Self-focused attention vs. negative attentional bias during public speech task in socially anxious individuals.

Enhanced self-focused attention (SFA) and negative attentional bias (NAB) towards social cues are characteristic hallmarks of social anxiety. It is essential to investigate these two attentional phenomena under socially relevant situations using comparable stimuli. In the present study, individuals with high social anxiety (HSA, n = 32) and low social anxiety (LSA, n = 29) were compared according to their attention toward self-related stimuli and toward positive, neutral, and negative feedback related stimuli.

Avoidance of all feedback? Attention allocation during and after public speech in social anxiety.

Background And Objectives: Attention avoidance of feedback-related stimuli is proposed to be associated with and maintain social anxiety. However, previous research has mainly focused on comparing the attention bias between two types of stimuli, while little is known about attention distribution patterns among positive, neutral, and negative feedback and non-feedback stimuli in individuals with high trait social anxiety (HSA) or low trait social anxiety (LSA).

Methods: The current study assessed eye movement pattern of participants with HSA or LSA during a speech task (high anxiety condition) or while solely watching audience feedback of the speech (low anxiety condition).

The Critical Role of V2 Population Receptive Fields in Visual Orientation Crowding.

Crowding, the identification difficulty for a target in the presence of nearby flankers, is an essential bottleneck for object recognition and visual awareness [1, 2]. As suggested by multitudes of behavioral studies, crowding occurs because the visual system lacks the necessary resolution (e.g.

[Applications of the population receptive field technique in the field of neural mechanisms of sensory perception].

The population receptive field (pRF) of a voxel is the joint receptive field of the population of neurons within the voxel. Using a non-invasive pRF technique, researcher can estimate the pRF position and size parameters of each voxel in human brain. These pRF parameters provide an excellent research basis to study neural mechanisms of sensory perception.

Attention Priority Map of Face Images in Human Early Visual Cortex.

Attention priority maps are topographic representations that are used for attention selection and guidance of task-related behavior during visual processing. Previous studies have identified attention priority maps of simple artificial stimuli in multiple cortical and subcortical areas, but investigating neural correlates of priority maps of natural stimuli is complicated by the complexity of their spatial structure and the difficulty of behaviorally characterizing their priority map. To overcome these challenges, we reconstructed the topographic representations of upright/inverted face images from fMRI BOLD signals in human early visual areas primary visual cortex (V1) and the extrastriate cortex (V2 and V3) based on a voxelwise population receptive field model.

Predictive feature remapping before saccadic eye movements.

Saccadic eye movements cause rapid and dramatic displacements of the retinal image of the visual world, yet our conscious perception of the world remains stable and continuous. A popular explanation for this remarkable ability of our visual system to compensate for the displacements is the predictive feature remapping theory. The theory proposes that, before saccades, the representation of a visual stimulus can be predictively transferred from neurons that initially encode the stimulus to neurons whose receptive fields will encompass the stimulus location after the saccade.

Decoding Visual Location From Neural Patterns in the Auditory Cortex of the Congenitally Deaf.

Sensory cortices of individuals who are congenitally deprived of a sense can exhibit considerable plasticity and be recruited to process information from the senses that remain intact. Here, we explored whether the auditory cortex of congenitally deaf individuals represents visual field location of a stimulus-a dimension that is represented in early visual areas. We used functional MRI to measure neural activity in auditory and visual cortices of congenitally deaf and hearing humans while they observed stimuli typically used for mapping visual field preferences in visual cortex.

Position shifts of fMRI-based population receptive fields in human visual cortex induced by Ponzo illusion.

Ponzo illusion is a well-known perceptual phenomenon in which the perceived sizes of visual objects are altered by visual depth cues created by converging lines at the horizon. One possible neural mechanism of the Ponzo illusion is the receptive field position shifts of V1 neurons, as supported by a recent monkey electrophysiological study (Ni et al. in Curr Biol 24(14):1653-1658, 2014).

Opposite modulation of high- and low-level visual aftereffects by perceptual grouping.

A fundamental task of visual perception is to group visual features - sometimes spatially separated and partially occluded - into coherent, unified representations of objects. Perceptual grouping can vastly simplify the description of a visual scene and is critical for our visual system to understand the three-dimensional visual world. Numerous neurophysiological and brain imaging studies have demonstrated that neural mechanisms of perceptual grouping are characterized by the enhancement of neural responses throughout the visual processing hierarchy, from lower visual areas processing grouped features to higher visual areas representing objects and shapes from grouping.

Effects of face view discrimination learning on N170 latency and amplitude.

Learning is critical for fast and efficient object recognition. However, the neural implementation of object learning in the human brain remains largely unknown. Using combined psychophysics and electroencephalogram (EEG), we investigated the effects of perceptual learning on face processing.

Learning to discriminate face views.

Although perceptual learning of simple visual features has been studied extensively and intensively for many years, we still know little about the mechanisms of perceptual learning of complex object recognition. In a series of seven experiments, human perceptual learning in discrimination of in-depth orientation of face view was studied using psychophysical methods. We trained subjects to discriminate face orientations around a face view (i.