we examined whether this coupling entails a habitual component relating to an expectation of spatial congruence between visual and motor targets. In two experiments, participants had to identify a visual discrimination target (DT) while preparing variably delayed pointing movements to a motor target (MT). To induce distinct expectations regarding the DT position, different groups of participants performed a training phase in which the DT either always appeared at MT, opposite to MT, or at an unpredictable position. In a subsequent test phase, the DT position was randomized to assess the impact of learned expectancy on premotor attention allocation. Although we applied individually determined DT presentation times in the test phase of Experiment 1, a fixed DT presentation time was used in Experiment 2. Both experiments yielded evidence for attentional enhancement at the expected DT position. Although interpretability of this effect was limited in Experiment 1 because of between-group differences in DT presentation time, results of Experiment 2 were much clearer. Specifically, a marked discrimination benefit was observed at the position opposite to MT in participants anticipating the DT at this position, whereas no statistically significant benefit was found at MT. Crucially, this was observed at short movement delays, demonstrating that expectation of spatial incongruence between visual and motor targets allows for decoupling of attentional resources from ongoing motor preparation. Based on our findings, we suggest that premotor attention shifts entail a considerable habitual component rather than being the sole result of motor programming. |
Shin-ichi Tokushige; Hideyuki Matsumoto; Shun-ichi Matsuda; Satomi Inomata-Terada; Naoki Kotsuki; Masashi Hamada; Shoji Tsuji; Yoshikazu Ugawa; Yasuo Terao Early detection of cognitive decline in Alzheimer's disease using eye tracking Journal Article In: Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, vol. 15, pp. 1–15, 2023. @article{Tokushige2023, Background: Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) are known to exhibit visuospatial processing impairment, as reflected in eye movements from the early stages of the disease. We investigated whether the pattern of gaze exploration during visual tasks could be useful for detecting cognitive decline at the earliest stage. Methods: Sixteen AD patients (age: 79.1 ± 7.9 years, Mini Mental State Examination [MMSE] score: 17.7 ± 5.3, mean ± standard deviation) and 16 control subjects (age: 79.4 ± 4.6, MMSE score: 26.9 ± 2.4) participated. In the visual memory task, subjects memorized presented line drawings for later recall. In the visual search tasks, they searched for a target Landolt ring of specific orientation (serial search task) or color (pop-out task) embedded among arrays of distractors. Using video-oculography, saccade parameters, patterns of gaze exploration, and pupil size change during task performance were recorded and compared between AD and control subjects. Results: In the visual memory task, the number of informative regions of interest (ROIs) fixated was significantly reduced in AD patients compared to control subjects. In the visual search task, AD patients took a significantly longer time and more saccades to detect the target in the serial but not in pop-out search. In both tasks, there was no significant difference in the saccade frequency and amplitude between groups. On-task pupil modulation during the serial search task was decreased in AD. The number of ROIs fixated in the visual memory task and search time and saccade numbers in the serial search task differentiated both grwoups of subjects with high sensitivity, whereas saccade parameters of pupil size modulation were effective in confirming normal cognition from cognitive decline with high specificity. Discussion: Reduced fixation on informative ROIs reflected impaired attentional allocation. Increased search time and saccade numbers in the visual search task indicated inefficient visual processing. Decreased on-task pupil size during visual search suggested decreased pupil modulation with cognitive load in AD patients, reflecting impaired function of the locus coeruleus. When patients perform the combination of these tasks to visualize multiple aspects of visuospatial processing, cognitive decline can be detected at an early stage with high sensitivity and specificity and its progression be evaluated. |
Elizabeth L. Tighe; Gal Kaldes; Amani Talwar; Scott A. Crossley; Daphne Greenberg; Stephen Skalicky In: Journal of Learning Disabilities, vol. 56, no. 1, pp. 25–42, 2023. @article{Tighe2023, Comprehension monitoring is a meta-cognitive skill that is defined as the ability to self-evaluate one's comprehension of text. Although it is known that struggling adult readers are poor at monitoring their comprehension, additional research is needed to understand the mechanisms underlying comprehension monitoring and their role in reading comprehension in this population. This study used a comprehension monitoring task with struggling adult readers, which included online eye movements (reread and regression path durations) and an offline verbal protocol (oral explanations of key information). We examined whether eye movements predicted accuracy on the passages' reading comprehension questions, a norm-referenced reading assessment, and an offline verbal protocol after controlling for age and traditional component skills (i.e., decoding, oral language, working memory). Regression path duration uniquely predicted accuracy on the questions; however, decoding and oral vocabulary were the most salient predictors of the norm-referenced reading comprehension measure. Regression path duration also predicted the offline verbal protocol, such that those who exhibited longer regression path duration were also better at explaining key information. These results contribute to the literature regarding struggling adults' reading component skills, eye movement behaviors involved in processing connected text, and future considerations in assessing comprehension monitoring. |
Yixin Tian; Jiapeng Yin; Chengyao Wang; Zhenliang He; Jingyi Xie; Xiaoshan Feng; Yang Zhou; Tianyu Ma; Yang Xie; Xue Li; Tianming Yang; Chi Ren; Chengyu Li; Zhengtuo Zhao An ultraflexible electrode array for large-scale chronic recording in the nonhuman primate brain Journal Article In: Advanced Science, vol. 10, no. 33, pp. 1–15, 2023. @article{Tian2023, Single-unit (SU) recording in nonhuman primates (NHPs) is indispensible in the quest of how the brain works, yet electrodes currently used for the NHP brain are limited in signal longevity, stability, and spatial coverage. Using new structural materials, microfabrication, and penetration techniques, we develop a mechanically robust ultraflexible, 1 µm thin electrode array (MERF) that enables pial penetration and high-density, large-scale, and chronic recording of neurons along both vertical and horizontal cortical axes in the nonhuman primate brain. Recording from three monkeys yields 2,913 SUs from 1,065 functional recording channels (up to 240 days), with some SUs tracked for up to 2 months. Recording from the primary visual cortex (V1) reveals that neurons with similar orientation preferences for visual stimuli exhibited higher spike correlation. Furthermore, simultaneously recorded neurons in different cortical layers of the primary motor cortex (M1) show preferential firing for hand movements of different directions. Finally, it is shown that a linear decoder trained with neuronal spiking activity across M1 layers during monkey's hand movements can be used to achieve on-line control of cursor movement. Thus, the MERF electrode array offers a new tool for basic neuroscience studies and brain–machine interface (BMI) applications in the primate brain. |
Malathi Thothathiri; Jeremy Kirkwood; Abhijeet Patra; Anna Krason; Erica L. Middleton Multimodal measures of sentence comprehension in agrammatism Journal Article In: Cortex, vol. 169, pp. 309–325, 2023. @article{Thothathiri2023, Agrammatic or asyntactic comprehension is a common language impairment in aphasia. We considered three possible hypotheses about the underlying cause of this deficit, namely problems in syntactic processing, over-reliance on semantics, and a deficit in cognitive control. We tested four individuals showing asyntactic comprehension on their comprehension of syntax-semantics conflict sentences (e.g., The robber handcuffed the cop), where semantic cues pushed towards a different interpretation from syntax. Two of the four participants performed above chance on such sentences indicating that not all agrammatic individuals are impaired in structure-based interpretation. We collected additional eyetracking measures from the other two participants, who performed at chance on the conflict sentences. These measures suggested distinct underlying processing profiles in the two individuals. Cognitive assessments further suggested that one participant might have performed poorly due to a linguistic cognitive control impairment while the other had difficulty due to over-reliance on semantics. Together, the results highlight the importance of multimodal measures for teasing apart aphasic individuals' underlying deficits. They corroborate findings from neurotypical adults by showing that semantics can strongly influence comprehension and that cognitive control could be relevant for choosing between competing sentence interpretations. They extend previous findings by demonstrating variability between individuals with aphasia—cognitive control might be especially relevant for patients who are not overly reliant on semantics. Clinically, the identification of distinct underlying problems in different individuals suggests that different treatment paths might be warranted for cases who might look similar on behavioral assessments. |
Lowell W. Thompson; Byounghoon Kim; Bas Rokers; Ari Rosenberg Hierarchical computation of 3D motion across macaque areas MT and FST Journal Article In: Cell Reports, vol. 42, no. 12, pp. 1–18, 2023. @article{Thompson2023, Computing behaviorally relevant representations of three-dimensional (3D) motion from two-dimensional (2D) retinal signals is critical for survival. To ascertain where and how the primate visual system performs this computation, we recorded from the macaque middle temporal (MT) area and its downstream target, the fundus of the superior temporal sulcus (area FST). Area MT is a key site of 2D motion processing, but its role in 3D motion processing is controversial. The functions of FST remain highly underexplored. To distinguish representations of 3D motion from those of 2D retinal motion, we contrast responses to multiple motion cues during a motion discrimination task. The results reveal a hierarchical transformation whereby many FST but not MT neurons are selective for 3D motion. Modeling results further show how generalized, cue-invariant representations of 3D motion in FST may be created by selectively integrating the output of 2D motion selective MT neurons. |
Nikita Thomas; Jennifer H. Acton; Jonathan T. Erichsen; Tony Redmond; Matt J. Dunn Reliability of gaze-contingent perimetry Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Thomas2023, Standard automated perimetry, a psychophysical task performed routinely in eyecare clinics, requires observers to maintain fixation for several minutes at a time in order to measure visual field sensitivity. Detection of visual field damage is confounded by eye movements, making the technique unreliable in poorly attentive individuals and those with pathologically unstable fixation, such as nystagmus. Microperimetry, which utilizes ‘partial gaze-contingency' (PGC), aims to counteract eye movements but only corrects for gaze position errors prior to each stimulus onset. Here, we present a novel method of visual field examination in which stimulus position is updated during presentation, which we refer to as ‘continuous gaze-contingency' (CGC). In the first part of this study, we present three case examples that demonstrate the ability of CGC to measure the edges of the physiological blind spot in infantile nystagmus with greater accuracy than PGC and standard ‘no gaze-contingency' (NoGC), as initial proof-of-concept for the utility of the paradigm in measurements of absolute scotomas in these individuals. The second part of this study focused on healthy observers, in which we demonstrate that CGC has the lowest stimulus positional error (gaze-contingent precision: CGC = ± 0.29° |
Chaitanya Thammineni; Hemanth Manjunatha; Ehsan T. Esfahani Selective eye-gaze augmentation to enhance imitation learning in Atari games Journal Article In: Neural Computing and Applications, vol. 35, no. 32, pp. 23401–23410, 2023. @article{Thammineni2023, This paper presents the selective use of eye-gaze information in learning human actions in Atari games. Extensive evidence suggests that our eye movements convey a wealth of information about the direction of our attention and mental states and encode the information necessary to complete a task. Based on this evidence, we hypothesize that selective use of eye-gaze, as a clue for attention direction, will enhance the learning from demonstration. For this purpose, we propose a selective eye-gaze augmentation (SEA) network that learns when to use the eye-gaze information. The proposed network architecture consists of three sub-networks: gaze prediction, gating, and action prediction network. Using the prior 4 game frames, a gaze map is predicted by the gaze prediction network, which is used for augmenting the input frame. The gating network will determine whether the predicted gaze map should be used in learning and is fed to the final network to predict the action at the current frame. To validate this approach, we use publicly available Atari Human Eye-Tracking And Demonstration (Atari-HEAD) dataset consists of 20 Atari games with 28 million human demonstrations and 328 million eye-gazes (over game frames) collected from four subjects. We demonstrate the efficacy of selective eye-gaze augmentation compared to the state-of-the-art Attention Guided Imitation Learning (AGIL) and Behavior Cloning (BC). The results indicate that the selective augmentation approach (the SEA network) performs significantly better than the AGIL and BC. Moreover, to demonstrate the significance of selective use of gaze through the gating network, we compare our approach with the random selection of the gaze. Even in this case, the SEA network performs significantly better, validating the advantage of selectively using the gaze in demonstration learning. |
Lonneke Teunissen; Luc P. J. Selen; W. Pieter Medendorp Abrupt, but not gradual, motor adaptation biases saccadic target selection Journal Article In: Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 129, no. 3, pp. 733–748, 2023. @article{Teunissen2023, Decisions between potential motor actions are influenced by their costs, but costs change when movements are adapted. Using a saccadic target selection task, we show that target preference shifts after abrupt, but not after gradual adaptation. We suggest that this difference emerges because abrupt adaptation results in target remapping, and thus directly influences cost calculations, whereas gradual adaptation is mainly driven by corrections to a forward model that is not involved in cost calculations.Motor costs influence movement selection. These costs could change when movements are adapted in response to errors. When the motor system attributes the encountered errors to an external cause, appropriate movement selection requires an update of the movement goal, which prompts the selection of a different control policy. However, when errors are attributed to an internal cause, the initially selected control policy could remain unchanged, but the internal forward model of the body needs to be updated, resulting in an online correction of the movement. We hypothesized that external attribution of errors leads to the selection of a different control policy, and thus to a change in the expected cost of movements. This should also affect subsequent motor decisions. Conversely, internal attribution of errors may (initially) only evoke online corrections, and thus is expected to leave the motor decision process unchanged. We tested this hypothesis using a saccadic adaptation paradigm, designed to change the relative motor cost of two targets. Motor decisions were measured using a target selection task between the two saccadic targets before and after adaptation. Adaptation was induced by either abrupt or gradual perturbation schedules, which are thought to induce more external or internal attribution of errors, respectively. By taking individual variability into account, our results show that saccadic decisions shift toward the least costly target after adaptation, but only when the perturbation is abruptly, and not gradually, introduced. We suggest that credit assignment of errors not only influences motor adaptation but also subsequent motor decisions.NEW & NOTEWORTHY Decisions between potential motor actions are influenced by their costs, but costs change when movements are adapted. Using a saccadic target selection task, we show that target preference shifts after abrupt, but not after gradual adaptation. We suggest that this difference emerges because abrupt adaptation results in target remapping, and thus directly influences cost calculations, whereas gradual adaptation is mainly driven by corrections to a forward model that is not involved in cost calculations. |
Yasuo Terao; Shin-ichi Tokushige; Satomi Inomata-Terada; Tai Miyazaki; Naoki Kotsuki; Francesco Fisicaro; Yoshikazu Ugawa How do patients with Parkinson's disease and cerebellar ataxia read aloud? -Eye–voice coordination in text reading Journal Article In: Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 17, pp. 1–25, 2023. @article{Terao2023a, Background: The coordination between gaze and voice is closely linked when reading text aloud, with the gaze leading the reading position by a certain eye–voice lead (EVL). How this coordination is affected is unknown in patients with cerebellar ataxia and parkinsonism, who show oculomotor deficits possibly impacting coordination between different effectors. Objective: To elucidate the role of the cerebellum and basal ganglia in eye–voice coordination during reading aloud, by studying patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and spinocerebellar degeneration (SCD). Methods: Participants were sixteen SCD patients, 18 PD patients, and 30 age-matched normal subjects, all native Japanese speakers without cognitive impairment. Subjects read aloud Japanese texts of varying readability displayed on a monitor in front of their eyes, consisting of Chinese characters and hiragana (Japanese phonograms). The gaze and voice reading the text was simultaneously recorded by video-oculography and a microphone. A custom program synchronized and aligned the gaze and audio data in time. Results: Reading speed was significantly reduced in SCD patients (3.53 ± 1.81 letters/s), requiring frequent regressions to compensate for the slow reading speed. In contrast, PD patients read at a comparable speed to normal subjects (4.79 ± 3.13 letters/s vs. 4.71 ± 2.38 letters/s). The gaze scanning speed, excluding regressive saccades, was slower in PD patients (9.64 ± 4.26 letters/s) compared to both normal subjects (12.55 ± 5.42 letters/s) and SCD patients (10.81 ± 4.52 letters/s). PD patients' gaze could not far exceed that of the reading speed, with smaller allowance for the gaze to proceed ahead of the reading position. Spatial EVL was similar across the three groups for all texts (normal: 2.95 ± 1.17 letters/s, PD: 2.95 ± 1.51 letters/s, SCD: 3.21 ± 1.35 letters/s). The ratio of gaze duration to temporal EVL was lowest for SCD patients (normal: 0.73 ± 0.50, PD: 0.70 ± 0.37, SCD: 0.40 ± 0.15). Conclusion: Although coordination between voice and eye movements and normal eye-voice span was observed in both PD and SCD, SCD patients made frequent regressions to manage the slowed vocal output, restricting the ability for advance processing of text ahead of the gaze. In contrast, PD patients experience restricted reading speed primarily due to slowed scanning, limiting their maximum reading speed but effectively utilizing advance processing of upcoming text. |
Yasuo Terao; Yoshiko Nomura; Hideki Fukuda; Okihide Hikosaka; Kazue Kimura; Shun-ichi Matsuda; Akihiro Yugeta; Francesco Fisicaro; Kyoko Hoshino; Yoshikazu Ugawa The pathophysiology of Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome: Changes in saccade performance by low-dose L-Dopa and dopamine receptor blockers Journal Article In: Brain Sciences, vol. 13, no. 12, pp. 1–23, 2023. @article{Terao2023, Aim: To elucidate the pathophysiology of Gilles de la Tourette syndrome (GTS), which is associated with prior use of dopamine receptor antagonists (blockers) and treatment by L-Dopa, through saccade performance. Method: In 226 male GTS patients (5–14 years), we followed vocal and motor tics and obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) after discontinuing blockers at the first visit starting with low-dose L-Dopa. We recorded visual- (VGS) and memory-guided saccades (MGS) in 110 patients and 26 normal participants. Results: At the first visit, prior blocker users exhibited more severe vocal tics and OCD, but not motor tics, which persisted during follow-up. Patients treated with L-Dopa showed greater improvement of motor tics, but not vocal tics and OCD. Patients with and without blocker use showed similarly impaired MGS performance, while patients with blocker use showed more prominently impaired inhibitory control of saccades, associated with vocal tics and OCD. Discussion: Impaired MGS performance suggested a mild hypodopaminergic state causing reduced direct pathway activity in the (oculo-)motor loops of the basal ganglia–thalamocortical circuit. Blocker use may aggravate vocal tics and OCD due to disinhibition within the associative and limbic loops. The findings provide a rationale for discouraging blocker use and using low-dose L-Dopa in GTS. |
Qawi K. Telesford; Eduardo Gonzalez-Moreira; Ting Xu; Yiwen Tian; Stanley J. Colcombe; Jessica Cloud; Brian E. Russ; Arnaud Falchier; Maximilian Nentwich; Jens Madsen; Lucas C. Parra; Charles E. Schroeder; Michael P. Milham; Alexandre R. Franco An open-access dataset of naturalistic viewing using simultaneous EEG-fMRI Journal Article In: Scientific Data, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 1–13, 2023. @article{Telesford2023, In this work, we present a dataset that combines functional magnetic imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) to use as a resource for understanding human brain function in these two imaging modalities. The dataset can also be used for optimizing preprocessing methods for simultaneously collected imaging data. The dataset includes simultaneously collected recordings from 22 individuals (ages: 23–51) across various visual and naturalistic stimuli. In addition, physiological, eye tracking, electrocardiography, and cognitive and behavioral data were collected along with this neuroimaging data. Visual tasks include a flickering checkerboard collected outside and inside the MRI scanner (EEG-only) and simultaneous EEG-fMRI recordings. Simultaneous recordings include rest, the visual paradigm Inscapes, and several short video movies representing naturalistic stimuli. Raw and preprocessed data are openly available to download. We present this dataset as part of an effort to provide open-access data to increase the opportunity for discoveries and understanding of the human brain and evaluate the correlation between electrical brain activity and blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signals. |
Robert Taylor; Ivan Tomić; David Aagten-Murphy; Paul M. Bays Working memory is updated by reallocation of resources from obsolete to new items Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 85, no. 5, pp. 1437–1451, 2023. @article{Taylor2023a, Visual working memory (VWM) resources are limited, placing constraints on how much visual information can be simultaneously retained. During visually guided activity, stored information can quickly become outdated, so updating mechanisms are needed to ensure the contents of memory remain relevant to current task goals. In particular, successful deallocation of resources from items that become obsolete is likely to be critical for maintaining the precision of those representations still in memory. The experiments in this study involved presenting two memory arrays of coloured disks in sequence. The appearance of the second array was a cue to replace, rehearse, or add a new colour to the colours in memory. We predicted that successful resource reallocation should result in comparable recall precision when an item was replaced or rehearsed, owing to the removal of pre-replacement features. In contrast, a failure to update WM should lead to comparable precision with a condition in which a new colour was added to memory. We identified a very small proportion (∼5%) of trials in which participants incorrectly reported a feature from the first array in place of its replacement in the second, which we interpreted as a failure to incorporate the information from the second display into memory. Once these trials were discounted, precision estimates were consistent with complete redistribution of resources in the case of updating a single item. We conclude that working memory can be efficiently updated when previous information becomes obsolete, but that this is a demanding active process that occasionally fails. |
Jamie Taylor; Yoichi Mukai Bidirectional cross-linguistic influence with different-script languages: Evidence from eye tracking Journal Article In: Applied Psycholinguistics, vol. 44, no. 5, pp. 635–667, 2023. @article{Taylor2023, This study compared patterns of nonselective cross-language activation in L1 and L2 visual word recognition with different-script bilinguals. The aim was to determine (1) whether lexical processing is nonselective in the L1 (as in L2), and (2) if the same cross-linguistic factors affected processing similarly in each language. To examine the time course of activation, eye movements were tracked during lexical decision. Thirty-two Japanese-English bilinguals responded to 250 target words in Japanese and in English. The same participants and items (i.e., cognate translation equivalents) were used to directly compare L1 and L2 processing. Response latencies as well as eye movements representing early and late processing were analyzed using mixed-effects regression modeling. Similar cross-linguistic effects, namely cognate word frequency, phonological similarity, and semantic similarity, were found in both languages. These factors affected processing to different degrees in each language, however. While cognate frequency was significant as early as the first fixation, effects of cross-linguistic phonological and semantic similarity arose later in time. Increased phonological similarity slowed responses in L2 but speeded them in L1, while greater semantic overlap was facilitatory in both languages. Results are discussed from the perspective of the BIA+ model of visual word recognition. |
John M. Tauber; Scott L. Brincat; Emily P. Stephen; Jacob A. Donoghue; Leo Kozachkov; Emery N. Brown; Earl K. Miller Propofol-mediated unconsciousness disrupts progression of sensory signals through the cortical hierarchy Journal Article In: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 394–413, 2023. @article{Tauber2023, A critical component of anesthesia is the loss of sensory perception. Propofol is the most widely used drug for general anesthesia, but the neural mechanisms of how and when it disrupts sensory processing are not fully understood. We analyzed local field potential and spiking recorded from Utah arrays in auditory cortex, associative cortex, and cognitive cortex of nonhuman primates before and during propofol-mediated unconsciousness. Sensory stimuli elicited robust and decodable stimulus responses and triggered periods of stimulus-related synchronization between brain areas in the local field potential of Awake animals. By contrast, propofol-mediated unconsciousness eliminated stimulus-related synchrony and drastically weakened stimulus responses and information in all brain areas except for auditory cortex, where responses and information persisted. However, we found stimuli occurring during spiking Up states triggered weaker spiking responses than in Awake animals in auditory cortex, and little or no spiking responses in higher order areas. These results suggest that propofol's effect on sensory processing is not just because of asynchronous Down states. Rather, both Down states and Up states reflect disrupted dynamics. |
A. Caglar Tas; Jessica L. Parker The role of color in transsaccadic object correspondence Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 23, no. 8, pp. 1–21, 2023. @article{Tas2023, With each saccade, visual information is disrupted, and the visual system is tasked with establishing object correspondence between the presaccadic and postsaccadic representations of the saccade target. There is substantial evidence that the visual system consults spatiotemporal continuity when determining object correspondence across saccades. The evidence for surface feature continuity, however, is mixed. Surface features that are integral to the saccade target object's identity (e.g., shape and contrast polarity) are informative of object continuity, but features that may only imply the state of the object (e.g., orientation) are ignored. The present study tested whether color information is consulted to determine transsaccadic object continuity.We used two variations of the intrasaccadic target displacement task. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants reported the direction of the target displacement. In Experiments 3 and 4, they instead reported whether they detected any target movement. In all experiments, we manipulated the saccade target's continuity by removing it briefly (i.e., blanking) and by changing its color.We found that large color changes can disrupt stability and increase sensitivity to displacements for both direction and movement reports, although not as strongly as long blank durations (250 ms). Interestingly, even smaller color changes, but not blanking, reduced response biases. These results indicate that disrupting surface feature continuity may impact the process of transsaccadic object correspondence more strongly than spatiotemporal disruptions by both increasing the sensitivity and decreasing the response bias. |
Benjamin Tari; Joshua Ahn; Connor Dalton; Sun Young Choo; Matthew Heath Cerebral blood flow and immediate and sustained executive function benefits following single bouts of passive and active exercise Journal Article In: Brain and Cognition, vol. 166, pp. 1–9, 2023. @article{Tari2023, Passive exercise occurs when an individual's limbs are moved via an external force and is a modality that increases cerebral blood flow (CBF) and provides an immediate postexercise executive function (EF) benefit. To our knowledge, no work has examined for how long passive exercise benefits EF. Here, healthy young adults (N = 22; 7 female) used a cycle ergometer to complete three 20-min conditions: passive exercise (via mechanically driven flywheel), a traditional light intensity (37 W) “active” exercise condition (i.e., via volitional pedalling) and a non-exercise control condition. An estimate of CBF was obtained via transcranial Doppler ultrasound measurement of middle cerebral artery blood velocity (MCAv) and antisaccades (i.e., saccade mirror-symmetrical to a target) were completed prior to and immediately, 30- and 60-min following each condition to assess EF. Passive and active exercise increased MCAv; however, the increase was larger in the latter condition. In terms of antisaccades, passive and active exercise provided an immediate postexercise reaction time benefit. At the 30-min assessment, the benefit was observed for active but not passive exercise and neither produced a benefit at the 60-min assessment. Thus, passive exercise provided an evanescent EF “boost” and is a finding that may reflect a smaller cortical hemodynamic response. |
Yuma Taniyama; Yuta Suzuki; Taisei Kondo; Tetsuto Minami; Shigeki Nakauchi Pupil dilation is driven by perceptions of naturalness of color composition in paintings Journal Article In: Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, pp. 1–12, 2023. @article{Taniyama2023, Findings regarding the direction of pupil modulation (dilation/constriction) related to aesthetic preference are often contradictory, partly because preference is determined by multiple factors depending on the target. Research has demonstrated that art paintings with image features similar to those of natural scenes are preferred, suggesting that the perception of naturalness is one factor affecting preference. This study aimed to test the hypothesis that the pupil dilation in response to visual examination of a preferred painting may be caused by the perceived naturalness of the color composition of the painting. We investigated the relationship between pupil response and preference/perception of naturalness by manipulating the color composition of art paintings. First, we found that when compared to hue-rotated paintings, the paintings presented with their original color composition were preferred and perceived as more natural. Second, the extent of the pupil dilation had a significant positive correlation with the perceptions of naturalness for the painting, whereas there was no significant correlation between pupil dilation and preference. This result indicates that the pupil dilation during the viewing of the paintings is not caused by preference but by the perceived naturalness regarding the color composition of paintings. This was observed not only in representational paintings but also in abstract paintings, suggesting that the color composition of a painting itself, rather than memory colors—the standard, known hues of objects—or other influences, is an important factor of perceived naturalness that produces pupil dilation. |
Gene Tangtartharakul; Catherine A. Morgan; Simon K. Rushton; D. Samuel Schwarzkopf Retinotopic connectivity maps of human visual cortex with unconstrained eye movements Journal Article In: Human Brain Mapping, vol. 44, no. 16, pp. 5221–5237, 2023. @article{Tangtartharakul2023, Human visual cortex contains topographic visual field maps whose organization can be revealed with retinotopic mapping. Unfortunately, constraints posed by standard mapping hinder its use in patients, atypical subject groups, and individuals at either end of the lifespan. This severely limits the conclusions we can draw about visual processing in such individuals. Here, we present a novel data-driven method to estimate connective fields, resulting in fine-grained maps of the functional connectivity between brain areas. We find that inhibitory connectivity fields accompany, and often surround facilitatory fields. The visual field extent of these inhibitory subfields falls off with cortical magnification. We further show that our method is robust to large eye movements and myopic defocus. Importantly, freed from the controlled stimulus conditions in standard mapping experiments, using entertaining stimuli and unconstrained eye movements our approach can generate retinotopic maps, including the periphery visual field hitherto only possible to map with special stimulus displays. Generally, our results show that the connective field method can gain knowledge about retinotopic architecture of visual cortex in patients and participants where this is at best difficult and confounded, if not impossible, with current methods. |
Enze Tang; Hongwei Ding Emotion effects in second language processing: Evidence from eye movements in natural sentence reading Journal Article In: Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, pp. 1–20, 2023. @article{Tang2023, There exists insufficient eye-tracking evidence on the differences in emotional word processing between the first language (L1) and second language (L2) readers. This study conducted an eye-tracking experiment to investigate the emotional effects in L2 sentence reading, and to explore the modulation of L2 proficiency and individual emotional states. Adapted from Knickerbocker et al. (2015), the current study recorded eye movements at both early and late processing stages when late Chinese-English bilinguals read emotion-label and neutral target words in natural L2 sentences. Results indicated that L2 readers did not show the facilitation effects of lexical affective connotations during sentence reading, and they even demonstrated processing disadvantages for L2 emotional words. Additionally, the interaction effect between L2 proficiency and emotion was consistently significant for the measure of total reading time in positive words. Measurements of participants' depressive and anxious states were not robustly correlated with eye movement measures. Our findings supplemented new evidence to existing sparse eye-tracking experiments on L2 emotion processing, and lent support to several theoretical frameworks in the bilingual research field, including the Emotional Contexts of Learning Theory, Lexical Quality Hypothesis and Revised Hierarchical Model. |
Pin Kwang Tan; Cheng Tang; Roger Herikstad; Arunika Pillay; Camilo Libedinsky Distinct lateral prefrontal regions are organized in an anterior-posterior functional gradient Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 43, no. 38, pp. 6564–6572, 2023. @article{Tan2023a, The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is composed of multiple anatomically-defined regions involved in higher-order cognitive processes, including working memory and selective attention. It is organized in an anterior-posterior global gradient where posterior regions track changes in the environment while anterior regions support abstract neural representations. However, it remains unknown if such a global gradient results from a smooth gradient that spans regions, or an emergent property arising from functionally distinct regions, i.e. an areal gradient. Here, we recorded single-neurons in the dlPFC of non-human primates trained to perform a memory-guided saccade task with an interfering distractor, and analyzed their physiological properties along the anterior-posterior axis. We found that these physiological properties were best described by an areal gradient. Further, population analyses revealed that there is a distributed representation of spatial information across the dlPFC. Our results validate the functional boundaries between anatomically-defined dlPFC regions and highlight the distributed nature of computations underlying working memory across the dlPFC. Significance Statement Activity of frontal lobe regions is known to possess an anterior-posterior functional gradient. However, it is not known whether this gradient is the result of individual brain regions organized in a gradient (like a staircase), or a smooth gradient that spans regions (like a slide). Analysis of physiological properties of individual neurons in the primate frontal regions suggest that individual regions are organized as a gradient, rather than a smooth gradient. At the population level, working memory was more prominent in posterior regions, even though it was also present in anterior regions. This is consistent with the functional segregation of brain regions that is also observed in other systems (i.e. the visual system). |
Cheng-Hui Tan; Qi-Qi Xing; Yuan Zhao; Bo-Hai Song; Chuan-Lin Zhu; Jun-Jie Qiu; Mu-Ye He; Dian-Zhi Liu Goal-directed action anticipation and prediction error processing in children with autism spectrum disorders: An eye-movement study Journal Article In: Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, vol. 106, pp. 1–13, 2023. @article{Tan2023, Background: Differences in predictive ability have been proposed as a possible explanation for the core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This study aimed to investigate potential differences in prior knowledge acquisition and application for goal-directed anticipation in children with ASD. Method: The study included 22 children with ASD and 19 typically developing (TD) children between the ages of 5–10 years. Two eye-tracking phases were used to examine the formation of goal-directed action anticipations and the processing of action prediction errors. In the action anticipation formation phase, participants were asked to observe goal-directed actions repeatedly to examine prior knowledge acquisition about agent-goal association. In the action anticipation violation phase, the goals of actions were changed to examine the application of previously acquired knowledge. Results: Children with ASD required more trials to form goal-directed anticipations than TD children. Furthermore, prior knowledge acquisition was characterized by variability and instability in children with ASD. During the action anticipation violation phase, children with ASD exhibited lower preference for the action goal determined by prior knowledge in uncertain situations. This atypical processing of prior knowledge was significantly correlated with the severity of ASD symptoms. Conclusions: Our findings support the Bayesian perception theory and predictive coding theory, suggesting that children with ASD may experience difficulties in both the acquisition and application of prior knowledge in anticipation. These findings have implications for developing interventions to improve goal-directed anticipation and reduce social and communication difficulties in individuals with ASD. |
Noam Tal-Perry; Shlomit Yuval-Greenberg Sequential effect and temporal orienting in prestimulus oculomotor inhibition Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 23, no. 14, pp. 1–13, 2023. @article{TalPerry2023, When faced with unfamiliar circumstances, we often turn to our past experiences with similar situations to shape our expectations. This results in the well-established sequential effect, in which previous trials influence the expectations of the current trial. Studies have revealed that, in addition to the classical behavioral metrics, the inhibition of eye movement could be used as a biomarker to study temporal expectations. This prestimulus oculomotor inhibition is found a few hundred milliseconds prior to predictable events, with a stronger inhibition for predictable than unpredictable events. The phenomenon has been found to occur in various temporal structures, such as rhythms, cue-association, and conditional probability, yet it is still unknown whether it reflects local sequential information of the previous trial. To explore this, we examined the relationship between the sequential effect and the prestimulus oculomotor inhibition. Our results (N = 40) revealed that inhibition was weaker when the previous trial was longer than the current trial, in line with findings of behavioral metrics. These findings indicate that the prestimulus oculomotor inhibition covaries with expectation based on local sequential information, demonstrating the tight connection between this phenomenon and expectation and providing a novel measurement for studying sequential effects in temporal expectation. |
Bharath Chandra Talluri; Incheol Kang; Adam Lazere; Katrina R. Quinn; Nicholas Kaliss; Jacob L. Yates; Daniel A. Butts; Hendrikje Nienborg Activity in primate visual cortex is minimally driven by spontaneous movements Journal Article In: Nature Neuroscience, vol. 26, no. 11, pp. 1953–1959, 2023. @article{Talluri2023, Organisms process sensory information in the context of their own moving bodies, an idea referred to as embodiment. This idea is important for developmental neuroscience, robotics and systems neuroscience. The mechanisms supporting embodiment are unknown, but a manifestation could be the observation in mice of brain-wide neuromodulation, including in the primary visual cortex, driven by task-irrelevant spontaneous body movements. We tested this hypothesis in macaque monkeys (Macaca mulatta), a primate model for human vision, by simultaneously recording visual cortex activity and facial and body movements. We also sought a direct comparison using an analogous approach to those used in mouse studies. Here we found that activity in the primate visual cortex (V1, V2 and V3/V3A) was associated with the animals' own movements, but this modulation was largely explained by the impact of the movements on the retinal image, that is, by changes in visual input. These results indicate that visual cortex in primates is minimally driven by spontaneous movements and may reflect species-specific sensorimotor strategies. |
Travis N. Talcott; John E. Kiat; Steven J. Luck; Nicholas Gaspelin Is covert attention necessary for programming accurate saccades? Evidence from saccade-locked event-related potentials Journal Article In: Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics, pp. 1–19, 2023. @article{Talcott2023, For decades, researchers have assumed that shifts of covert attention mandatorily occur prior to eye movements to improve perceptual processing of objects before they are fixated. However, recent research suggests that the N2pc component—a neural measure of covert attentional allocation—does not always precede eye movements. The current study investigated whether the N2pc component mandatorily precedes eye movements and assessed its role in the accuracy of gaze control. In three experiments, participants searched for a letter of a specific color (e.g., red) and directed gaze to it as a response. Electroencephalograms and eye movements were coregistered to determine whether neural markers of covert attention preceded the initial shift of gaze. The results showed that the presaccadic N2pc only occurred under limited conditions: when there were many potential target locations and distractors. Crucially, there was no evidence that the presence or magnitude of the presaccadic N2pc was associated with improved eye movement accuracy in any of the experiments. Interestingly, ERP decoding analyses were able to classify the target location well before the eyes started to move, which likely reflects a presaccadic cognitive process that is distinct from the attentional process measured by the N2pc. Ultimately, we conclude that the covert attentional mechanism indexed by the N2pc is not necessary for precise gaze control. |
Norihiro Takakuwa; Kaoru Isa; Reona Yamaguchi; Hirotaka Onoe; Jun Takahashi; Masatoshi Yoshida; Tadashi Isa Protocol for making an animal model of “blindsight” in macaque monkeys Journal Article In: STAR Protocols, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 1–22, 2023. @article{Takakuwa2023, Patients with damage to the primary visual cortex (V1) can respond correctly to visual stimuli in their lesion-affected visual field above the chance level, an ability named blindsight. Here, we present a protocol for making an animal model of blindsight in macaque monkeys. We describe the steps to perform pre-lesion training of monkeys on a visual task, followed by lesion surgery, post-lesion training, and evaluation of blindsight. This animal model can be used to investigate the source of visual awareness. For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Yoshida et al. (2008)1 and Takakuwa et al. (2021).2 |
Maciej J. Szul; Sotirios Papadopoulos; Sanaz Alavizadeh; Sébastien Daligaut; Denis Schwartz; Jérémie Mattout; James J. Bonaiuto Diverse beta burst waveform motifs characterize movement-related cortical dynamics Journal Article In: Progress in Neurobiology, vol. 228, pp. 1–17, 2023. @article{Szul2023, Classical analyses of induced, frequency-specific neural activity typically average band-limited power over trials. More recently, it has become widely appreciated that in individual trials, beta band activity occurs as transient bursts rather than amplitude-modulated oscillations. Most studies of beta bursts treat them as unitary, and having a stereotyped waveform. However, we show there is a wide diversity of burst shapes. Using a biophysical model of burst generation, we demonstrate that waveform variability is predicted by variability in the synaptic drives that generate beta bursts. We then use a novel, adaptive burst detection algorithm to identify bursts from human MEG sensor data recorded during a joystick-based reaching task, and apply principal component analysis to burst waveforms to define a set of dimensions, or motifs, that best explain waveform variance. Finally, we show that bursts with a particular range of waveform motifs, ones not fully accounted for by the biophysical model, differentially contribute to movement-related beta dynamics. Sensorimotor beta bursts are therefore not homogeneous events and likely reflect distinct computational processes. |
Elise M. Szeremeta; Dane Sutton; Welber Marinovic; Patrick J. F. Clarke The effects of left prefrontal stimulation on selective attention and emotional reactivity for positive and negative information Journal Article In: Biological Psychology, vol. 182, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Szeremeta2023, Transcranial direct current stimulation targeting lateral prefrontal areas may attenuate attentional vigilance for negative content and reduce emotional reactivity. However, little research to date has examined how such stimulation may affect attention towards and emotional reactivity to positive emotional content. The aim of this study was to examine whether anodal tDCS targeting the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex would affect attentional bias towards either or both negative and positive content, and similarly, how it would impact emotional reactivity to negative and positive emotional content among healthy individuals. Unselected participants (N = 101) were recruited (Mage = 22.57 |
Georgia F. Symons; William T. O'Brien; Larry Abel; Zhibin Chen; Daniel M. Costello; Terence J. O'Brien; Scott Kolbe; Joanne Fielding; Sandy R. Shultz; Meaghan Clough; William T. O'Brien; Larry Abel; Zhibin Chen; Daniel M. Costello; Terence J. O'brien; Scott Kolbe; Joanne Fielding; Sandy R. Shultz; Meaghan Clough Monitoring the acute and subacute recovery of cognitive ocular motor changes after a sports-related concussion Journal Article In: Cerebral Cortex, vol. 33, no. 9, pp. 5276–5288, 2023. @article{Symons2023, Identifying when recovery from a sports-related concussion (SRC) has occurred remains a challenge in clinical practice. This study investigated the utility of ocular motor (OM) assessment to monitor recovery post-SRC between sexes and compared to common clinical measures. From 139 preseason baseline assessments (i.e. before they sustained an SRC), 18 (12 males, 6 females) consequent SRCs were sustained and the longitudinal follow-ups were collected at 2, 6, and 13 days post-SRC. Participants completed visually guided, antisaccade (AS), and memory-guided saccade tasks requiring a saccade toward, away from, and to a remembered target, respectively. Changes in latency (processing speed), visual-spatial accuracy, and errors were measured. Clinical measures included The Sports Concussion Assessment Tool, King-Devick test, Stroop task, and Digit span. AS latency was significantly longer at 2 days and returned to baseline by 13-days post-SRC in females only (P < 0.001). Symptom numbers recovered from 2 to 6 days and 13 days (P < 0.05). Persistently poorer AS visual-spatial accuracy was identified at 2, 6 and 13 days post-SRC (P < 0.05) in both males and females but with differing trajectories. Clinical measures demonstrated consistent improvement reminiscent of practice effects. OM saccade assessment may have improved utility in tracking recovery compared to conventional measures and between sexes. |
Eunkyung Sung; Sehoon Jung; Sunhee Lee Word recognition in English place assimilation by L1 and L2 listeners: An eye tracking study Journal Article In: Korean Journal of English Language and Linguistics, vol. 23, pp. 175–191, 2023. @article{Sung2023, This study explores the dynamics of lexical activation by comparing the time course of word recognition between assimilated forms (e.g., ca[t p] in cat box) and noncoronal forms (e.g., ca[p] in cap box). Using the Visual World Paradigm, an eye-tracking method, the main goal was to investigate how gradient modification in place assimilation context influences L1 and L2 listeners' real time word recognition in English. Twenty native Korean learners of English, as well as fourteen native English listeners took part in the listening task integrated into the eye-tracking experiment. The participants were given aural input in the form of instructions (e.g., look at the cat/cap box) and asked to pick the word they had just heard between two options (e.g., cat or cap) on the screen while or after they listened to the input. Their eye movements over the visual screen while listening, along with their keyboard-press responses were recorded for the main analysis. The results showed both English and Korean listeners displayed higher proportions of fixations on the target (e.g., cat) than on the competitor words (e.g., cap) in assimilation contexts (e.g., ca[t p] box), as well as higher proportions of fixations on targets (e.g., cap) than on competitors (e.g., cat) in non-assimilation contexts (e.g., ca[p] box). However, the discrepancy of fixation proportions between targets and competitors was more obvious for the English listeners than for the Korean listeners. In other words, although the L2 listenersin addition to L1 listeners were able to use acoustic variations when identifying the target phonemes, the L1 listeners revealed a higher certainty level than their L2 counterparts. Furthermore, the divergence points between targets and competitors wereshown to appear earlier for the L1 listeners than for the L2 listeners. |
Sai Sun; Hongbo Yu; Shuo Wang; Rongjun Yu Cognitive and neural bases of visual-context-guided decision-making Journal Article In: NeuroImage, vol. 275, pp. 1–15, 2023. @article{Sun2023d, Humans adjust their behavioral strategies based on feedback, a process that may depend on intrinsic preferences and contextual factors such as visual salience. In this study, we hypothesized that decision-making based on visual salience is influenced by habitual and goal-directed processes, which can be evidenced by changes in attention and subjective valuation systems. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a series of studies to investigate the behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying visual salience-driven decision-making. We first established the baseline behavioral strategy without salience in Experiment 1 (n = 21). We then highlighted the utility or performance dimension of the chosen outcome using colors in Experiment 2 (n = 30). We demonstrated that the difference in staying frequency increased along the salient dimension, confirming a salience effect. Furthermore, the salience effect was abolished when directional information was removed in Experiment 3 (n = 28), suggesting that the salience effect is feedback-specific. To generalize our findings, we replicated the feedback-specific salience effects using eye-tracking and text emphasis. The fixation differences between the chosen and unchosen values were enhanced along the feedback-specific salient dimension in Experiment 4 (n = 48) but unchanged after removing feedback-specific information in Experiment 5 (n = 32). Moreover, the staying frequency was correlated with fixation properties, confirming that salience guides attention deployment. Lastly, our neuroimaging study (Experiment 6 |
Sai Sun; Runnan Cao; Ueli Rutishauser; Rongjun Yu; Shuo Wang A uniform human multimodal dataset for emotion perception and judgment Journal Article In: Scientific Data, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 1–14, 2023. @article{Sun2023c, Face perception is a fundamental aspect of human social interaction, yet most research on this topic has focused on single modalities and specific aspects of face perception. Here, we present a comprehensive multimodal dataset for examining facial emotion perception and judgment. This dataset includes EEG data from 97 unique neurotypical participants across 8 experiments, fMRI data from 19 neurotypical participants, single-neuron data from 16 neurosurgical patients (22 sessions), eye tracking data from 24 neurotypical participants, behavioral and eye tracking data from 18 participants with ASD and 15 matched controls, and behavioral data from 3 rare patients with focal bilateral amygdala lesions. Notably, participants from all modalities performed the same task. Overall, this multimodal dataset provides a comprehensive exploration of facial emotion perception, emphasizing the importance of integrating multiple modalities to gain a holistic understanding of this complex cognitive process. This dataset serves as a key missing link between human neuroimaging and neurophysiology literature, and facilitates the study of neuropsychiatric populations. |
Rui Sun; Julia Fietz; Mira Erhart; Dorothee Poehlchen; Lara Henco; Tanja M. Brückl; BeCOME Team; Michael Czisch; Philipp G. Saemann; Victor I. Spoormaker Free-viewing gaze patterns reveal a mood-congruency bias in MDD during an affective fMRI/eye-tracking task Journal Article In: European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, pp. 1–13, 2023. @article{Sun2023b, Major depressive disorder (MDD) has been related to abnormal amygdala activity during emotional face processing. However, a recent large-scale study (n = 28,638) found no such correlation, which is probably due to the low precision of fMRI measurements. To address this issue, we used simultaneous fMRI and eye-tracking measurements during a commonly employed emotional face recognition task. Eye-tracking provide high-precision data, which can be used to enrich and potentially stabilize fMRI readouts. With the behavioral response, we additionally divided the active task period into a task-related and a free-viewing phase to explore the gaze patterns of MDD patients and healthy controls (HC) and compare their respective neural correlates. Our analysis showed that a mood-congruency attentional bias could be detected in MDD compared to healthy controls during the free-viewing phase but without parallel amygdala disruption. Moreover, the neural correlates of gaze patterns reflected more prefrontal fMRI activity in the free-viewing than the task-related phase. Taken together, spontaneous emotional processing in free viewing might lead to a more pronounced mood-congruency bias in MDD, which indicates that combined fMRI with eye-tracking measurement could be beneficial for our understanding of the underlying psychopathology of MDD in different emotional processing phases. |
Juncai Sun; Tiantian Dong; Ping Liu Holistic processing and visual characteristics of regulated and spontaneous expressions Journal Article In: Journal of Vision, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 1–12, 2023. @article{Sun2023a, The rapid and efficient recognition of facial expressions is crucial for adaptive behaviors, and holistic processing is one of the critical processing methods to achieve this adaptation. Therefore, this study integrated the effects and attentional characteristics of the authenticity of facial expressions on holistic processing. The results show that both regulated and spontaneous expressions were processed holistically. However, the spontaneous expression details did not indicate typical holistic processing, with the congruency effect observed equally for aligned and misaligned conditions. No significant difference between the two expressions was observed in terms of reaction times and eye movement characteristics (i.e., total fixation duration, fixation counts, and first fixation duration). These findings suggest that holistic processing strategies differ between the two expressions. Nevertheless, the difference was not reflected in attentional engagement. |
Binbin Sun; Bryan Wang; Zhen Wei; Zhe Feng; Zhi Liu Wu; Walid Yassin; William S. Stone; Yan Lin; Xue Jun Kong Identification of diagnostic markers for ASD: A restrictive interest analysis based on EEG combined with eye tracking Journal Article In: Frontiers in Neuroscience, vol. 17, pp. 1–16, 2023. @article{Sun2023, Electroencephalography (EEG) functional connectivity (EFC) and eye tracking (ET) have been explored as objective screening methods for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but no study has yet evaluated restricted and repetitive behavior (RRBs) simultaneously to infer early ASD diagnosis. Typically developing (TD) children (n = 27) and ASD (n = 32), age- and sex-matched, were evaluated with EFC and ET simultaneously, using the restricted interest stimulus paradigm. Network-based machine learning prediction (NBS-predict) was used to identify ASD. Correlations between EFC, ET, and Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-Second Edition (ADOS-2) were performed. The Area Under the Curve (AUC) of receiver-operating characteristics (ROC) was measured to evaluate the predictive performance. Under high restrictive interest stimuli (HRIS), ASD children have significantly higher α band connectivity and significantly more total fixation time (TFT)/pupil enlargement of ET relative to TD children (p = 0.04299). These biomarkers were not only significantly positively correlated with each other (R = 0.716 |
Longjiao Sui; Nicolas Dirix; Evy Woumans; Wouter Duyck GECO-CN: Ghent Eye-tracking COrpus of sentence reading for Chinese-English bilinguals Journal Article In: Behavior Research Methods, vol. 55, no. 6, pp. 2743–2763, 2023. @article{Sui2023, The current work presents the very first eye-tracking corpus of natural reading by Chinese-English bilinguals, whose two languages entail different writing systems and orthographies. Participants read an entire novel in these two languages, presented in paragraphs on screen. Half of the participants first read half of the novel in their native language (Simplified Chinese) and then the rest of the novel in their second language (English), while the other half read in the reverse language order. This article presents some important basic descriptive statistics of reading times and compares the difference between reading in the two languages. However, this unique eye-tracking corpus also allows the exploration of theories of language processing and bilingualism. Importantly, it provides a solid and reliable ground for studying the difference between Eastern and Western languages, understanding the impact and consequences of having a completely different first language on bilingual processing. The materials are freely available for use by researchers interested in (bilingual) reading. |
Benjamin Suarez-Jimenez; Amit Lazarov; Xi Zhu; Daniel S. Pine; Yair Bar-Haim; Yuval Neria Attention allocation to negatively-valenced stimuli in PTSD is associated with reward-related neural pathways Journal Article In: Psychological Medicine, vol. 53, no. 10, pp. 4666–4674, 2023. @article{SuarezJimenez2023, Background. In a recent eye-tracking study we found a differential dwell time pattern for negatively-valenced and neutral faces among patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), trauma-exposed healthy control (TEHCs), and healthy control (HC) participants. Here, we explored whether these group differences relate to resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) patterns of brain areas previously linked to both attention processes and PTSD. These encompass the amygdala, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC), and nucleus accumbens (NAcc).Methods.Ten minutes magnetic resonance imaging rsFC scans were recorded in 17 PTSD patients, 21 TEHCs, and 16 HCs. Participants then completed a free-viewing eye-tracking task assessing attention allocation outside the scanner. Dwell time on negatively-valenced stimuli (DT%) were assessed relative to functional connectivity in the aforementioned seed regions of interest (amygdala, dACC, dlPFC, vlPFC, and NAcc) to whole-brain voxel-wise rsFC.Results. As previously reported, group differences occurred in attention allocation to negative-valence stimuli, with longer dwell time on negatively valence stimuli in the PTSD and TEHC groups than the HC group. Higher DT% correlated with weaker NAcc-orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) connectivity in patients with PTSD. Conversely, a positive association emerged in the HC group between DT% and NAcc-OFC connectivity.Conclusions. While exploratory in nature, present findings may suggest that reward-related brain areas are involved in disengaging attention from negative-valenced stimuli, and possibly in regulating ensuing negative emotions. |
Yongqiang Su; Yixun Li; Hong Li Development and validation of the simplified Chinese Author Recognition Test: Evidence from eye movements of Chinese adults in Mainland China Journal Article In: Journal of Research in Reading, pp. 1–25, 2023. @article{Su2023a, Background: It is well evident that individuals' levels of print exposure are significantly correlated with their reading ability across languages, and an author recognition test is commonly used to measure print exposure objectively. For the first time, the current work developed and validated a Simplified Chinese Author Recognition Test (SCART) and examined its role in explaining Chinese online reading. Methods: In Study 1, we constructed the SCART for readers of simplified Chinese and validated the test using data collected from 203 young adults in Mainland China. Participants were measured on the SCART and three self-report tasks about their reading experiences and habits. Study 2 recruited additional 68 young adults in Mainland and measured their print exposure (with the same tasks used in Study 1), reading-related cognitive ability (working memory, rapid automatic naming, Chinese character reading, and vocabulary knowledge), and Chinese online reading via an eye-tracking passage reading task. Results: Results of Study 1 support the high reliability and validity of the SCART. Results of Study 2 indicate that SCART scores significantly predicted participants' online reading processing while controlling for subjective reading experiences and habits, and reading-related cognitive abilities. Across two studies, we found converging evidence that the in-depth recognition of the authors (i.e., participants have read the books written by these authors) appears to be a better indicator of print exposure than the superficial recognition of the author names. Conclusions: Taken together, this work filled in the gap in the literature by providing an evidence-based, objective print exposure measure for simplified Chinese and contributes to a broader understanding of print exposure and online reading processing across different writing systems. |
Yankui Su; Meiling He; Rongbao Li The effects of background music on English reading comprehension for English foreign language learners: Evidence from an eye movement study Journal Article In: Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 14, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Su2023, Based on previous literature, the present study examines the effects of background music on English reading comprehension using eye tracking techniques. All the participants, whose first language was Chinese, were selected from a foreign language college and all of them were sophomores who majored in English. The experiment in this study was a 2 (music tempo: fast and slow) × 2 (text difficulty: difficult and easy) × 2 (background music preference: high and low) mixed design. Both musical tempo and English reading passage were within-subjects factors, and the level of music listening preference was a between-subjects factor. The results showed that the main effect of the music tempo was statistically significant, which indicated that participants read texts more quickly in the fast-tempo music condition than in the slow-tempo music condition. Furthermore, the main effect of the text difficulty was statistically significant. Additionally, the interaction between the text difficulty and music tempo was statistically significant. The music tempo had a greater effect on easy texts than on difficult texts. The results of this study reveal that it is beneficial for people who have a stronger preference for music listening to conduct English reading tasks with fast-tempo music. It is detrimental for people who have little preference for background music listening to complete difficult English reading tasks with slow-tempo music. |
Patrick Sturt; Nayoung Kwon Agreement attraction in comprehension: Do active dependencies and distractor position play a role? Journal Article In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, pp. 1–23, 2023. @article{Sturt2023, Across four eye-tracking studies and one self-paced reading study, we test whether attraction in subject-verb agreement is affected by (a) the relative linear positions of target and distractor, and (b) the active dependency status of the distractor. We find an effect of relative position, with greater attraction in retro-active interference configurations, where the distractor is linearly closer to the critical verb (Subject…Distractor…V) than in pro-active interference where it is more distant (Distractor…Subject…V). However, within pro-active interference configurations, attraction was not affected by the active dependency status of the distractor: attraction effects were similarly small whether or not the distractor was waiting to complete an upcoming dependency at the critical verb, with Bayes Factor analyses showing evidence in favour of a null effect of active dependency status. We discuss these findings in terms of the decay of activation, and whether such decay is affected by maintenance of features in memory. |
Stefanie Sturm; Jordi Costa-Faidella; Iria SanMiguel Neural signatures of memory gain through active exploration in an oculomotor-auditory learning task Journal Article In: Psychophysiology, vol. 60, no. 10, pp. 1–20, 2023. @article{Sturm2023, Active engagement improves learning and memory, and self- versus externally generated stimuli are processed differently: perceptual intensity and neural responses are attenuated. Whether the attenuation is linked to memory formation remains unclear. This study investigates whether active oculomotor control over auditory stimuli—controlling for movement and stimulus predictability—benefits associative learning, and studies the underlying neural mechanisms. Using EEG and eye tracking we explored the impact of control during learning on the processing and memory recall of arbitrary oculomotor-auditory associations. Participants (N = 23) learned associations through active exploration or passive observation, using a gaze-controlled interface to generate sounds. Our results show faster learning progress in the active condition. ERPs time-locked to the onset of sound stimuli showed that learning progress was linked to an attenuation of the P3a component. The detection of matching movement-sound pairs triggered a target-matching P3b. There was no general modulation of ERPs through active learning. However, we found continuous variation in the strength of the memory benefit across participants: some benefited more strongly from active control during learning than others. This was paralleled in the strength of the N1 attenuation effect for self-generated stimuli, which was correlated with memory gain in active learning. Our results show that control helps learning and memory and modulates sensory responses. Individual differences during sensory processing predict the strength of the memory benefit. Taken together, these results help to disentangle the effects of agency, unspecific motor-based neuromodulation, and predictability on ERP components and establish a link between self-generation effects and active learning memory gain. |
Dawid Strzelczyk; Simon P. Kelly; Nicolas Langer Neurophysiological markers of successful learning in healthy aging Journal Article In: GeroScience, vol. 45, no. 5, pp. 2873–2896, 2023. @article{Strzelczyk2023, The capacity to learn and memorize is a key determinant for the quality of life but is known to decline to varying degrees with age. However, neural correlates of memory formation and the critical features that determine the extent to which aging affects learning are still not well understood. By employing a visual sequence learning task, we were able to track the behavioral and neurophysiological markers of gradual learning over several repetitions, which is not possible in traditional approaches that utilize a remember vs. forgotten comparison. On a neurophysiological level, we focused on two learning-related centro-parietal event-related potential (ERP) components: the expectancy-driven P300 and memory-related broader positivity (BP). Our results revealed that although both age groups showed significant learning progress, young individuals learned faster and remembered more stimuli than older participants. Successful learning was directly linked to a decrease of P300 and BP amplitudes. However, young participants showed larger P300 amplitudes with a sharper decrease during the learning, even after correcting for an observed age-related longer P300 latency and increased P300 peak variability. Additionally, the P300 amplitude predicted learning success in both age groups and showed good test–retest reliability. On the other hand, the memory formation processes, reflected by the BP amplitude, revealed a similar level of engagement in both age groups. However, this engagement did not translate into the same learning progress in the older participants. We suggest that the slower and more variable timing of the stimulus identification process reflected in the P300 means that despite the older participants engaging the memory formation process, there is less time for it to translate the categorical stimulus location information into a solidified memory trace. The results highlight the important role of the P300 and BP as a neurophysiological marker of learning and may enable the development of preventive measures for cognitive decline. |
Tilo Strobach; Jens Kürten; Lynn Huestegge Benefits of repeated alternations – Task-specific vs. task-general sequential adjustments of dual-task order control Journal Article In: Acta Psychologica, vol. 236, pp. 1–16, 2023. @article{Strobach2023, An important cognitive requirement in multitasking is the decision of how multiple tasks should be temporally scheduled (task order control). Specifically, task order switches (vs. repetitions) yield performance costs (i.e., task-order switch costs), suggesting that task order scheduling is a vital part of configuring a task set. Recently, it has been shown that this process takes specific task-related characteristics into account: task order switches were easier when switching to a preferred (vs. non-preferred) task order. Here, we ask whether another determinant of task order control, namely the phenomenon that a task order switch in a previous trial facilitates a task order switch in a current trial (i.e., a sequential modulation of task order switch effect) also takes task-specific characteristics into account. Based on three experiments involving task order switches between a preferred (dominant oculomotor task prior to non-dominant manual/pedal task) and a non-preferred (vice versa) order, we replicated the finding that task order switching (in Trial N) is facilitated after a previous switch (vs. repetition in Trial N - 1) in task order. There was no substantial evidence in favor of a significant difference when switching to the preferred vs. non-preferred order and in the analyses of the dominant oculomotor task and the non-dominant manual task. This indicates different mechanisms underlying the control of immediate task order configuration (indexed by task order switch costs) and the sequential modulation of these costs based on the task order transition type in the previous trial. |
Moritz Stolte; Leon Kraus; Ulrich Ansorge Visual attentional guidance during smooth pursuit eye movements: Distractor interference is independent of distractor-target similarity Journal Article In: Psychophysiology, vol. 60, no. 12, pp. 1–11, 2023. @article{Stolte2023, In the current study, we used abrupt-onset distractors similar and dissimilar in luminance to the target of a smooth pursuit eye-movement to test if abrupt-onset distractors capture attention in a top-down or bottom-up fashion while the eyes track a moving object. Abrupt onset distractors were presented at different positions relative to the current position of a pursuit target during the closed-loop phase of smooth pursuit. Across experiments, we varied the duration of the distractors, their motion direction, and task-relevance. We found that abrupt-onset distractors decreased the gain of horizontally directed smooth-pursuit eye-movements. This effect, however, was independent of the similarity in luminance between distractor and target. In addition, distracting effects on horizontal gain were the same, regardless of the exact duration and position of the distractors, suggesting that capture was relatively unspecific and short-lived (Experiments 1 and 2). This was different with distractors moving in a vertical direction, perpendicular to the horizontally moving target. In line with past findings, these distractors caused suppression of vertical gain (Experiment 3). Finally, making distractors task-relevant by asking observers to report distractor positions increased the pursuit gain effect of the distractors. This effect was also independent of target-distractor similarity (Experiment 4). In conclusion, the results suggest that a strong location signal exerted by the pursuit targets led to very brief and largely location-unspecific interference through the abrupt onsets and that this interference was bottom-up, implying that the control of smooth pursuit was independent of other target features besides its motion signal. |
Gabriel M. Stine; Eric M. Trautmann; Danique Jeurissen; Michael N. Shadlen A neural mechanism for terminating decisions Journal Article In: Neuron, vol. 111, no. 16, pp. 2601–2613, 2023. @article{Stine2023, The brain makes decisions by accumulating evidence until there is enough to stop and choose. Neural mechanisms of evidence accumulation are established in association cortex, but the site and mechanism of termination are unknown. Here, we show that the superior colliculus (SC) plays a causal role in terminating decisions, and we provide evidence for a mechanism by which this occurs. We recorded simultaneously from neurons in the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) and SC while monkeys made perceptual decisions. Despite similar trial-averaged activity, we found distinct single-trial dynamics in the two areas: LIP displayed drift-diffusion dynamics and SC displayed bursting dynamics. We hypothesized that the bursts manifest a threshold mechanism applied to signals represented in LIP to terminate the decision. Consistent with this hypothesis, SC inactivation produced behavioral effects diagnostic of an impaired threshold sensor and prolonged the buildup of activity in LIP. The results reveal the transformation from deliberation to commitment. |
Pnina Stern; Tamar Kolodny; Shlomit Tsafrir; Galit Cohen; Lilach Shalev In: Journal of Attention Disorders, vol. 27, no. 7, pp. 757–776, 2023. @article{Stern2023, Objective: The present study evaluated the near (attention) and far (reading, ADHD symptoms, learning, and quality of life) transfer effects of a Computerized Progressive Attention Training (CPAT) versus Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) practice among adults with ADHD compared to a passive group. Method: Fifty-four adults participated in a non-fully randomized controlled trial. Participants in the intervention groups completed eight 2-hr weekly training sessions. Outcomes were assessed before, immediately after, and 4 months post-intervention, using objective tools: attention tests, eye-tracker, and subjective questionnaires. Results: Both interventions showed near-transfer to various attention functions. The CPAT produced far-transfer effects to reading, ADHD symptoms, and learning while the MBSR improved the self-perceived quality of life. At follow-up, all improvements except for ADHD symptoms were preserved in the CPAT group. The MBSR group showed mixed preservations. Conclusion: Both interventions have beneficial effects, however only the CPAT group exhibited improvements compared to the passive group. |
Jeremy Steffman; Megha Sundara Disentangling the role of biphone probability from neighborhood density in the perception of nonwords Journal Article In: Language and Speech, pp. 1–37, 2023. @article{Steffman2023, In six experiments we explored how biphone probability and lexical neighborhood density influence listeners' categorization of vowels embedded in nonword sequences. We found independent effects of each. Listeners shifted categorization of a phonetic continuum to create a higher probability sequence, even when neighborhood density was controlled. Similarly, listeners shifted categorization to create a nonword from a denser neighborhood, even when biphone probability was controlled. Next, using a visual world eye-tracking task, we determined that biphone probability information is used rapidly by listeners in perception. In contrast, task complexity and irrelevant variability in the stimuli interfere with neighborhood density effects. These results support a model in which both biphone probability and neighborhood density independently affect word recognition, but only biphone probability effects are observed early in processing. |
Maximilian Stefani; Marian Sauter Relative contributions of oculomotor capture and disengagement to distractor-related dwell times in visual search Journal Article In: Scientific Reports, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 1–10, 2023. @article{Stefani2023, In visual search, attention is reliably captured by salient distractors and must be actively disengaged from them to reach the target. In such attentional capture paradigms, dwell time is measured on distractors that appear in the periphery (e.g., on a random location on a circle). Distractor-related dwell time is typically thought to be largely due to stimulus-driven processes related to oculomotor capture dynamics. However, the extent to which oculomotor capture and oculomotor disengagement contribute to distractor dwell time has not been known because standard attentional capture paradigms cannot decouple these processes. In the present study, we used a novel paradigm combining classical attentional capture trials and delayed disengagement trials. We measured eye movements to dissociate the capture and disengagement mechanisms underlying distractor dwell time. We found that only two-thirds of distractor dwell time (~ 52 ms) can be explained by oculomotor capture, while one-third is explained by oculomotor disengagement (~ 18 ms), which has been neglected or underestimated in previous studies. Thus, oculomotor disengagement (goal-directed) processes play a more significant role in distractor dwell times than previously thought. |
Anna Cornelia Stausberg Who are you to judge? Investigating narcissism through pupil dilation at witness testimonials Journal Article In: Psychology, vol. 14, no. 02, pp. 144–157, 2023. @article{Stausberg2023, Various literature has explored narcissistic behaviour and its distinct emotional and aggressive nature. However, there is a significant gap in research when exploring the physiological differences of individual classified as having high narcissistic traits and tendencies. Pupillometry is a measure often utilised to measure distinct differences in emotional arousal. This measure allows for excellent insight into physiological responses to various stimuli presented. This exploratory study was set up to investigate pupillometry responses to auditory stimulation in narcissistic versus control participants. Findings were consistent with previous research; however, various limitations hindered significant findings. This pilot study is a guideline for future research as it is a first attempt at exploring a physiological relationship between emotionality and narcissism in the context of a criminal hearing. |
Adrian Staub The function/content word distinction and eye movements in reading Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, pp. 1–18, 2023. @article{Staub2023, A substantial quantity of research has explored whether readers' eye movements are sensitive to the distinc- tion between function and content words. No clear answer has emerged, in part due to the difficulty of accounting for differences in length, frequency, and predictability between the words in the two classes. Based on evidence that readers differentially overlook function word errors, we hypothesized that function words may be more frequently skipped or may receive shorter fixations. We present two very large-scale eyetracking experiments using selected sentences from a corpus of natural text, with each sentence containing a target function or content word. The target words in the two classes were carefully matched on length, frequency, and predictability, with the latter variable operationalized in terms of next-word probability obtained from the large language model GPT-2. While the experiments replicated a range of expected effects, word class did not have any clear influence on target word skipping probability, and there was some evidence for a content word advantage in fixation duration measures. These results indicate that readers' tendency to overlook function word errors is not due to reduced time spent encoding these words. The results also broadly support the implicit assumption in prominent models ofeye movement control in reading that a word's syntactic category does not play an important role in decisions about when and where to move the eyes. |
Vladislava Staroverova; Anastasiya Lopukhina; Nina Zdorova; Nina Ladinskaya; Olga Vedenina; Sofya Goldina; Anastasiia Kaprielova; Ksenia Bartseva; Olga Dragoy Phonological and orthographic parafoveal processing during silent reading in Russian children and adults Journal Article In: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, vol. 226, pp. 1–11, 2023. @article{Staroverova2023, Studies on German and English have shown that children and adults can rely on phonological and orthographic information from the parafovea during reading, but this reliance differs between ages and languages. In the current study, we investigated the development of phonological and orthographic parafoveal processing during silent reading in Russian-speaking 8-year-old children, 10-year-old children, and adults using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm. The participants read sentences with embedded nouns that were presented in original, pseudohomophone, control for pseudohomophone, transposed-letter, and control for transposed-letter conditions in the parafoveal area to assess phonological and orthographic preview benefit effects. The results revealed that all groups of participants relied only on orthographic but not phonological parafoveal information. These findings indicate that 8-year-old children already preprocess parafoveal information similarly to adults. |