Decoding Remapped Spatial Information in the Peri-Saccadic Period.

It has been suggested that, prior to a saccade, visual neurons predictively respond to stimuli that will fall in their receptive fields after completion of the saccade. This saccadic remapping process is thought to compensate for the shift of the visual world across the retina caused by eye movements. To map the timing of this predictive process in the brain, we recorded neural activity using electroencephalography during a saccade task.

Sensory Drive Modifies Brain Dynamics and the Temporal Integration Window.

Perception is suggested to occur in discrete temporal windows, clocked by cycles of neural oscillations. An important testable prediction of this theory is that individuals' peak frequencies of oscillations should correlate with their ability to segregate the appearance of two successive stimuli. An influential study tested this prediction and showed that individual peak frequency of spontaneously occurring alpha (8-12 Hz) correlated with the temporal segregation threshold between two successive flashes of light [Samaha, J.

Hello from the other side: Robust contralateral interference in tactile detection.

Touch is unique among the sensory modalities in that our tactile receptors are spread across the body surface and continuously receive different inputs at the same time. These inputs vary in type, properties, relevance according to current goals, and, of course, location on the body. Sometimes, they must be integrated, and other times set apart and distinguished.

Intonation Units in Spontaneous Speech Evoke a Neural Response.

Spontaneous speech is produced in chunks called intonation units (IUs). IUs are defined by a set of prosodic cues and presumably occur in all human languages. Recent work has shown that across different grammatical and sociocultural conditions IUs form rhythms of ∼1 unit per second.

A Role for Bottom-Up Alpha Oscillations in Temporal Integration.

Neural oscillations in the 8-12 Hz alpha band are thought to represent top-down inhibitory control and to influence temporal resolution: Individuals with faster peak frequencies segregate stimuli appearing closer in time. Recently, this theory has been challenged. Here, we investigate a special case in which alpha does not correlate with temporal resolution: when stimuli are presented amidst strong visual drive.

Attentional Sampling between Eye Channels.

Our ability to detect targets in the environment fluctuates in time. When individuals focus attention on a single location, the ongoing temporal structure of performance fluctuates at 8 Hz. When task demands require the distribution of attention over two objects defined by their location, color or motion direction, ongoing performance fluctuates at 4 Hz per object.

Rhythmic modulation of visual discrimination is linked to individuals' spontaneous motor tempo.

The impact of external rhythmic structure on perception has been demonstrated across different modalities and experimental paradigms. However, recent findings emphasize substantial individual differences in rhythm-based perceptual modulation. Here, we examine the link between spontaneous rhythmic preferences, as measured through the motor system, and individual differences in rhythmic modulation of visual discrimination.

Neural signatures of evidence accumulation in temporal decisions.

Cognitive models of interval timing can be formulated as an accumulation-to-bound process. However, the physiological manifestation of such processes has not yet been identified. We used electroencephalography (EEG) to measure the neural responses of participants while they performed a temporal bisection task in which they were requested to categorize the duration of visual stimuli as short or long.

Sequences of Intonation Units form a ~ 1 Hz rhythm.

Studies of speech processing investigate the relationship between temporal structure in speech stimuli and neural activity. Despite clear evidence that the brain tracks speech at low frequencies (~ 1 Hz), it is not well understood what linguistic information gives rise to this rhythm. In this study, we harness linguistic theory to draw attention to Intonation Units (IUs), a fundamental prosodic unit of human language, and characterize their temporal structure as captured in the speech envelope, an acoustic representation relevant to the neural processing of speech.

Beta-Band Activity Is a Signature of Statistical Learning.

Through statistical learning (SL), cognitive systems may discover the underlying regularities in the environment. Testing human adults ( = 35, 21 females), we document, in the context of a classical visual SL task, divergent rhythmic EEG activity in the interstimulus delay periods within patterns versus between patterns (i.e.

When Temporal Certainty Doesn't Help.

In a dynamically changing environment, the ability to capture regularities in our sensory input helps us generate predictions about future events. In most sensory systems, the basic finding is clear: Knowing when something will happen improves performance on it [Nobre, A. C.

Where Does Time Go When You Blink?

Retinal input is frequently lost because of eye blinks, yet humans rarely notice these gaps in visual input. Although previous studies focused on the perceptual and neural correlates of diminished awareness to blinks, the impact of these correlates on the perceived time of concurrent events is unknown. Here, we investigated whether the subjective sense of time is altered by spontaneous blinks.

Feature-Based Attention Samples Stimuli Rhythmically.

Attention supports the allocation of resources to relevant locations and objects in a scene. Under most conditions, several stimuli compete for neural representation. Attention biases neural representation toward the response associated with the attended object [1, 2].

Neuroscience: A Mechanism for Rhythmic Sampling in Vision.

Ongoing perception ebbs and flows rhythmically. Understanding the source and scope of this phenomenon is an important step in unraveling the foundations of sensory processing. A new study demonstrates that local neuronal interactions generate rhythmic brain activity and correspond to rhythmic performance patterns on a visual-detection task.

Distributed Attention Is Implemented through Theta-Rhythmic Gamma Modulation.

When subjects monitor a single location, visual target detection depends on the pre-target phase of an ∼8 Hz brain rhythm. When multiple locations are monitored, performance decrements suggest a division of the 8 Hz rhythm over the number of locations, indicating that different locations are sequentially sampled. Indeed, when subjects monitor two locations, performance benefits alternate at a 4 Hz rhythm.

Spatial attention and environmental information.

Navigating through our perceptual environment requires constant selection of behaviorally relevant information and irrelevant information. Spatial cues guide attention to information in the environment that is relevant to the current task. How does the amount of information provided by a location cue and irrelevant information influence the deployment of attention and what are the processes underlying this effect? To address these questions, we used a spatial cueing paradigm to measure the relationship between cue predictability (measured in bits of information) and the voluntary attention effect, the benefit in reaction time (RT) because of cueing a target.

Improved control of exogenous attention in action video game players.

Action video game players (VGPs) have demonstrated a number of attentional advantages over non-players. Here, we propose that many of those benefits might be underpinned by improved control over exogenous (i.e.

Extracting the mean size across the visual field in patients with mild, chronic unilateral neglect.

Previous studies suggest that normal vision pools information from groups of objects in a display to extract statistical summaries (e.g., mean size).

Cholinergic enhancement reduces orientation-specific surround suppression but not visual crowding.

Acetylcholine (ACh) reduces the spatial spread of excitatory fMRI responses in early visual cortex and receptive field size of V1 neurons. We investigated the perceptual consequences of these physiological effects of ACh with surround suppression and crowding, two phenomena that involve spatial interactions between visual field locations. Surround suppression refers to the reduction in perceived stimulus contrast by a high-contrast surround stimulus.

Attention samples stimuli rhythmically.

Overt exploration or sampling behaviors, such as whisking, sniffing, and saccadic eye movements, are often characterized by a rhythm. In addition, the electrophysiologically recorded theta or alpha phase predicts global detection performance. These two observations raise the intriguing possibility that covert selective attention samples from multiple stimuli rhythmically.

Voluntary and involuntary attention vary as a function of impulsivity.

In the present study we examined, first, whether voluntary and involuntary attention manifest differently in people who differ in impulsivity (measured with the Barratt Impulsivity Scale). For Experiment 1, we used the spatial cueing task with informative and noninformative spatial cues to probe voluntary and involuntary attention, respectively. We found that participants with high impulsivity scores exhibited larger involuntary attention effects, whereas participants with low impulsivity scores exhibited larger voluntary attention effects.

Action video game experience reduces the cost of switching tasks.

Video game expertise has been shown to have beneficial effects for visual attention processes, but the effects of action video game playing on executive functions, such as task switching and filtering out distracting information, are less well understood. In the main experiment presented here, video game players (VGPs) and nonplayers (nVGPs) switched between two tasks of unequal familiarity: a familiar task of responding in the direction indicated by an arrow, and a novel task of responding in the opposite direction. nVGPs had large response time costs for switching from the novel task to the familiar task, and small costs for switching from the familiar task to the novel task, replicating prior findings.

Modulation of inhibition of return by the dopamine D2 receptor agonist bromocriptine depends on individual DAT1 genotype.

Involuntary visual spatial attention is captured when a salient cue appears in the visual field. If a target appears soon after the cue, response times to targets at the cue location are faster relative to other locations. However, after longer cue-target intervals, responses to targets at the cue location are slower, due to inhibition of return (IOR).

Shifting attention in viewer- and object-based reference frames after unilateral brain injury.

The aims of the present study were to investigate the respective roles that object- and viewer-based reference frames play in reorienting visual attention, and to assess their influence after unilateral brain injury. To do so, we studied 16 right hemisphere injured (RHI) and 13 left hemisphere injured (LHI) patients. We used a cueing design that manipulates the location of cues and targets relative to a display comprised of two rectangles (i.

The influence of language on perception: listening to sentences about faces affects the perception of faces.

We examined the effect of linguistic comprehension on early perceptual encoding in a series of electrophysiological and behavioral studies on humans. Using the fact that pictures of faces elicit a robust and reliable evoked response that peaks at ∼170 ms after stimulus onset (N170), we measured the N170 to faces that were preceded by primes that referred to either faces or scenes. When the primes were auditory sentences, the magnitude of the N170 was larger when the face stimuli were preceded by sentences describing faces compared to sentences describing scenes.