Mask wearing affects emotion perception.

To reduce the spread of COVID-19, mask wearing has become ubiquitous in much of the world. We studied the extent to which masks impair emotion recognition and dampen the perceived intensity of facial expressions by naturalistically inducing positive, neutral, and negative emotions in individuals while they were masked and unmasked. Two groups of online participants rated the emotional intensity of each presented image.

Low-frequency cortical activity is a neuromodulatory target that tracks recovery after stroke.

Recent work has highlighted the importance of transient low-frequency oscillatory (LFO; <4 Hz) activity in the healthy primary motor cortex during skilled upper-limb tasks. These brief bouts of oscillatory activity may establish the timing or sequencing of motor actions. Here, we show that LFOs track motor recovery post-stroke and can be a physiological target for neuromodulation.

Auditory event-related potentials associated with perceptual reversals of bistable pitch motion.

Previous event-related potential (ERP) experiments have consistently identified two components associated with perceptual transitions of bistable visual stimuli, the "reversal negativity" (RN) and the "late positive complex" (LPC). The RN (~200 ms post-stimulus, bilateral occipital-parietal distribution) is thought to reflect transitions between neural representations that form the moment-to-moment contents of conscious perception, while the LPC (~400 ms, central-parietal) is considered an index of post-perceptual processing related to accessing and reporting one's percept. To explore the generality of these components across sensory modalities, the present experiment utilized a novel bistable auditory stimulus.