Seeing fast and slow: the influence of music-induced affective states and individual sensory sensitivity on visual processing speed.

There is a speed-accuracy trade-off in perception. The ability to quickly extract sensory information is critical for survival, while extended processing can improve our accuracy. It has been suggested that emotions can change our style of processing, but their influence on processing speed is not yet clear.

Atypical oscillatory and aperiodic signatures of visual sampling in developmental dyslexia.

Temporal processing deficits in Developmental Dyslexia (DD) have been documented extensively at the behavioral level, leading to the formulation of neural theories positing that such anomalies in parsing multisensory input rely on aberrant synchronization of neural oscillations or to an excessive level of neural noise. Despite reading being primarily supported by visual functions, experimental evidence supporting these theories remains scarce. Here, we tested 26 adults with DD (9 females) and 31 neurotypical controls (16 females) with a temporal segregation/integration task that required participants to either integrate or segregate two rapidly presented displays while their EEG activity was recorded.

Presaccadic preview shapes postsaccadic processing more where perception is poor.

The presaccadic preview of a peripheral target enhances the efficiency of its postsaccadic processing, termed the extrafoveal preview effect. Peripheral visual performance-and thus the quality of the preview-varies around the visual field, even at isoeccentric locations: It is better along the horizontal than vertical meridian and along the lower than upper vertical meridian. To investigate whether these polar angle asymmetries influence the preview effect, we asked human participants to preview four tilted gratings at the cardinals, until a central cue indicated which one to saccade to.

Aperiodic EEG Predicts Variability of Visual Temporal Processing.

The human brain exhibits both oscillatory and aperiodic, or 1/, activity. Although a large body of research has focused on the relationship between brain rhythms and sensory processes, aperiodic activity has often been overlooked as functionally irrelevant. Prompted by recent findings linking aperiodic activity to the balance between neural excitation and inhibition, we investigated its effects on the temporal resolution of perception.

An early effect of the parafoveal preview on post-saccadic processing of English words.

A key aspect of efficient visual processing is to use current and previous information to make predictions about what we will see next. In natural viewing, and when looking at words, there is typically an indication of forthcoming visual information from extrafoveal areas of the visual field before we make an eye movement to an object or word of interest. This "preview effect" has been studied for many years in the word reading literature and, more recently, in object perception.

Schizotypal traits and anomalous perceptual experiences are associated with greater visual temporal acuity.

One of the main tasks of the human visual system is to organize the temporal flow of visual events into meaningful patterns. It has been suggested that segregation/integration of continuous visual stimuli relies on temporal windows that are phase-locked to brain oscillations in the alpha frequency range (~10 Hz). From a behavioral point of view, the balance between integration and segregation is reflected in visual temporal acuity: the ability to perceive a small temporal gap between two identical stimuli.

Saccade execution increases the preview effect with faces: An EEG and eye-tracking coregistration study.

Under naturalistic viewing conditions, humans conduct about three to four saccadic eye movements per second. These dynamics imply that in real life, humans rarely see something completely new; there is usually a preview of the upcoming foveal input from extrafoveal regions of the visual field. In line with results from the field of reading research, we have shown with EEG and eye-tracking coregistration that an extrafoveal preview also affects postsaccadic visual object processing and facilitates discrimination.

Electrophysiological signatures of visual temporal processing deficits in developmental dyslexia.

Developmental dyslexia (DD) is a common neurodevelopmental disorder that affects reading ability despite normal intelligence and education. In search of core deficits, previous evidence has linked DD with impairments in temporal aspects of perceptual processing, which might underlie phonological deficits as well as inefficient graphemic parsing during reading. However, electrophysiological evidence for atypical temporal processing in DD is still scarce in the visual modality.

Perception, performance, and detectability of conversational artificial intelligence across 32 university courses.

The emergence of large language models has led to the development of powerful tools such as ChatGPT that can produce text indistinguishable from human-generated work. With the increasing accessibility of such technology, students across the globe may utilize it to help with their school work-a possibility that has sparked ample discussion on the integrity of student evaluation processes in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). To date, it is unclear how such tools perform compared to students on university-level courses across various disciplines.

Periodic and Aperiodic EEG Features as Potential Markers of Developmental Dyslexia.

Developmental Dyslexia (DD) is a neurobiological condition affecting the ability to read fluently and/or accurately. Analyzing resting-state electroencephalographic (EEG) activity in DD may provide a deeper characterization of the underlying pathophysiology and possible biomarkers. So far, studies investigating resting-state activity in DD provided limited evidence and did not consider the aperiodic component of the power spectrum.

The effect of familiarity on behavioral oscillations in face perception.

Studies on behavioral oscillations demonstrate that visual sensitivity fluctuates over time and visual processing varies periodically, mirroring neural oscillations at the same frequencies. Do these behavioral oscillations reflect fixed and relatively automatic sensory sampling, or top-down processes such as attention or predictive coding? To disentangle these theories, the current study used a dual-target rapid serial visual presentation paradigm, where participants indicated the gender of a face target embedded in streams of distractors presented at 30 Hz. On critical trials, two identical targets were presented with varied stimulus onset asynchrony from 200 to 833 ms.

Pre-saccadic Preview Shapes Post-Saccadic Processing More Where Perception is Poor.

The pre-saccadic preview of a peripheral target enhances the efficiency of its post-saccadic processing, termed the extrafoveal preview effect. Peripheral visual performance -and thus the quality of the preview- varies around the visual field, even at iso-eccentric locations: it is better along the horizontal than vertical meridian and along the lower than upper vertical meridian. To investigate whether these polar angle asymmetries influence the preview effect, we asked human participants (to preview four tilted gratings at the cardinals, until a central cue indicated to which one to saccade.

A Supervised Machine Learning Approach to Classify Brain Morphology of Professional Visual Artists versus Non-Artists.

This study aimed to investigate whether there are structural differences in the brains of professional artists who received formal training in the visual arts and non-artists who did not have any formal training or professional experience in the visual arts, and whether these differences can be used to accurately classify individuals as being an artist or not. Previous research using functional MRI has suggested that general creativity involves a balance between the default mode network and the executive control network. However, it is not known whether there are structural differences between the brains of artists and non-artists.

Distinct Cortical Networks Subserve Spatio-temporal Sampling in Vision through Different Oscillatory Rhythms.

Although visual input arrives continuously, sensory information is segmented into (quasi-)discrete events. Here, we investigated the neural correlates of spatiotemporal binding in humans with magnetoencephalography using two tasks where separate flashes were presented on each trial but were perceived, in a bistable way, as either a single or two separate events. The first task (two-flash fusion) involved judging one versus two flashes, whereas the second task (apparent motion: AM) involved judging coherent motion versus two stationary flashes.

Correlations between Visual Temporal Resolution and Individual Alpha Peak Frequency: Evidence that Internal and Measurement Noise Drive Null Findings.

The brain organizes the continuous flow of sensory input by parsing it into discrete events. In the case of two flashes separated by a brief ISI, for example, perception may be of a single flash or two distinct flashes, depending on the ISI but also on the speed of processing. A number of studies have reported evidence that participants with a higher EEG peak alpha frequency are able to detect the presence of two flashes separated by short intervals, whereas those with slower alpha report only one flash.

Bilateral increase in MEG planar gradients prior to saccade onset.

Every time we move our eyes, the retinal locations of objects change. To distinguish the changes caused by eye movements from actual external motion of the objects, the visual system is thought to anticipate the consequences of eye movements (saccades). Single neuron recordings have indeed demonstrated changes in receptive fields before saccade onset.

Transcriptomics of acute myeloid leukaemia core bone marrow biopsies reveals distinct therapy response-specific osteo-mesenchymal profiles.

While the bone marrow (BM) microenvironment is significantly remodelled in acute myeloid leukaemia (AML), molecular insight into AML-specific alterations in the microenvironment has been historically limited by the analysis of liquid marrow aspirates rather than core biopsies that contain solid-phase BM stroma. We assessed the effect of anthracycline- and cytarabine-based induction chemotherapy on both haematopoietic and non-haematopoietic cells directly in core BM biopsies using RNA-seq and histological analysis. We compared matched human core BM biopsies at diagnosis and 2 weeks after cytarabine- and anthracycline-based induction therapy in responders (<5% blasts present after treatment) and non-responders (≥5% blasts present after treatment).

The effect of perceptual history on the interpretation of causality.

The ability to interpret spatiotemporal contingencies in terms of causal relationships plays a key role in human understanding of the external world. Indeed, the detection of such simple properties enables us to attribute causal attributes to interactions between objects. Here, we investigated the degree to which this perception of causality depends on recent experience, as has been found for other low-level properties of visual stimuli.

Spatial Attention Tunes Temporal Processing in Early Visual Cortex by Speeding and Slowing Alpha Oscillations.

The perception of dynamic visual stimuli relies on two apparently conflicting perceptual mechanisms: rapid visual input must sometimes be integrated into unitary percepts but at other times must be segregated or parsed into separate objects or events. Though they have opposite effects on our perceptual experience, the deployment of spatial attention benefits both operations. Little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying this impact of spatial attention on temporal perception.

Evidence for a theta-band behavioural oscillation in rapid face detection.

Theories of rhythmic perception propose that perceptual sampling operates in a periodic way, with alternating moments of high and low responsiveness to sensory inputs. This rhythmic sampling is linked to neural oscillations and thought to produce fluctuations in behavioural outcomes. Previous studies have revealed theta- and alpha-band behavioural oscillations in low-level visual tasks and object categorization.

Lower multisensory temporal acuity in individuals with high schizotypal traits: a web-based study.

Natural events are often multisensory, requiring the brain to combine information from the same spatial location and timing, across different senses. The importance of temporal coincidence has led to the introduction of the temporal binding window (TBW) construct, defined as the time range within which multisensory inputs are highly likely to be perceptually bound into a single entity. Anomalies in TBWs have been linked to confused perceptual experiences and inaccurate filtering of sensory inputs coming from different environmental sources.

Individual resting-state alpha peak frequency and within-trial changes in alpha peak frequency both predict visual dual-pulse segregation performance.

Although sensory input is continuous, information must be combined over time to guide action and cognition, leading to the proposal of temporal sampling windows. A number of studies have suggested that a 10-Hz sampling window might be involved in the "frame rate" of visual processing. To investigate this, we tested the ability of participants to localize and enumerate 1 or 2 visual flashes presented either at near-threshold or full-contrast intensities, while recording magnetoencephalography.