Dynamics in interbrain synchronization while playing a piano duet.

Humans interact with each other through actions that are implemented by sensory and motor processes. To investigate the role of interbrain synchronization emerging during interpersonal action coordination, electroencephalography data from 13 pairs of pianists were recorded simultaneously while they performed a duet together. The study aimed to investigate whether interbrain phase couplings can be reduced to similar bottom-up driven processes during synchronous play, or rather represent cognitive top-down control required during periods of higher coordination demands.

Modeling Biological Face Recognition with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks.

Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have become the state-of-the-art computational models of biological object recognition. Their remarkable success has helped vision science break new ground, and recent efforts have started to transfer this achievement to research on biological face recognition. In this regard, face detection can be investigated by comparing face-selective biological neurons and brain areas to artificial neurons and model layers.

Guiding visual attention in deep convolutional neural networks based on human eye movements.

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs) were originally inspired by principles of biological vision, have evolved into best current computational models of object recognition, and consequently indicate strong architectural and functional parallelism with the ventral visual pathway throughout comparisons with neuroimaging and neural time series data. As recent advances in deep learning seem to decrease this similarity, computational neuroscience is challenged to reverse-engineer the biological plausibility to obtain useful models. While previous studies have shown that biologically inspired architectures are able to amplify the human-likeness of the models, in this study, we investigate a purely data-driven approach.

Self-efficacy matters: Influence of students' perceived self-efficacy on statistics anxiety.

Statistical knowledge is a key competency for psychologists in order to correctly interpret assessment outcomes. Importantly, when learning statistics (and its mathematical foundations), self-efficacy (defined as an individual's belief to successfully accomplish specific performance attainments) is a central predictor of students' motivation to learn, learning engagement, and actual achievement. Therefore, it is crucial to gain a better understanding of students' self-efficacy for statistics and its interrelations with statistics anxiety and students' belief in the relevance of statistics.

Comparing Object Recognition in Humans and Deep Convolutional Neural Networks-An Eye Tracking Study.

Deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) and the ventral visual pathway share vast architectural and functional similarities in visual challenges such as object recognition. Recent insights have demonstrated that both hierarchical cascades can be compared in terms of both exerted behavior and underlying activation. However, these approaches ignore key differences in spatial priorities of information processing.

Investigating the Effects of Seizures on Procedural Memory Performance in Patients with Epilepsy.

Memory complaints are frequently reported by patients with epilepsy and are associated with seizure occurrence. Yet, the direct effects of seizures on memory retention are difficult to assess given their unpredictability. Furthermore, previous investigations have predominantly assessed declarative memory.

"How does Austria sleep?" self-reported sleep habits and complaints in an online survey.

During the past years, the prevalence of sleep problems has been increasing steadily in industrial societies and represents a major social and socioeconomic burden. The situation in Austria was last evaluated in 2007 by Zeitlhofer and colleagues in a representative sample of 1000 participants. In the current study, we sought to evaluate the sleep behaviour of the Austrian population in an ongoing online survey, in which we have collected data from 986 participants (66% women, mean age 40.

Coupling and Decoupling between Brain and Body Oscillations.

Cross frequency coupling is used to study the cross talk between brain oscillations. In this paper we focus on a special type of frequency coupling between brain and body oscillations, which is reflected by the numerical ratio (r) between two frequencies (m and n; n > m). This approach is motivated by theoretical considerations, indicating that during alert wakefulness brain-body oscillations form a coupled hierarchy of frequencies with integer relationships that are binary multiples (r = n:m = 1:2, 1:4, 1:8….

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.

Heartbeat-related EEG amplitude and phase modulations from wakefulness to deep sleep: Interactions with sleep spindles and slow oscillations.

Based on physiological models of neurovisceral integration, different studies have shown how cognitive processes modulate heart rate and how the heartbeat, on the other hand, modulates brain activity. We tried to further determine interactions between cardiac and electrical brain activity by means of EEG. We investigated how the heartbeat modulates EEG in 23 healthy controls from wakefulness to deep sleep and showed that frontocentral heartbeat evoked EEG amplitude and phase locking (as measured by intertrial phase locking), at about 300-400 ms after the R peak, decreased with increasing sleep depth with a renewed increase during REM sleep, which underpins the assumption that the heartbeat evoked positivity constitutes an active frontocortical response to the heartbeat.

Prestimulus amplitudes modulate P1 latencies and evoked traveling alpha waves.

Traveling waves have been well documented in the ongoing, and more recently also in the evoked EEG. In the present study we investigate what kind of physiological process might be responsible for inducing an evoked traveling wave. We used a semantic judgment task which already proved useful to study evoked traveling alpha waves that coincide with the appearance of the P1 component.

Alpha phase, temporal attention, and the generation of early event related potentials.

In the present study, we have investigated the influence of ongoing alpha phase on the generation of the P1 component of the visual ERP, recorded in a target detection task. Our hypothesis is that in trials where pre- or peristimulus alpha phase is already aligned in a way that voltage positive alpha peaks develop seamlessly into the P1, detection performance will be enhanced as compared to trials where alpha is not aligned. The findings supported our hypothesis and showed that target detection times for the subset of seamless alpha trials was significantly shorter than for trials that are not seamless.

Lexical access and evoked traveling alpha waves.

Retrieval from semantic memory is usually considered within a time window around 300-600ms. Here we suggest that lexical access already occurs at around 100ms. This interpretation is based on the finding that semantically rich and frequent words exhibit a significantly shorter topographical latency difference between the site with the shortest P1 latency (leading site) and that with the longest P1 latency (trailing site).

Alpha entrainment is responsible for the attentional blink phenomenon.

The attentional blink phenomenon is the reduced ability to report a second target (T2) after identifying a first target (T1) in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of stimuli (e.g., letters), which are presented at approximately 10 items per second.

Evoked traveling alpha waves predict visual-semantic categorization-speed.

In the present study we have tested the hypothesis that evoked traveling alpha waves are behaviorally significant. The results of a visual-semantic categorization task show that three early ERP components including the P1-N1 complex had a dominant frequency characteristic in the alpha range and behaved like traveling waves do. They exhibited a traveling direction from midline occipital to right lateral parietal sites.

Event-related activity and phase locking during a psychomotor vigilance task over the course of sleep deprivation.

There is profound knowledge that sleep restriction increases tonic (event-unrelated) electroencephalographic (EEG) activity. In the present study we focused on time-locked activity by means of phasic (event-related) EEG analysis during a psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) over the course of sleep deprivation. Twenty healthy subjects (10 male; mean age ± SD: 23.

Brain oscillatory substrates of visual short-term memory capacity.

The amount of information that can be stored in visual short-term memory is strictly limited to about four items. Therefore, memory capacity relies not only on the successful retention of relevant information but also on efficient suppression of distracting information, visual attention, and executive functions. However, completely separable neural signatures for these memory capacity-limiting factors remain to be identified.

Lifespan differences in cortical dynamics of auditory perception.

Using electroencephalographic recordings (EEG), we assessed differences in oscillatory cortical activity during auditory-oddball performance between children aged 9-13 years, younger adults, and older adults. From childhood to old age, phase synchronization increased within and between electrodes, whereas whole power and evoked power decreased. We conclude that the cortical dynamics of perceptual processing undergo substantial reorganization from childhood to old age, and discuss possible reasons for the inverse relation between age trends in phase synchronization and power, such as lifespan differences in neural background activity, or a lifespan shift from rate coding in children to temporal coding in adults.

Human frontal midline theta and its synchronization to gamma during a verbal delayed match to sample task.

The involvement of oscillatory activity, especially at theta and gamma frequency, in human working memory has been reported frequently. A salient pattern during working memory is electroencephalographic frontal midline theta activity which has been suggested to reflect monitoring functions in order to deal with a task. In general, theta activity has been credited with integrative functions of distributed activity.

Dissociation between phase-locked and nonphase-locked alpha oscillations in a working memory task.

The functions of human alpha oscillations ( approximately 10 Hz) were related to cognitive processes such as memory and top-down control. Recent models suggest that alpha phase serves as a mechanism especially relevant for the timing of neural activity, whereas alpha amplitude is important for the inhibition of task-irrelevant brain areas. This study investigates directly the influence of top-down modulation on phase-locked and nonphase-locked alpha rhythms.

The functional relevance of phase reset: a comment to Risner et al. (2009): The visual evoked potential of surface alpha rhythm phase.

In this comment we argue that a proof of phase reset is difficult for a variety of reasons. We suggest that a theoretical analysis of the assumptions and empirical evaluation of predictions of the phase reset model offers a promising way to shed new light on mechanisms generating ERPs. The crucial assumption is that the purpose of phase reset is the event-related reorganization of the phase of task relevant oscillations in a way to enhance stimulus processing.

Brains swinging in concert: cortical phase synchronization while playing guitar.

Background: Brains interact with the world through actions that are implemented by sensory and motor processes. A substantial part of these interactions consists in synchronized goal-directed actions involving two or more individuals. Hyperscanning techniques for assessing fMRI simultaneously from two individuals have been developed.

A short review of slow phase synchronization and memory: evidence for control processes in different memory systems?

An integrative theoretical approach about memory related oscillations is presented. The basic assumptions are that memory related oscillations are probably confined to theta and upper alpha and that other frequencies particularly in the gamma range are important for memory primarily because they become coupled to lower frequencies and/or because they play a specific role for a high precision timing of neural events (including phenomena such as LTP or LTD). In contrast to previous studies, where we related theta and upper alpha to a variety of different memory processes, we suggest here that these oscillations are associated with top-down control processes in two large storage systems, working memory (WM) and long-term memory (LTM).

Alpha phase coupling reflects object recognition.

In the present study, we investigate the role of upper alpha oscillations for semantic access and retrieval processes. In each of a series of trials, subjects were presented trains of distorted pictures (with decreasing levels of degradation), and were asked to respond as quickly as possible when they recognize the meaning of the picture. The results show that during the time-window of picture recognition, upper alpha power decreased but inter-areal phase synchronization increased as compared to meaningless control pictures.

Functional similarities between the P1 component and alpha oscillations.

The present study attempts to demonstrate functional similarities between the P1 component of event-related potentials and alpha oscillations that are predicted by the 'alpha inhibition-timing' hypothesis. On the basis of findings showing that the frequency characteristic of the P1 component lies in the alpha range and that alpha oscillation is functionally associated with inhibition, we predict that the P1 component also reflects inhibitory processes. This hypothesis is tested in two experiments, a spatial-cuing task and a visual-semantic categorization task.