The rise and fall of face recognition awareness across the life span.

A core component of metacognition is cognitive awareness, insight into how one's cognitive abilities compare with others. Previous studies of cognitive awareness have focused on basic aspects of perception, memory, and learning. Further, studies of the awareness of one's social-cognitive abilities have been limited to examining awareness of ' thinking (i.

Comparing the sensitivity of face matching assessments to detect face perception impairments.

Numerous neurological, developmental, and psychiatric conditions demonstrate impaired face recognition, which can be socially debilitating. These impairments can be caused by either deficient face perception or face memory mechanisms. Though there are well-validated, sensitive measures of face memory impairments, it currently remains unclear which assessments best measure face perception impairments.

Attention Biases Competition for Visual Representation via Dissociable Influences from Frontal and Parietal Cortex.

What mechanisms underlie the prioritization of neural representations of visually perceived information to guide behavior? We assessed the dynamics whereby attention biases competition for representation of visual stimuli by enhancing representations of relevant information and suppressing the irrelevant. Multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) classifiers were trained to discriminate patterns of fMRI activity associated with each of three stimuli, within several predefined ROIs. Participants performed a change-detection task wherein two of three presented items flashed at 1 Hz, one to each side of central fixation.

Characterizing developmental prosopagnosia beyond face perception: Impaired recollection but intact familiarity recognition.

Converging lines of research suggests that many developmental prosopagnosics (DPs) have impairments beyond face perception, but currently no framework exists to characterize these impaired mechanisms. One potential extra-perceptual deficit is that DPs encode/retrieve faces in a distinct manner from controls that does not sufficiently support individuation. To test this possibility, 30 DPs and 30 matched controls performed an old/new face recognition task while providing confidence ratings, to which a model-based ROC analysis was applied.

Self-reported face recognition is highly valid, but alone is not highly discriminative of prosopagnosia-level performance on objective assessments.

Severe developmental deficits in face recognition ability (developmental prosopagnosia, or DP) have been vigorously studied over the past decade, yet many questions remain unanswered about their origins, nature, and social consequences. A rate-limiting factor in answering such questions is the challenge of recruiting rare DP participants. Although self-reported experiences have long played a role in efforts to identify DPs, much remains unknown about how such self-reports can or should contribute to screening or diagnosis.

Network-targeted cerebellar transcranial magnetic stimulation improves attentional control.

Developing non-invasive brain stimulation interventions to improve attentional control is extremely relevant to a variety of neurological and psychiatric populations, yet few studies have identified reliable biomarkers that can be readily modified to improve attentional control. One potential biomarker of attention is functional connectivity in the core cortical network supporting attention - the dorsal attention network (DAN). We used a network-targeted cerebellar transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) procedure, intended to enhance cortical functional connectivity in the DAN.

Consciousness and cortical responsiveness: a within-state study during non-rapid eye movement sleep.

When subjects become unconscious, there is a characteristic change in the way the cerebral cortex responds to perturbations, as can be assessed using transcranial magnetic stimulation and electroencephalography (TMS-EEG). For instance, compared to wakefulness, during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep TMS elicits a larger positive-negative wave, fewer phase-locked oscillations, and an overall simpler response. However, many physiological variables also change when subjects go from wake to sleep, anesthesia, or coma.

Partial dissociation in the neural bases of VSTM and imagery in the early visual cortex.

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) and visual imagery are believed to involve overlapping neuronal representations in the early visual cortex. While a number of studies have provided evidence for this overlap, at the behavioral level VSTM and imagery are dissociable processes; this begs the question of how their neuronal mechanisms differ. Here we used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to examine whether the neural bases of imagery and VSTM maintenance are dissociable in the early visual cortex (EVC).

Contrast and strength of visual memory and imagery differentially affect visual perception.

Visual short-term memory (VSTM) and visual imagery have been shown to modulate visual perception. However, how the subjective experience of VSTM/imagery and its contrast modulate this process has not been investigated. We addressed this issue by asking participants to detect brief masked targets while they were engaged either in VSTM or visual imagery.

How visual short-term memory maintenance modulates subsequent visual aftereffects.

Prolonged viewing of a visual stimulus can result in sensory adaptation, giving rise to perceptual phenomena such as the tilt aftereffect (TAE). However, it is not known if short-term memory maintenance induces such effects. We examined how visual short-term memory (VSTM) maintenance modulates the strength of the TAE induced by subsequent visual adaptation.

How visual short-term memory maintenance modulates the encoding of external input: evidence from concurrent visual adaptation and TMS.

The impact of memory representations on the encoding of visual input has been the subject of much debate. Here we investigated this issue by examining how visual short-term memory (VSTM) maintenance of orientation information modulates the strength of the tilt aftereffect (TAE) induced by a concurrent visual adapter. We reasoned that if VSTM maintenance facilitates visual processing of stimuli that match the VSTM content, then the magnitude of the TAE should be enhanced when the orientations of the memory item and the adapter are identical.