A scalable and robust system for audience EEG recordings.

The neural mechanisms that unfold when humans form a large group defined by an overarching context, such as audiences in theater or sports, are largely unknown and unexplored. This is mainly due to the lack of availability of a scalable system that can record the brain activity from a significantly large portion of such an audience simultaneously. Although the technology for such a system has been readily available for a long time, the high cost as well as the large overhead in human resources and logistic planning have prohibited the development of such a system.

From pre-processing to advanced dynamic modeling of pupil data.

The pupil of the eye provides a rich source of information for cognitive scientists, as it can index a variety of bodily states (e.g., arousal, fatigue) and cognitive processes (e.

A perceptual glitch in serial perception generates temporal distortions.

Precisely estimating event timing is essential for survival, yet temporal distortions are ubiquitous in our daily sensory experience. Here, we tested whether the relative position, duration, and distance in time of two sequentially-organized events-standard S, with constant duration, and comparison C, with duration varying trial-by-trial-are causal factors in generating temporal distortions. We found that temporal distortions emerge when the first event is shorter than the second event.

What neural oscillations can and cannot do for syntactic structure building.

Understanding what someone says requires relating words in a sentence to one another as instructed by the grammatical rules of a language. In recent years, the neurophysiological basis for this process has become a prominent topic of discussion in cognitive neuroscience. Current proposals about the neural mechanisms of syntactic structure building converge on a key role for neural oscillations in this process, but they differ in terms of the exact function that is assigned to them.

Post-acute coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID 19) syndrome: .

Background: Sars-CoV2 can cause severe pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). In COVID-19-associated respiratory failure, lung transplantation might be an option (Bharat A).

Case Report: A previously healthy 63-year-old man with a nasopharyngeal swab positive for SarsCoV2 and radiological evidence of interstitial lung consolidations developed acute respiratory distress that required intubation and veno-venous extracorporeal membrane oxygenation support (VV ECMO).

Two attentive strategies reducing subjective distortions in serial duration perception.

Humans tend to perceptually distort (dilate/shrink) the duration of brief stimuli presented in a sequence when discriminating the duration of a second stimulus (Comparison) from the duration of a first stimulus (Standard). This type of distortion, termed "Time order error" (TOE), is an important window into the determinants of subjective perception. We hypothesized that stimulus durations would be optimally processed, suppressing subjective distortions in serial perception, if the events to be compared fell within the boundaries of rhythmic attentive sampling (4-8 Hz, theta band).

Overt Oculomotor Behavior Reveals Covert Temporal Predictions.

Our eyes move in response to stimulus statistics, reacting to surprising events, and adapting to predictable ones. Cortical and subcortical pathways contribute to generating context-specific eye-movement dynamics, and oculomotor dysfunction is recognized as one the early clinical markers of Parkinson's disease (PD). We asked if covert computations of environmental statistics generating temporal expectations for a potential target are registered by eye movements, and if so, assuming that temporal expectations rely on motor system efficiency, whether they are impaired in PD.

Neural entrainment via perceptual inferences.

Entrainment depends on sequential neural phase reset by regular stimulus onset, a temporal parameter. Entraining to sequences of identical stimuli also entails stimulus feature predictability, but this component is not readily separable from temporal regularity. To test if spectral regularities concur with temporal regularities in determining the strength of auditory entrainment, we devised sound sequences that varied in conditional perceptual inferences based on deviant sound repetition probability: strong inference (100% repetition probability: If a deviant appears, then it will repeat), weak inference (75% repetition probability) and no inference (50%: A deviant may or may not repeat with equal probability).

Eye movements during text reading align with the rate of speech production.

Across languages, the speech signal is characterized by a predominant modulation of the amplitude spectrum between about 4.3 and 5.5 Hz, reflecting the production and processing of linguistic information chunks (syllables and words) every ~200 ms.

Beta power encodes contextual estimates of temporal event probability in the human brain.

To prepare for an impending event of unknown temporal distribution, humans internally increase the perceived probability of event onset as time elapses. This effect is termed the hazard rate of events. We tested how the neural encoding of hazard rate changes by providing human participants with prior information on temporal event probability.

A division of labor between power and phase coherence in encoding attention to stimulus streams.

Both time-based (when) and feature-based (what) aspects of attention facilitate behavior, so it is natural to hypothesize additive effects. We tested this conjecture by recording response behavior and electroencephalographic (EEG) data to auditory pitch changes, embedded at different time lags in a continuous sound stream. Participants reacted more rapidly to larger rather than smaller feature change magnitudes (deviancy), as well as to changes appearing after longer rather than shorter waiting times (hazard rate of response times).

Prosody abilities in a large sample of affective and non-affective first episode psychosis patients.

Objective: Prosody comprehension deficits have been reported in major psychoses. It is still not clear whether these deficits occur at early psychosis stages. The aims of our study were to investigate a) linguistic and emotional prosody comprehension abilities in First Episode Psychosis (FEP) patients compared to healthy controls (HC); b) performance differences between non-affective (FEP-NA) and affective (FEP-A) patients, and c) association between symptoms severity and prosodic features.

Learning and Using Abstract Words: Evidence from Clinical Populations.

It has been shown that abstract concepts are more difficult to process and are acquired later than concrete concepts. We analysed the percentage of concrete words in the narrative lexicon of individuals with Williams Syndrome (WS) as compared to individuals with Down Syndrome (DS) and typically developing (TD) peers. The cognitive profile of WS is characterized by visual-spatial difficulties, while DS presents with predominant impairments in linguistic abilities.

Integrating speech in time depends on temporal expectancies and attention.

Sensory information that unfolds in time, such as in speech perception, relies on efficient chunking mechanisms in order to yield optimally-sized units for further processing. Whether or not two successive acoustic events receive a one-unit or a two-unit interpretation seems to depend on the fit between their temporal extent and a stipulated temporal window of integration. However, there is ongoing debate on how flexible this temporal window of integration should be, especially for the processing of speech sounds.

Are Ultrasound Findings Similar in Patients with Axial Spondyloarthritis and in Athlete Entheses?

Objective: Enthesitis is the spondyloarthritis (SpA) landmark, but can also be seen after entheses overuse, such as during intensive sport.

Methods: We aimed to compare entheses ultrasound (US) findings in a prospective cross-sectional study of 30 axial SpA cases, 30 athletes, and 29 controls.

Results: Mean (SD) MAdrid Sonographic Enthesis Index (MASEI) score was 26.

Perceptual integration of faces and voices depends on the interaction of emotional content and spatial frequency.

The role of spatial frequencies (SF) is highly debated in emotion perception, but previous work suggests the importance of low SFs for detecting emotion in faces. Furthermore, emotion perception essentially relies on the rapid integration of multimodal information from faces and voices. We used EEG to test the functional relevance of SFs in the integration of emotional and non-emotional audiovisual stimuli.

Cognitive rehabilitation in a child with Joubert Syndrome: Developmental trends and adaptive changes in a single case report.

We report the clinical and rehabilitative follow up of M, a female child carrying a compound heterozygous pathogenic mutations in the TCTN1 gene and affected by Joubert Syndrome (JS). JS is a congenital cerebellar ataxia characterized by "the molar tooth sign" on axial MRI, a pathognomonic neuroradiological malformation involving the cerebellum and brainstem. JS presents with high phenotypic/cognitive variability, and little is known about cognitive rehabilitation programs.