An experimental paradigm for studying sense of agency in joint human-machine motor actions.

In this paper, we propose an experimental technique for studying the sense of agency (SoA) in joint human-machine actions. This technique is based on the use of an electromechanical finger-lifting device that enables a joint motor action initiated by a participant and completed by the machine. The joint action, later referred to as an "active-passive" action, was implemented as a reaction time task and contrasted with other levels of participant's involvement, including active movement, passive movement, and observation of a dummy's movement.

A passive BCI for monitoring the intentionality of the gaze-based moving object selection.

The use of an electroencephalogram (EEG) anticipation-related component, the expectancy wave (E-wave), in brain-machine interaction was proposed more than 50 years ago. This possibility was not explored for decades, but recently it was shown that voluntary attempts to select items using eye fixations, but not spontaneous eye fixations, are accompanied by the E-wave. Thus, the use of the E-wave detection was proposed for the enhancement of gaze interaction technology, which has a strong need for a mean to decide if a gaze behavior is voluntary or not.

Size matters: How reaching and vergence movements are influenced by the familiar size of stereoscopically presented objects.

The knowledge about the usual size of objects-familiar size-is known to be a taken into account for distance perception. The influence of familiar size on action programming is less clear and has not yet been tested with regard to vergence eye movements. In two experiments, we stereoscopically presented everyday objects, such as a credit card or a package of paper tissues, and varied the distance as specified by binocular disparity and the distance as specified by familiar size.

Consciousness in a multilevel architecture: What causes the lateralization of effective connectivity under resting state?

Here we present our answers to a critical commentary by Elkhonon Goldberg on our recent publication (Velichkovsky et al., 2018). To avoid discussions about novelty effects in the human brain activity and memory processes, we narrowed down this response to a reanalysis of our data along the lines proposed in the commentary, namely to comparing the effective links between symmetrical brain structures during the first and the last parts of a prolonged resting-state fMRI experiment.

Consciousness in a multilevel architecture: Evidence from the right side of the brain.

By taking into account Bruce Bridgeman's interest in an evolutionary framing of human cognition, we examine effective (cause-and-effect) connectivity among cortical structures related to different parts of the triune phylogenetic stratification: archicortex, paleocortex and neocortex. Using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging data from 25 healthy subjects and spectral Dynamic Causal Modeling, we report interactions among 10 symmetrical left and right brain areas. Our results testify to general rightward and top-down biases in excitatory interactions of these structures during resting state, when self-related contemplation prevails over more objectified conceptual thinking.

Gaze3DFix: Detecting 3D fixations with an ellipsoidal bounding volume.

Nowadays, the use of eyetracking to determine 2-D gaze positions is common practice, and several approaches to the detection of 2-D fixations exist, but ready-to-use algorithms to determine eye movements in three dimensions are still missing. Here we present a dispersion-based algorithm with an ellipsoidal bounding volume that estimates 3D fixations. Therefore, 3D gaze points are obtained using a vector-based approach and are further processed with our algorithm.

EEG Negativity in Fixations Used for Gaze-Based Control: Toward Converting Intentions into Actions with an Eye-Brain-Computer Interface.

We usually look at an object when we are going to manipulate it. Thus, eye tracking can be used to communicate intended actions. An effective human-machine interface, however, should be able to differentiate intentional and spontaneous eye movements.

Dynamic Causal Modeling of Hippocampal Links within the Human Default Mode Network: Lateralization and Computational Stability of Effective Connections.

The purpose of this paper was to study causal relationships between left and right hippocampal regions (LHIP and RHIP, respectively) within the default mode network (DMN) as represented by its key structures: the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and the inferior parietal cortex of left (LIPC) and right (RIPC) hemispheres. Furthermore, we were interested in testing the stability of the connectivity patterns when adding or deleting regions of interest. The functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from a group of 30 healthy right-handed subjects in the resting state were collected and a connectivity analysis was performed.

Changes in snoRNA and snRNA Abundance in the Human, Chimpanzee, Macaque, and Mouse Brain.

Small nuclear and nucleolar RNAs (snRNAs and snoRNAs) are known to be functionally and evolutionarily conserved elements of transcript processing machinery. Here, we investigated the expression evolution of snRNAs and snoRNAs by measuring their abundance in the frontal cortex of humans, chimpanzees, rhesus monkeys, and mice. Although snRNA expression is largely conserved, 44% of the 185 measured snoRNA and 40% of the 134 snoRNA families showed significant expression divergence among species.

Effective Connectivity within the Default Mode Network: Dynamic Causal Modeling of Resting-State fMRI Data.

The Default Mode Network (DMN) is a brain system that mediates internal modes of cognitive activity, showing higher neural activation when one is at rest. Nowadays, there is a lot of interest in assessing functional interactions between its key regions, but in the majority of studies only association of Blood-oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) activation patterns is measured, so it is impossible to identify causal influences. There are some studies of causal interactions (i.

Effects of driving time on microsaccadic dynamics.

Driver fatigue is a common cause of car accidents. Thus, the objective detection of driver fatigue is a first step toward the effective management of fatigue-related traffic accidents. Here, we investigated the effects of driving time, a common inducer of driver fatigue, on the dynamics of fixational eye movements.

Attentional dynamics during free picture viewing: Evidence from oculomotor behavior and electrocortical activity.

Most empirical evidence on attentional control is based on brief presentations of rather abstract stimuli. Results revealed indications for a dynamic interplay between bottom-up and top-down attentional mechanisms. Here we used a more naturalistic task to examine temporal signatures of attentional mechanisms on fine and coarse time scales.

I see you remembering: what eye movements can reveal about process characteristics of prospective memory.

Prospective memory performance describes the delayed execution of an intended action. As this requires a mixture of memory and attentional control functions, current research aims at delineating the specific processes associated with solving a prospective memory task. Therefore, the current study measured, analysed and compared eye movements of participants who performed a prospective memory, a free viewing, and a visual search task.

Gaze transfer in remote cooperation: is it always helpful to see what your partner is attending to?

Establishing common ground in remote cooperation is challenging because nonverbal means of ambiguity resolution are limited. In such settings, information about a partner's gaze can support cooperative performance, but it is not yet clear whether and to what extent the abundance of information reflected in gaze comes at a cost. Specifically, in tasks that mainly rely on spatial referencing, gaze transfer might be distracting and leave the partner uncertain about the meaning of the gaze cursor.

Comparing two types of engineering visualizations: task-related manipulations matter.

This study focuses on the comparison of traditional engineering drawings with a CAD (computer aided design) visualization in terms of user performance and eye movements in an applied context. Twenty-five students of mechanical engineering completed search tasks for measures in two distinct depictions of a car engine component (engineering drawing vs. CAD model).

Fixation based event-related fmri analysis: using eye fixations as events in functional magnetic resonance imaging to reveal cortical processing during the free exploration of visual images.

Eye movements, comprising predominantly fixations and saccades, are known to reveal information about perception and cognition, and they provide an explicit measure of attention. Nevertheless, fixations have not been considered as events in the analyses of data obtained during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments. Most likely, this is due to their brevity and statistical properties.

Saccadic context indicates information processing within visual fixations: evidence from event-related potentials and eye-movements analysis of the distractor effect.

Attention, visual information processing, and oculomotor control are integrated functions of closely related brain mechanisms. Recently, it was shown that the processing of visual distractors appearing during a fixation is modulated by the amplitude of its preceding saccade (Pannasch & Velichkovsky, 2009). So far, this was demonstrated only at the behavioral level in terms of saccadic inhibition.

On the control of visual fixation durations in free viewing of complex images.

The mechanisms for the substantial variation in the durations of visual fixations in scene perception are not yet well understood. During free viewing of paintings, gaze-contingent irrelevant distractors (Exp. 1) and non-gaze-related time-locked display changes (Exp.

Saccadic peak velocity sensitivity to variations in mental workload.

Introduction: For research and applications in the field of (neuro)ergonomics, it is of increasing importance to have reliable methods for measuring mental workload. In the present study we examined the hypothesis that saccadic eye movements can be used for an online assessment of mental workload.

Methods: Saccadic main sequence (amplitude, duration and peak velocity) was used as a diagnostic measure of mental workload in a virtual driving task with three complexity levels.

Yarbus, eye movements, and vision.

The impact of Yarbus's research on eye movements was enormous following the translation of his book Eye Movements and Vision into English in 1967. In stark contrast, the published material in English concerning his life is scant. We provide a brief biography of Yarbus and assess his impact on contemporary approaches to research on eye movements.

Virtual friend or threat? The effects of facial expression and gaze interaction on psychophysiological responses and emotional experience.

The present study aimed to investigate the impact of facial expression, gaze interaction, and gender on attention allocation, physiological arousal, facial muscle responses, and emotional experience in simulated social interactions. Participants viewed animated virtual characters varying in terms of gender, gaze interaction, and facial expression. We recorded facial EMG, fixation duration, pupil size, and subjective experience.

The effects of self-involvement on attention, arousal, and facial expression during social interaction with virtual others: a psychophysiological study.

Social neuroscience has shed light on the underpinnings of understanding other minds. The current study investigated the effect of self-involvement during social interaction on attention, arousal, and facial expression. Specifically, we sought to disentangle the effect of being personally addressed from the effect of decoding the meaning of another person's facial expression.

Surprise, surprise: two distinct components in the visually evoked distractor effect.

The distractor effect is an inhibition of saccades shortly after a sudden visual event. It has been explained both as an oculomotor reflex and as a manifestation of the orienting response. To clarify which explanation is more appropriate, we investigated a possible habituation of this effect.

Blinks, blanks and saccades: how blind we really are for relevant visual events.

We report on a study in which subjects viewed color video stills of natural traffic situations while eye movements were recorded. A display change could occur randomly during three different occlusion modes--blinks, blanks and saccades--or during a fixation. These changes could be either relevant or irrelevant with respect to the traffic safety situation.

Heterarchy of cognition: the depths and the highs of a framework for memory research.

To celebrate the levels-of-processing approach, I describe a multilevel evolutionary architecture for human behaviour and cognition. New experimental data on human eye movements are presented that demonstrate a possibility of splitting visual perceptual activity at least on two hierarchical but closely interrelated levels of processing. Furthermore, data from behavioural studies of human memory and neuroimaging testify that within the domain of cognition proper two higher levels can be differentiated.