Standardization and Personalized Medicine Using Quantitative EEG in Clinical Settings.

Two major trends have been dominant in health care in recent years. First, there is a growing consensus that standardization of health care procedures and methods can result in improved effectiveness and safety of treatments. Second, there is increased interest in "personalized medicine," which refers to the tailoring of treatments to individual patients.

Consciousness is not necessary for visual feature binding.

When visual information enters the brain, it is relayed to different specialized regions, processing features such as shape, color, or motion. And yet, in our conscious experience of a colored, moving shape, all the different features seem to be integrated into one unified percept. Therefore, it has been hypothesized that consciousness and feature binding share an intimate relationship.

Binding success and failure: evidence for the spontaneous integration of perceptual features and object evaluations.

Humans represent perceptual events in a distributed, feature-specific fashion, which calls for some sort of feature integration. It has been suggested that processing an event leads to the creation of a temporary binding of the corresponding feature codes - an object file. Here we show that object files do not only comprise of perceptual feature codes but also include codes that reflect evaluations of the perceptual event.

The neural underpinnings of event-file management: evidence for stimulus-induced activation of and competition among stimulus-response bindings.

The present fMRI study tested the assumption that a single pairing of a stimulus and a logically unrelated response is sufficient for binding the corresponding stimulus and response codes into an event representation (event file) that is automatically retrieved upon processing of at least one of its components. In particular, we investigated whether repeating a face or a house stimulus and/or a left or a right manual response induces the automatic retrieval of the response or stimulus that it previously accompanied. ROI analyses of fusiform face area, parahippocampal place area, and right and left motor cortex revealed that repeating one component of a previously encountered stimulus-response episode leads to the suppression of cortical areas processing the other components, suggesting that these components were indeed automatically retrieved and conflicted with ongoing processing.

Enhancing cognitive control through neurofeedback: a role of gamma-band activity in managing episodic retrieval.

Neural synchronization has been proposed to be the underlying mechanism for exchanging and integrating anatomically distributed information and has been associated with a myriad of cognitive domains, including visual feature binding, top-down control, and long-term memory. Moreover, it seems that separate frequency bands have different functions in these cognitive processes. Here we studied whether neurofeedback training designed either to increase local gamma band activity (GBA+; 36-44 Hz), or local beta band activity (BBA+; 12-20 Hz), would have an impact on performance of behavioral tasks measuring short-term and long-term episodic binding.

The effect of gamma enhancing neurofeedback on the control of feature bindings and intelligence measures.

Neural synchronization in the gamma band has been associated with feature binding and intelligence. Using neurofeedback, we aimed at changing the power of the gamma band and investigated whether these changes would influence behavioral measures of feature binding and intelligence. The results show that people are indeed able to alter the power in the gamma band if provided with neurofeedback.

When moving faces activate the house area: an fMRI study of object-file retrieval.

Background: The visual cortex of the human brain contains specialized modules for processing different visual features of an object. Confronted with multiple objects, the system needs to attribute the correct features to each object (often referred to as 'the binding problem'). The brain is assumed to integrate the features of perceived objects into object files - pointers to the neural representations of these features, which outlive the event they represent in order to maintain stable percepts of objects over time.

Integrating faces, houses, motion, and action: spontaneous binding across ventral and dorsal processing streams.

Perceiving an event requires the integration of its features across numerous brain maps and modules. Visual object perception is thought to be mediated by a ventral processing stream running from occipital to inferotemporal cortex, whereas most spatial processing and action control is attributed to the dorsal stream connecting occipital, parietal, and frontal cortex. Here we show that integration operates not only on ventral features and objects, such as faces and houses, but also across ventral and dorsal pathways, binding faces and houses to motion and manual action.