Publications by authors named "E E Lalor"
Altered neural response to social awkwardness in schizophrenia spectrum disorders.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci
December 2024
Article Synopsis
- Individuals with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) struggle with processing social information and have issues with "theory of mind" (ToM), which is essential for understanding others' mental states.
- A study using fMRI while participants watched The Office revealed that SSD individuals show less neural response in the medial prefrontal cortex during socially awkward moments, indicating a disruption in the ToM network.
- The findings suggest that this reduced activation and connectivity in the ToM network correlate with psychotic experiences and social dysfunction, implying that SSD individuals may have a diminished capacity for social understanding during real-life interactions.
Article Synopsis
- The human brain transforms continuous speech into words by interpreting various factors like intonation and accents, and this process can be modeled using EEG recordings.
- Contemporary models tend to overlook how sounds are categorized in the brain, limiting our understanding of speech processing.
- The study finds that deep-learning systems like Whisper improve EEG modeling of speech comprehension by incorporating context and demonstrating that linguistic structure is crucial for accurate brain function representation, especially in complex listening environments.
The effect of gaze on EEG measures of multisensory integration in a cocktail party scenario.
Front Hum Neurosci
December 2023
Seeing the speaker's face greatly improves our speech comprehension in noisy environments. This is due to the brain's ability to combine the auditory and the visual information around us, a process known as multisensory integration. Selective attention also strongly influences what we comprehend in scenarios with multiple speakers-an effect known as the cocktail-party phenomenon.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThere is considerable debate over how visual speech is processed in the absence of sound and whether neural activity supporting lipreading occurs in visual brain areas. Much of the ambiguity stems from a lack of behavioral grounding and neurophysiological analyses that cannot disentangle high-level linguistic and phonetic/energetic contributions from visual speech. To address this, we recorded EEG from human observers as they watched silent videos, half of which were novel and half of which were previously rehearsed with the accompanying audio.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeurophysiology research has demonstrated that it is possible and valuable to investigate sensory processing in scenarios involving continuous sensory streams, such as speech and music. Over the past 10 years or so, novel analytic frameworks combined with the growing participation in data sharing has led to a surge of publicly available datasets involving continuous sensory experiments. However, open science efforts in this domain of research remain scattered, lacking a cohesive set of guidelines.
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