Neural correlates underlying local and global processing during visual search across adulthood.

Visual processing relies on the identification of both local and global features of visual stimuli. While well investigated at the behavioral level, the underlying brain mechanisms are less clear, especially in the context of aging. Using fMRI, we aimed to investigate the neural correlates underlying local and global processing in early and late adulthood.

Effects of general anaesthesia in early childhood on local and global visual processing: a post hoc analysis of the APEX cohort study.

Background: Preclinical studies suggest that early exposure to anaesthesia alters the visual system in mice and non-human primates. We investigated whether exposure to general anaesthesia leads to visual attention processing changes in children, which could potentially impact essential life skills, including learning.

Methods: This was a post hoc analysis of data from the APprentissages EXécutifs et cerveau chez les enfants d'âge scolaire (APEX) cohort study.

Lateralization of the cerebral network of inhibition in children before and after cognitive training.

Inhibitory control (IC) plays a critical role in cognitive and socio-emotional development. IC relies on a lateralized cortico-subcortical brain network including the inferior frontal cortex, anterior parts of insula, anterior cingulate cortex, caudate nucleus and putamen. Brain asymmetries play a critical role for IC efficiency.

Impaired Global Precedence Effect in Severe Alcohol Use Disorder and Korsakoff's Syndrome: A Pilot Exploration through a Global/Local Visual Paradigm.

In healthy populations, visual abilities are characterized by a faster and more efficient processing of global features in a stimulus compared to local ones. This phenomenon is known as the global precedence effect (GPE), which is demonstrated by (1) a global advantage, resulting in faster response times for global features than local features and (2) interference from global distractors during the identification of local targets, but not vice versa. This GPE is essential for adapting visual processing in everyday life (e.

Consequences of General Anesthesia in Infancy on Behavior and Brain Structure.

Background: One in 7 children will need general anesthesia (GA) before the age of 3. Brain toxicity of anesthetics is controversial. Our objective was to clarify whether exposure of GA to the developing brain could lead to lasting behavioral and structural brain changes.

Link between fluid/crystallized intelligence and global/local visual abilities across adulthood.

Human visual processing involves the extraction of both global and local information from a visual stimulus. Such processing may be related to cognitive abilities, which is likely going to change over time as we age. We aimed to investigate the impact of healthy aging on the association between visual global vs local processing and intelligence.

Approach in green, avoid in red? Examining interindividual variabilities and personal color preferences through continuous measures of specific meaning associations.

Empirically based literature suggests that avoidance/approach motivation arising from color-meaning associations assume a key mediational role in the color effect during psychological functioning. Even if several studies investigated color-meaning associations through different methodological approaches, no study investigated specific color-meaning associations (1) through continuous measures (2) for both positive and negative meanings. In addition, color effects are not unequivocal, and interindividual variability issues are still underexplored.

The forest, the trees, and the leaves across adulthood: Age-related changes on a visual search task containing three-level hierarchical stimuli.

Selecting relevant visual information in complex scenes by processing either global information or local parts helps us act efficiently within our environment and achieve goals. A global advantage (faster global than local processing) and global interference (global processing interferes with local processing) comprise an evidentiary global precedence phenomenon in early adulthood. However, the impact of healthy aging on this phenomenon remains unclear.

Framing the area: An efficient approach for avoiding visual interference and optimising visual search in adolescents.

Attentional resources are limited, and resistance to interference plays a critical role during cognitive tasks and learning. Previous studies have shown that participants find it difficult to avoid being distracted by global visual information when processing local details. In this study, we investigated an innovative approach for enhancing the processing of local visual details by middle-school adolescents.

Preventing the Long-term Effects of General Anesthesia on the Developing Brain: How Translational Research can Contribute.

In 2017, the Food and Drug Administration published a safety recommendation to limit the exposure to general anesthesia as much as possible below the age of three. Indeed, several preclinical and clinical studies have questioned the possible toxicity of general anesthesia on the developing brain. Since then, recent clinical studies tried to mitigate this alarming issue.

Cortical Thickness and Natural Scene Recognition in the Child's Brain.

Visual scenes are processed in terms of spatial frequencies. Low spatial frequencies (LSF) carry coarse information, whereas high spatial frequencies (HSF) subsequently carry information about fine details. The present magnetic resonance imaging study investigated how cortical thickness covaried with LSF/HSF processing abilities in ten-year-old children and adults.

The forest, the trees, and the leaves in preterm children: the impact of prematurity on a visual search task containing three-level hierarchical stimuli.

Very preterm (VPT; < 33 gestational weeks) children are at risk of developing visuospatial deficits, including local/global attention deficits. They are also more likely to develop poorer inhibitory control. Here, we investigated, using the same stimuli, the potential local/global attention and inhibitory control deficits of VPT children using three levels compound stimuli (global, intermediate, and local levels), more ecological than the ones used in a classic global/local task (Navon task).

Anatomical Connectivity of the Visuospatial Attentional Network in Schizophrenia: A Diffusion Tensor Imaging Tractography Study.

Objective: In healthy individuals, the visuospatial attentional network consists of frontoparietal bundles; however, the anatomical organization of this network in persons with schizophrenia remains largely unknown. Using diffusion tensor imaging-based tractography, the authors investigated the white matter integrity and volume of frontoparietal and frontotemporo-occipital bundles in the right and left hemispheres and studied their structural asymmetry in persons with schizophrenia and in healthy individuals.

Methods: This study included 34 participants with schizophrenia and 69 healthy individuals.

Who's got the global advantage? Visual field differences in processing of global and local shape.

Much evidence suggests that we first perceive the overall layout of a scene or object followed later by the details. This coarse-to-fine temporal dynamic in visual processing is also found in Navon's classical paradigm where information at the global level of compound stimuli is processed faster than information at the local level (global precedence effect), and where information at the global level has larger effects on local level responses than local level information has on global level responses (asymmetric interference effects). Traditionally, global shape primacy in Navon's paradigm has been linked with a right hemisphere preference (left visual field advantage) for global shape processing, and a left hemisphere preference (right visual field advantage) for local shape processing.

Complex and subtle structural changes in prefrontal cortex induced by inhibitory control training from childhood to adolescence.

A number of training interventions have been designed to improve executive functions and inhibitory control (IC) across the lifespan. Surprisingly, no study has investigated the structural neuroplasticity induced by IC training from childhood to late adolescence, a developmental period characterized by IC efficiency improvement and protracted maturation of prefrontal cortex (PFC) subregions involved in IC. The aim of the present study was to investigate the behavioral and structural changes induced by a 5-week computerized and adaptive IC training in school-aged children (10-year-olds) and in adolescents (16-year-olds).

Developmental frontal brain activation differences in overcoming heuristic bias.

Since reasoning is often biased by intuitive heuristics, the development of sound reasoning has long been postulated to depend on successful bias monitoring and inhibition. The present fMRI study aimed to identify neural correlates of developmental changes in these processes. A group of adults and young adolescents were presented with ratio-bias problems in which an intuitively cued heuristic response could be incongruent (conflict item) or congruent (no-conflict item) with the correct response.

Children inhibit global information when the forest is dense and local information when the forest is sparse.

Visual environments are composed of global shapes and local details that compete for attentional resources. In adults, the global level is processed more rapidly than the local level, and global information must be inhibited in order to process local information when the local information and global information are in conflict. Compared with adults, children present less of a bias toward global visual information and appear to be more sensitive to the density of local elements that constitute the global level.

Neural basis of functional fixedness during creative idea generation: An EEG study.

Decades of problem solving and creativity research have converged to show that the ability to generate new and useful ideas can be blocked or impeded by intuitive biases leading to mental fixations. The present study aimed at investigating the neural bases of the processes involved in overcoming fixation effects during creative idea generation. Using the AU task adapted for EEG recording, we examined whether participant's ability to provide original ideas was related to alpha power changes in both the frontal and temporo-parietal regions.

Sulcal Polymorphisms of the IFC and ACC Contribute to Inhibitory Control Variability in Children and Adults.

Inhibitory control (IC) is a core executive function that enables humans to resist habits, temptations, or distractions. IC efficiency in childhood is a strong predictor of academic and professional success later in life. Based on analysis of the sulcal pattern, a qualitative feature of cortex anatomy determined during fetal life and stable during development, we searched for evidence that interindividual differences in IC partly trace back to prenatal processes.

Navon's classical paradigm concerning local and global processing relates systematically to visual object classification performance.

Forty years ago David Navon tried to tackle a central problem in psychology concerning the time course of perceptual processing: Do we first see the details (local level) followed by the overall outlay (global level) or is it rather the other way around? He did this by developing a now classical paradigm involving the presentation of compound stimuli; large letters composed of smaller letters. Despite the usefulness of this paradigm it remains uncertain whether effects found with compound stimuli relate directly to visual object recognition. It does so because compound stimuli are not actual objects but rather formations of elements and because the elements that form the global shape of compound stimuli are not features of the global shape but rather objects in their own right.

The forest, the trees, and the leaves: Differences of processing across development.

To act and think, children and adults are continually required to ignore irrelevant visual information to focus on task-relevant items. As real-world visual information is organized into structures, we designed a feature visual search task containing 3-level hierarchical stimuli (i.e.

You can detect the trees as well as the forest when adding the leaves: evidence from visual search tasks containing three-level hierarchical stimuli.

The present study investigated how multiple levels of hierarchical stimuli (i.e., global, intermediate and local) are processed during a visual search task.

Changes in cortical thickness in 6-year-old children open their mind to a global vision of the world.

Even if objectively presented with similar visual stimuli, children younger than 6 years of age exhibit a strong attraction to local visual information (e.g., the trees), whereas children older than 6 years of age, similar to adults, exhibit a visual bias toward global information (e.

Dynamics of the anatomical changes that occur in the brains of schoolchildren as they learn to read.

Although the functional brain network involved in reading for adults and children is now well documented, a critical lack of knowledge still exists about the structural development of these brain areas. To provide a better overview of the structural dynamics of the brain that sustain reading acquisition, we acquired anatomical MRI brain images from 55 children that were divided into two groups: one prior to the formal learning of reading (n = 33, 5-6 years old) and the second a few years after formal learning (n = 22, 9-10 years old). Reading performances were collected based on the "Alouette-R" test, a standardized test for reading text in French.