Dynamics in typewriting performance reflect mental fatigue during real-life office work.

Mental fatigue has repeatedly been associated with decline in task performance in controlled situations, such as the lab, and in less controlled settings, such as the working environment. Given that a large number of factors can influence the course of mental fatigue, it is challenging to objectively and unobtrusively monitor mental fatigue on the work floor. We aimed to provide a proof of principle of a method to monitor mental fatigue in an uncontrolled office environment, and to study how typewriting dynamics change over different time-scales (i.

Age Modulates the Effects of Mental Fatigue on Typewriting.

In the present study, we examined whether age influences the effects of mental fatigue on task performance, and if we could validate the use of measures based on typing behavior as an index of the effects of mental fatigue on different aspects of cognition. Young ( = 24, 18-30 years) and middle-aged ( = 24, 50-67 years) participants performed a typewriting task and a mouse targeting task for 120 min. At the beginning and at the end of the experiment the level of subjective fatigue was assessed.

Corrigendum: Investigating Emotional Top Down Modulation of Ambiguous Faces by Single Pulse TMS on Early Visual Cortices.

[This corrects the article on p. 305 in vol. 10, PMID: 27445674.

Brain Potentials Highlight Stronger Implicit Food Memory for Taste than Health and Context Associations.

Increasingly consumption of healthy foods is advised to improve population health. Reasons people give for choosing one food over another suggest that non-sensory features like health aspects are appreciated as of lower importance than taste. However, many food choices are made in the absence of the actual perception of a food's sensory properties, and therefore highly rely on previous experiences of similar consumptions stored in memory.

Trial history effects in stroop task performance are independent of top-down control.

In this study we sought to elucidate what mechanisms underlie the effects of trial history on information processing. We explicitly focused on the contribution of conflict control and S-R binding to sequential trial effects. Performance and brain activity were measured during two hours of continuous Stroop task performance.

Why do we see what's not there?

Conscious perception is not the result of passively processing sensory input, but to large extent of active inference based on previous knowledge. This process of inference does go astray from time to time, and may lead to illusory perception: sometimes people see things that are not there. In a recent study we have shown that this inference may also be influenced by mood.

What you may not see might slow you down anyway: masked images and driving.

Many theories of driver behaviour suggest that unconscious or implicit emotions play a functional role in the shaping and control of behaviour. This has not been experimentally tested however. Therefore, in this study the effects of emotive masked images on driver behaviour were examined.

Act quickly, decide later: long-latency visual processing underlies perceptual decisions but not reflexive behavior.

Humans largely guide their behavior by their visual representation of the world. Recent studies have shown that visual information can trigger behavior within 150 msec, suggesting that visually guided responses to external events, in fact, precede conscious awareness of those events. However, is such a view correct? By using a texture discrimination task, we show that the brain relies on long-latency visual processing in order to guide perceptual decisions.

Music alters visual perception.

Background: Visual perception is not a passive process: in order to efficiently process visual input, the brain actively uses previous knowledge (e.g., memory) and expectations about what the world should look like.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation-induced 'visual echoes' are generated in early visual cortex.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of the early visual areas can trigger perception of a flash of light, a so-called phosphene. Here we show that a very brief presentation of a stimulus can modulate features of a subsequent TMS-induced phosphene, to a level that participants mistake phosphenes for real stimuli, inducing 'visual echoes' of a previously seen stimulus. These 'echoes' are modulated by visual context at the moment of magnetic stimulation, showing that they are generated in early visual areas, and that the brain processes these 'echoes' as if they are factually presented stimuli.

Long-lasting modulation of feature integration by transcranial magnetic stimulation.

The human brain analyzes a visual object first by basic feature detectors. On the objects way to a conscious percept, these features are integrated in subsequent stages of the visual hierarchy. The time course of this feature integration is largely unknown.

Feedforward and recurrent processing in scene segmentation: electroencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging.

In texture segregation, an example of scene segmentation, we can discern two different processes: texture boundary detection and subsequent surface segregation [Lamme, V. A. F.

Processing speed in recurrent visual networks correlates with general intelligence.

Studies on the neural basis of general fluid intelligence strongly suggest that a smarter brain processes information faster. Different brain areas, however, are interconnected by both feedforward and feedback projections. Whether both types of connections or only one of the two types are faster in smarter brains remains unclear.

Figure-ground segregation requires two distinct periods of activity in V1: a transcranial magnetic stimulation study.

Discriminating objects from their surroundings by the visual system is known as figure-ground segregation. This process entails two different subprocesses: boundary detection and subsequent surface segregation or 'filling in'. In this study, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation to test the hypothesis that temporally distinct processes in V1 and related early visual areas such as V2 or V3 are causally related to the process of figure-ground segregation.

Repression of unconscious information by conscious processing: evidence from affective blindsight induced by transcranial magnetic stimulation.

Some patients with a lesion to the primary visual cortex (V1) show "blindsight": the remarkable ability to guess correctly about attributes of stimuli presented to the blind hemifield. Here, we show that blindsight can be induced in normal observers by using transcranial magnetic stimulation of the occipital cortex but exclusively for the affective content of unseen stimuli. Surprisingly, access to the affective content of stimuli disappears upon prolonged task training or when stimulus visibility increases, allegedly increasing the subjects' confidence in their overall performance.