Dusk2Dawn: an EEGLAB plugin for automatic cleaning of whole-night sleep electroencephalogram using Artifact Subspace Reconstruction.

Whole-night sleep electroencephalogram (EEG) is plagued by several types of large-amplitude artifacts. Common approaches to remove them are fraught with issues: channel interpolation, rejection of noisy intervals, and independent component analysis are time-consuming, rely on subjective user decisions, and result in signal loss. Artifact Subspace Reconstruction (ASR) is an increasingly popular approach to rapidly and automatically clean wake EEG data.

Brain Responses to Surprising Stimulus Offsets: Phenomenology and Functional Significance.

Abrupt increases of sensory input (onsets) likely reflect the occurrence of novel events or objects in the environment, potentially requiring immediate behavioral responses. Accordingly, onsets elicit a transient and widespread modulation of ongoing electrocortical activity: the Vertex Potential (VP), which is likely related to the optimisation of rapid behavioral responses. In contrast, the functional significance of the brain response elicited by abrupt decreases of sensory input (offsets) is more elusive, and a detailed comparison of onset and offset VPs is lacking.

Waves of Change: Brain Sensitivity to Differential, not Absolute, Stimulus Intensity is Conserved Across Humans and Rats.

Living in rapidly changing environments has shaped the mammalian brain toward high sensitivity to abrupt and intense sensory events-often signaling threats or affordances requiring swift reactions. Unsurprisingly, such events elicit a widespread electrocortical response (the vertex potential, VP), likely related to the preparation of appropriate behavioral reactions. Although the VP magnitude is largely determined by stimulus intensity, the relative contribution of the differential and absolute components of intensity remains unknown.

Movement of environmental threats modifies the relevance of the defensive eye-blink in a spatially-tuned manner.

Subcortical reflexive motor responses are under continuous cortical control to produce the most effective behaviour. For example, the excitability of brainstem circuitry subserving the defensive hand-blink reflex (HBR), a response elicited by intense somatosensory stimuli to the wrist, depends on a number of properties of the eliciting stimulus. These include face-hand proximity, which has allowed the description of an HBR response field around the face (commonly referred to as a defensive peripersonal space, DPPS), as well as stimulus movement and probability of stimulus occurrence.