Decoding Brain Responses to Names and Voices across Different Vigilance States.

Past research has demonstrated differential responses of the brain during sleep in response especially to variations in paralinguistic properties of auditory stimuli, suggesting they can still be processed "offline". However, the nature of the underlying mechanisms remains unclear. Here, we therefore used multivariate pattern analyses to directly test the similarities in brain activity among different sleep stages (non-rapid eye movement stages N1-N3, as well as rapid-eye movement sleep REM, and wake).

On the development of sleep states in the first weeks of life.

Human newborns spend up to 18 hours sleeping. The organization of their sleep differs immensely from adult sleep, and its quick maturation and fundamental changes correspond to the rapid cortical development at this age. Manual sleep classification is specifically challenging in this population given major body movements and frequent shifts between vigilance states; in addition various staging criteria co-exist.

Night and day variations of sleep in patients with disorders of consciousness.

Brain injuries substantially change the entire landscape of oscillatory dynamics and render detection of typical sleep patterns difficult. Yet, sleep is characterized not only by specific EEG waveforms, but also by its circadian organization. In the present study we investigated whether brain dynamics of patients with disorders of consciousness systematically change between day and night.

The Voice of Anger: Oscillatory EEG Responses to Emotional Prosody.

Emotionally relevant stimuli and in particular anger are, due to their evolutionary relevance, often processed automatically and able to modulate attention independent of conscious access. Here, we tested whether attention allocation is enhanced when auditory stimuli are uttered by an angry voice. We recorded EEG and presented healthy individuals with a passive condition where unfamiliar names as well as the subject's own name were spoken both with an angry and neutral prosody.

Event-related EEG power modulations and phase connectivity indicate the focus of attention in an auditory own name paradigm.

Estimating cognitive abilities in patients suffering from Disorders of Consciousness remains challenging. One cognitive task to address this issue is the so-called own name paradigm, in which subjects are presented with first names including the own name. In the active condition, a specific target name has to be silently counted.