Improvements in task performance after practice are associated with scale-free dynamics of brain activity.

Although practicing a task generally benefits later performance on that same task, there are individual differences in practice effects. One avenue to model such differences comes from research showing that brain networks extract functional advantages from operating in the vicinity of criticality, a state in which brain network activity is more scale-free. We hypothesized that higher scale-free signal from fMRI data, measured with the Hurst exponent (), indicates closer proximity to critical states.

Overt attentional correlates of memorability of scene images and their relationships to scene semantics.

Computer vision-based research has shown that scene semantics (e.g., presence of meaningful objects in a scene) can predict memorability of scene images.

Violence reduces attention to faces and draws attention to points of contact.

Although violence is a frequently researched topic, little is known about how different social features influence information gathering from violent interactions. Regions of an interaction that provide contextual information should receive more attention. We predicted the most informative features of a violent social interaction would be faces, points of contact, and objects being held.