Causal evidence for increased theta and gamma phase consistency in a parieto-frontal network during the maintenance of visual attention.

Endogenous visuo-spatial attention is under the control of a fronto-parietal network of brain regions. One key node in this network, the intra-parietal sulcus (IPS), plays a crucial role in maintaining endogenous attention, but little is known about its ongoing physiology and network dynamics during different attentional states. Here, we investigated the reactivity of the left IPS in response to brain stimulation under different states of selective attention.

Multivariate and network lesion mapping reveals distinct architectures of domain-specific post-stroke cognitive impairments.

Background: The purpose of this study was to identify patterns of structural disconnection and multivariate lesion-behaviour relationships associated with post-stroke deficits across six commonly impacted cognitive domains: executive function, language, memory, numerical processing, praxis, and visuospatial attention.

Methods: Stroke survivors (n = 593) completed a brief domain-specific cognitive assessment (the Oxford Cognitive Screen (OCS)) during acute hospitalisation. Network-level and multivariate (sparce canonical correlation) lesion mapping analyses were conducted to identify focal neural correlates and distributed patterns of structural disconnection associated with impairment on each of the 16 OCS measures.

Integrated Perceptual Decisions Rely on Parallel Evidence Accumulation.

The ability to make accurate and timely decisions, such as judging when it is safe to cross the road, is the foundation of adaptive behavior. While the computational and neural processes supporting simple decisions on isolated stimuli have been well characterized, decision-making in the real world often requires integration of discrete sensory events over time and space. Most previous experimental work on perceptual decision-making has focused on tasks that involve only a single, task-relevant source of sensory input.

A computational account of transsaccadic attentional allocation based on visual gain fields.

Coordination of goal-directed behavior depends on the brain's ability to recover the locations of relevant objects in the world. In humans, the visual system encodes the spatial organization of sensory inputs, but neurons in early visual areas map objects according to their retinal positions, rather than where they are in the world. How the brain computes world-referenced spatial information across eye movements has been widely researched and debated.

Stimulating prefrontal cortex facilitates training transfer by increasing representational overlap.

A recent hypothesis characterizes difficulties in multitasking as being the price humans pay for our ability to generalize learning across tasks. The mitigation of these costs through training has been associated with reduced overlap of constituent task representations within frontal, parietal, and subcortical regions. Transcranial direct current stimulation, which can modulate functional brain activity, has shown promise in generalizing performance gains when combined with multitasking training.

Distinct neural markers of evidence accumulation index metacognitive processing before and after simple visual decisions.

Perceptual decision-making is affected by uncertainty arising from the reliability of incoming sensory evidence (perceptual uncertainty) and the categorization of that evidence relative to a choice boundary (categorical uncertainty). Here, we investigated how these factors impact the temporal dynamics of evidence processing during decision-making and subsequent metacognitive judgments. Participants performed a motion discrimination task while electroencephalography was recorded.

Effects of neural oscillation power and phase on discrimination performance in a visual tilt illusion.

Neural oscillations reflect fluctuations in the relative excitation/inhibition of neural systems and are theorized to play a critical role in canonical neural computations and cognitive processes. These theories have been supported by findings that detection of visual stimuli fluctuates with the phase of oscillations prior to stimulus onset. However, null results have emerged in studies seeking to demonstrate these effects in visual discrimination tasks, raising questions about the generalizability of these phenomena to wider neural processes.

Neurochemical Predictors of Generalized Learning Induced by Brain Stimulation and Training.

Methods of cognitive enhancement for humans are most impactful when they generalize across tasks. However, the extent to which such "transfer" is possible via interventions is widely debated. In addition, the contribution of excitatory and inhibitory processes to such transfer is unknown.

Tests for consciousness in humans and beyond.

Which systems/organisms are conscious? New tests for consciousness ('C-tests') are urgently needed. There is persisting uncertainty about when consciousness arises in human development, when it is lost due to neurological disorders and brain injury, and how it is distributed in nonhuman species. This need is amplified by recent and rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI), neural organoids, and xenobot technology.

Neurodesk: an accessible, flexible and portable data analysis environment for reproducible neuroimaging.

Neuroimaging research requires purpose-built analysis software, which is challenging to install and may produce different results across computing environments. The community-oriented, open-source Neurodesk platform ( https://www.neurodesk.

Neural substrates of individual differences in learning generalization via combined brain stimulation and multitasking training.

A pervasive limitation in cognition is reflected by the performance costs we experience when attempting to undertake two tasks simultaneously. While training can overcome these multitasking costs, the more elusive objective of training interventions is to induce persistent gains that transfer across tasks. Combined brain stimulation and cognitive training protocols have been employed to improve a range of psychological processes and facilitate such transfer, with consistent gains demonstrated in multitasking and decision-making.

The influence of natural image statistics on upright orientation judgements.

Humans have well-documented priors for many features present in nature that guide visual perception. Despite being putatively grounded in the statistical regularities of the environment, scene priors are frequently violated due to the inherent variability of visual features from one scene to the next. However, these repeated violations do not appreciably challenge visuo-cognitive function, necessitating the broad use of priors in conjunction with context-specific information.

Comprehensive voxel-wise, tract-based, and network lesion mapping reveals unique architectures of right and left visuospatial neglect.

Visuospatial neglect is a common, post-stroke cognitive impairment which is widely considered to be a disconnection syndrome. However, the patterns of disconnectivity associated with visuospatial neglect remain unclear. Here, we had 480 acute stroke survivors [age = 72.

Modality independent or modality specific? Common computations underlie confidence judgements in visual and auditory decisions.

The mechanisms that enable humans to evaluate their confidence across a range of different decisions remain poorly understood. To bridge this gap in understanding, we used computational modelling to investigate the processes that underlie confidence judgements for perceptual decisions and the extent to which these computations are the same in the visual and auditory modalities. Participants completed two versions of a categorisation task with visual or auditory stimuli and made confidence judgements about their category decisions.

Fractionating distraction: How past- and future-relevant distractors influence integrated decisions.

Many everyday tasks require us to integrate information from multiple steps to make a decision. Dominant accounts of flexible cognition suggest that we are able to navigate such complex tasks by attending to each step in turn, yet few studies measure how we direct our attention to immediate and future task steps. Here, we used a two-step task to test whether participants are sensitive to information that is currently irrelevant but will be relevant in a future task step.

White matter microstructure is associated with the precision of visual working memory.

Visual working memory is critical for goal-directed behavior as it maintains continuity between previous and current visual input. Functional neuroimaging studies have shown that visual working memory relies on communication between distributed brain regions, which implies an important role for long-range white matter connections in visual working memory performance. Here, we characterized the relationship between the microstructure of white matter association tracts and the precision of visual working memory representations.

Neurodesk: An accessible, flexible, and portable data analysis environment for reproducible neuroimaging.

Neuroimaging data analysis often requires purpose-built software, which can be challenging to install and may produce different results across computing environments. Beyond being a roadblock to neuroscientists, these issues of accessibility and portability can hamper the reproducibility of neuroimaging data analysis pipelines. Here, we introduce the Neurodesk platform, which harnesses software containers to support a comprehensive and growing suite of neuroimaging software (https://www.

Expectation violations enhance neuronal encoding of sensory information in mouse primary visual cortex.

The response of cortical neurons to sensory stimuli is shaped both by past events (adaptation) and the expectation of future events (prediction). Here we employed a visual stimulus paradigm with different levels of predictability to characterise how expectation influences orientation selectivity in the primary visual cortex (V1) of male mice. We recorded neuronal activity using two-photon calcium imaging (GCaMP6f) while animals viewed sequences of grating stimuli which either varied randomly in their orientations or rotated predictably with occasional transitions to an unexpected orientation.

Distinct early and late neural mechanisms regulate feature-specific sensory adaptation in the human visual system.

A canonical feature of sensory systems is that they adapt to prolonged or repeated inputs, suggesting the brain encodes the temporal context in which stimuli are embedded. Sensory adaptation has been observed in the central nervous systems of many animal species, using techniques sensitive to a broad range of spatiotemporal scales of neural activity. Two competing models have been proposed to account for the phenomenon.

The neuroanatomy of visuospatial neglect: A systematic review and analysis of lesion-mapping methodology.

While visuospatial neglect is commonly associated with damage to the right posterior parietal cortex, neglect is an anatomically heterogenous syndrome. This project presents a systematic review of 34 lesion-mapping studies reporting on the anatomical correlates of neglect. Specifically, the reported correlates of egocentric versus allocentric, acute versus chronic, personal versus extra-personal, and left versus right hemisphere neglect are summarised.

Increased functional activity, bottom-up and intrinsic effective connectivity in autism.

Sensory perceptual alterations such as sensory sensitivities in autism have been proposed to be caused by differences in sensory observation (Likelihood) or in forming models of the environment (Prior), which result in an increase in bottom-up information flow relative to top-down control. To investigate this conjecture, we had autistic individuals (AS) and neurotypicals (NT) perform a decision-under-uncertainty paradigm while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). There were no group differences in task performance and in Prior and Likelihood representations in brain activity.

Neurophysiological evidence against attentional suppression as the source of the same-location cost in spatial cueing.

Spatial cues that mismatch the colour of a subsequent target have been shown to slow responses to targets that share their location. The source of this 'same location cost' (SLC) is currently unknown. Two potential sources are attentional signal suppression and object-file updating.