A Standards Organization for Open and FAIR Neuroscience: the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility.

There is great need for coordination around standards and best practices in neuroscience to support efforts to make neuroscience a data-centric discipline. Major brain initiatives launched around the world are poised to generate huge stores of neuroscience data. At the same time, neuroscience, like many domains in biomedicine, is confronting the issues of transparency, rigor, and reproducibility.

Visual search and line bisection in hemianopia: computational modelling of cortical compensatory mechanisms and comparison with hemineglect.

Hemianopia patients have lost vision from the contralateral hemifield, but make behavioural adjustments to compensate for this field loss. As a result, their visual performance and behaviour contrast with those of hemineglect patients who fail to attend to objects contralateral to their lesion. These conditions differ in their ocular fixations and perceptual judgments.

Sensitivity and bias in decision-making under risk: evaluating the perception of reward, its probability and value.

Background: There are few clinical tools that assess decision-making under risk. Tests that characterize sensitivity and bias in decisions between prospects varying in magnitude and probability of gain may provide insights in conditions with anomalous reward-related behaviour.

Objective: We designed a simple test of how subjects integrate information about the magnitude and the probability of reward, which can determine discriminative thresholds and choice bias in decisions under risk.

Line bisection under an attentional gradient induced by simulated neglect in healthy subjects.

Whether an attentional gradient favouring the ipsilesional side is responsible for the line bisection errors in visual neglect is uncertain. We explored this by using a conjunction-search task on the right side of a computer screen to bias attention while healthy subjects performed line bisection. The first experiment used a probe detection task to confirm that the conjunction-search task created a rightward attentional gradient, as manifest in response times, detection rates, and fixation patterns.

Modelling visual neglect: computational insights into conscious perception.

Background: Visual neglect is an attentional deficit typically resulting from parietal cortex lesion and sometimes frontal lesion. Patients fail to attend to objects and events in the visual hemifield contralateral to their lesion during visual search.

Methodology/principal Finding: The aim of this work was to examine the effects of parietal and frontal lesion in an existing computational model of visual attention and search and simulate visual search behaviour under lesion conditions.

Eye movement and diffusion tensor imaging analysis of treatment effects in a Niemann-Pick Type C patient.

New treatment options for Niemann-Pick Type C (NPC) have recently become available. To assess the efficiency and efficacy of these new treatment markers for disease status and progression are needed. Both the diagnosis and the monitoring of disease progression are challenging and mostly rely on clinical impression and functional testing of horizontal eye movements.

Combined functional MRI and diffusion tensor imaging analysis of visual motion pathways.

Background: Motion perception may be preserved after damage to striate cortex (primary visual cortex, area V1). Awareness and normal discrimination of fast-moving stimuli have been observed even in the complete absence of V1. These facts suggest that motion-sensitive cortex (the V5/MT complex or V5/MT+) may be activated by direct thalamic or collicular inputs that bypass V1.

Modelling attention in individual cells leads to a system with realistic saccade behaviours.

Single cell recordings in monkey inferior temporal cortex (IT) and area V4 during visual search tasks indicate that modulation of responses by the search target object occurs in the late portion of the cell's sensory response (Chelazzi et al. in J Neurophysiol 80:2918-2940, 1998; Cereb Cortex 11:761-772, 2001) whereas attention to a spatial location influences earlier responses (Luck et al. in J Neurophysiol 77:24-42, 1997).

Scan patterns during the processing of facial expression versus identity: an exploration of task-driven and stimulus-driven effects.

Perceptual studies suggest that processing facial identity emphasizes upper-face information, whereas processing expressions of anger or happiness emphasizes the lower-face. The two goals of the present study were to determine (a) if the distributions of eye fixations reflect these upper/lower-face biases, and (b) whether this bias is task- or stimulus-driven. We presented a target face followed by a probe pair of morphed faces, neither of which was identical to the target.

Navigational skills correlate with hippocampal fractional anisotropy in humans.

Individuals vary widely in their ability to orient within the environment. We used diffusion tensor imaging to investigate whether this ability, as measured by navigational performance in a virtual environment, correlates with the anatomic structural properties of the hippocampus, i.e.

A model of active visual search with object-based attention guiding scan paths.

When a monkey searches for a colour and orientation feature conjunction target, the scan path is guided to target coloured locations in preference to locations containing the target orientation [Vision Res. 38 (1998b) 1805]. An active vision model, using biased competition, is able to replicate this behaviour.