Neural Signatures of Predictive Strategies Track Individuals Along the Autism-Schizophrenia Continuum.

Background And Hypothesis: Humans develop a constellation of different representations of the external environment, even in the face of the same sensory exposure. According to the Bayesian framework, these differentiations could be grounded in a different weight assigned to prior knowledge vs. new external inputs in predictive inference.

Individual Alpha Frequency Contributes to the Precision of Human Visual Processing.

Brain oscillatory activity within the alpha band has been associated with a wide range of processes encompassing perception, memory, decision-making, and overall cognitive functioning. Individual alpha frequency (IAF) is a specific parameter accounting for the mean velocity of the alpha cycling activity, conventionally ranging between ∼7 and ∼13 Hz. One influential hypothesis has proposed a fundamental role of this cycling activity in the segmentation of sensory input and in the regulation of the speed of sensory processing, with faster alpha oscillations resulting in greater temporal resolution and more refined perceptual experience.

Excitation-Inhibition Imbalance in Migraine: From Neurotransmitters to Brain Oscillations.

Migraine is among the most common and debilitating neurological disorders typically affecting people of working age. It is characterised by a unilateral, pulsating headache often associated with severe pain. Despite the intensive research, there is still little understanding of the pathophysiology of migraine.

Rhythmic TMS as a Feasible Tool to Uncover the Oscillatory Signatures of Audiovisual Integration.

Multisensory integration is quintessential to adaptive behavior, with clinical populations showing significant impairments in this domain, most notably hallucinatory reports. Interestingly, altered cross-modal interactions have also been reported in healthy individuals when engaged in tasks such as the Sound-Induced Flash-Illusion (SIFI). The temporal dynamics of the SIFI have been recently tied to the speed of occipital alpha rhythms (IAF), with faster oscillations entailing reduced temporal windows within which the illusion is experienced.

Antivax attitude in the general population along the autism-schizophrenia continuum and the impact of socio-demographic factors.

Introduction: One of the most important inventions in human history is vaccines. However, to date a consistent amount of people exhibit a hesitant approach toward them and mixed results have emerged in the attempt to characterize which factors may play a role in predicting such negative attitude. Here, we aimed at investigating how the individual scoring along the autism-schizophrenic continuum component and socio-cultural factors contribute toward vaccination attitudes in the general population.

The Role of Alpha Oscillations among the Main Neuropsychiatric Disorders in the Adult and Developing Human Brain: Evidence from the Last 10 Years of Research.

Alpha oscillations (7-13 Hz) are the dominant rhythm in both the resting and active brain. Accordingly, translational research has provided evidence for the involvement of aberrant alpha activity in the onset of symptomatological features underlying syndromes such as autism, schizophrenia, major depression, and Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). However, findings on the matter are difficult to reconcile due to the variety of paradigms, analyses, and clinical phenotypes at play, not to mention recent technical and methodological advances in this domain.

Are you an empiricist or a believer? Neural signatures of predictive strategies in humans.

Predictive coding theory suggests that prior knowledge assists human behavior, from simple perceptual formation to complex decision-making processes. Here, we manipulate prior knowledge by inducing uninformative vs. informative (low and high) target probability expectation in a perceptual decision-making task while simultaneously recording EEG.

Bottom-up vs. top-down connectivity imbalance in individuals with high-autistic traits: An electroencephalographic study.

Brain connectivity is often altered in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, there is little consensus on the nature of these alterations, with studies pointing to either increased or decreased connectivity strength across the broad autism spectrum. An important confound in the interpretation of these contradictory results is the lack of information about the directionality of the tested connections.

Human perceptual and metacognitive decision-making rely on distinct brain networks.

Perceptual decisions depend on the ability to exploit available sensory information in order to select the most adaptive option from a set of alternatives. Such decisions depend on the perceptual sensitivity of the organism, which is generally accompanied by a corresponding level of certainty about the choice made. Here, by use of corticocortical paired associative transcranial magnetic stimulation protocol (ccPAS) aimed at inducing plastic changes, we shaped perceptual sensitivity and metacognitive ability in a motion discrimination task depending on the targeted network, demonstrating their functional dissociation.

The Directionality of Fronto-Posterior Brain Connectivity Is Associated with the Degree of Individual Autistic Traits.

Altered patterns of brain connectivity have been found in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and associated with specific symptoms and behavioral features. Growing evidence suggests that the autistic peculiarities are not confined to the clinical population but extend along a continuum between healthy and maladaptive conditions. The aim of this study was to investigate whether a differentiated connectivity pattern could also be tracked along the continuum of autistic traits in a non-clinical population.

Predictive waves in the autism-schizophrenia continuum: A novel biobehavioral model.

The brain is a predictive machine. Converging data suggests a diametric predictive strategy from autism spectrum disorders (ASD) to schizophrenic spectrum disorders (SSD). Whereas perceptual inference in ASD is rigidly shaped by incoming sensory information, the SSD population is prone to overestimate the precision of their priors' models.