High prevalence of long-term olfactory disorders in healthcare workers after COVID-19: A case-control study.

Background: More than a year after recovering from COVID-19, a large proportion of individuals, many of whom work in the healthcare sector, still report olfactory dysfunctions. However, olfactory dysfunction was common already before the COVID-19 pandemic, making it necessary to also consider the existing baseline prevalence of olfactory dysfunction. To establish the adjusted prevalence of COVID-19 related olfactory dysfunction, we assessed smell function in healthcare workers who had contracted COVID-19 during the first wave of the pandemic using psychophysical testing.

Nasal inhalation does not improve memory of visual repetitions.

Several studies suggest that breathing entrains neural oscillations and thereby improves visual detection and memory performance during nasal inhalation. However, the evidence for this association is mixed, with some studies finding no, minor, or opposite effects. Here, we tested whether nasal breathing phase influences memory of repeated images presented in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) task.

Induction of nitric oxide via humming does not improve short-term cognitive performance or influence emotional processing.

Nitric oxide (NO) is involved in a variety of biological functions including blood vessel dilation and neurotransmitter release. In animals, NO has been demonstrated to affect multiple behavioral outcomes, such as memory performance and arousal, whereas this link is less explored in humans. NO is created in the paranasal sinuses and studies show that humming releases paranasal NO to the nasal tract and that NO can then cross the blood brain barrier.

Discriminating between sick and healthy faces based on early sickness cues: an exploratory analysis of sex differences.

Background And Objectives: It has been argued that sex and disease-related traits should influence how observers respond to sensory sickness cues. In fact, there is evidence that humans can detect sensory cues related to infection in others, but lack of power from earlier studies prevents any firm conclusion regarding whether perception of sickness cues is associated with sex and disease-related personality traits. Here, we tested whether women (relative to men), individuals with poorer self-reported health, and who are more sensitive to disgust, vulnerable to disease, and concerned about their health, overestimate the presence of, and/or are better at detecting sickness cues.

Lifelong olfactory deprivation-dependent cortical reorganization restricted to orbitofrontal cortex.

Prolonged sensory deprivation has repeatedly been linked to cortical reorganization. We recently demonstrated that individuals with congenital anosmia (CA, complete olfactory deprivation since birth) have seemingly normal morphology in piriform (olfactory) cortex despite profound morphological deviations in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), a finding contradictory to both the known effects of blindness on visual cortex and to the sparse literature on brain morphology in anosmia. To establish whether these unexpected findings reflect the true brain morphology in CA, we first performed a direct replication of our previous study to determine if lack of results was due to a deviant control group, a confound in cross sectional studies.

Impairment of quality of life due to COVID-19-induced long-term olfactory dysfunction.

Introduction: Olfactory dysfunction is one of many long-lasting symptoms associated with COVID-19, estimated to affect approximately 60% of individuals and often lasting several months after infection. The associated daily life problems can cause a decreased quality of life.

Methods: Here, we assessed the association between perceived quality of life and both qualitative and quantitative olfactory function (distorted and weakened sense of smell, respectively) in 58 individuals who had undergone confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection and who complained about olfactory dysfunction.

COVID-19 infection does not seem to affect cognition in college students.

Emerging evidence indicates that COVID-19 damages the central nervous system and thereby might engender long-term cognitive impairment. Self-reports and some measures of cognitive ability suggest that long COVID can lead to substantial and frightening detriments in cognition. To further explore this issue, we used data from university courses on cognitive psychology where students participated in classic experiments that measure various aspects of cognition.

Effects of COVID-19 on the Human Central Olfactory System: A Natural Pre-Post Experiment.

Background And Purpose: Reduced olfactory function is the symptom with the highest prevalence in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) with nearly 70% of infected individuals experiencing partial or total loss of their sense of smell at some point during the disease. The exact cause is not known, but beyond peripheral damage, studies have demonstrated insults to both the olfactory bulb and central olfactory brain areas. However, these studies often lack both baseline pre-COVID-19 assessments and control groups, and the effects could, therefore, simply reflect pre-existing risk factors.

Excess success in articles on object-based attention.

Twenty-five years of research has explored the object-based attention effect using the two-rectangles paradigm and closely related paradigms. While reading this literature, we noticed statistical attributes that are sometimes related to questionable research practices, which can undermine the reported conclusions. To quantify these attributes, we applied the Test for Excess Success (TES) individually to 37 articles that investigate various properties of object-based attention and comprise four or more experiments.

Reversing Bonferroni.

It is common for conclusions of empirical studies to depend on multiple significant outcomes. This practice may seem reasonable, but it has some unintended effects. In particular, the compound Type I error rate for multiple studies (the likelihood of concluding that an effect exists when it does not) can be much lower than that of the individual studies.

The moon size illusion does not improve perceptual judgments.

Recent studies suggest that the accuracy of perceptual judgments can be influenced by the perceived illusory size of a stimulus, with judgments being more accurate for increased illusory size. This phenomenon seems consistent with recent neuroscientific findings that representations in early visual areas reflect the perceived (illusory) size of stimuli rather than the physical size. We further explored this idea with the moon illusion, in which the moon appears larger when it is close to the horizon and smaller when it is higher in the sky.

Regularity is not a key factor for encoding repetition in rapid image streams.

Human observers readily detect targets and repetitions in streams of rapidly presented visual stimuli. It seems intuitive that regularly spaced repeating items should be easier to detect than irregularly spaced ones, since regularity adds predictability and in addition has ecological relevance. Here, we show that this is not necessarily the case, and we point out the intrinsic difficulty in addressing this question.

Memory for Repeated Images in Rapid-Serial-Visual-Presentation Streams of Thousands of Images.

Human observers readily detect targets in stimuli presented briefly and in rapid succession. Here, we show that even without predefined targets, humans can spot repetitions in streams of thousands of images. We presented sequences of natural images reoccurring a number of times interleaved with either one or two distractors, and we asked participants to detect the repetitions and to identify the repeated images after a delay that could last for minutes.

Retinotopic encoding of the Ternus-Pikler display reflected in the early visual areas.

The visual representation of the world is often assumed to be retinotopic, and many visual brain areas are indeed organized retinotopically. Visual perception, however, is not based on a reference frame anchored in retinotopic coordinates. For example, when an object moves, motion of its constituent parts is perceived relative to the object rather than in retinotopic coordinates.

EEG Correlates of Relative Motion Encoding.

A large portion of the visual cortex is organized retinotopically, but perception is usually non-retinotopic. For example, a reflector on the spoke of a bicycle wheel appears to move on a circular or prolate cycloidal orbit as the bicycle moves forward, while in fact it traces out a curtate cycloidal trajectory. The moving bicycle serves as a non-retinotopic reference system to which the motion of the reflector is anchored.

Putting low-level vision into global context: Why vision cannot be reduced to basic circuits.

To cope with the complexity of vision, most models in neuroscience and computer vision are of hierarchical and feedforward nature. Low-level vision, such as edge and motion detection, is explained by basic low-level neural circuits, whose outputs serve as building blocks for more complex circuits computing higher level features such as shape and entire objects. There is an isomorphism between states of the outer world, neural circuits, and perception, inspired by the positivistic philosophy of the mind.

Different colors of light lead to different adaptation and activation as determined by high-density EEG.

Light adaptation is crucial for coping with the varying levels of ambient light. Using high-density electroencephalography (EEG), we investigated how adaptation to light of different colors affects brain responsiveness. In a within-subject design, sixteen young participants were adapted first to dim white light and then to blue, green, red, or white bright light (one color per session in a randomized order).