46 results match your criteria: "Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Science[Affiliation]"

Motion provides a powerful sensory cue for segmenting a visual scene into objects and inferring the causal relationships between objects. Fundamental mechanisms involved in this process are the integration and segmentation of local motion signals. However, the computations that govern whether local motion signals are perceptually integrated or segmented remain unclear.

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The Readiness Potential Correlates with Action-Linked Modulation of Visual Accuracy.

eNeuro

November 2022

Department of Translational Research on New Technologies in Medicine and Surgery, University of Pisa, 56123 Pisa, Italy

Visual accuracy is consistently shown to be modulated around the time of the action execution. The neural underpinning of this motor-induced modulation of visual perception is still unclear. Here, we investigate with EEG whether it is related to the readiness potential, an event-related potential (ERP) linked to motor preparation.

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Semantic differential techniques are a useful, well-validated tool to assess affective processing of stimuli and determine how that processing is impacted by various demographic factors, such as gender. In this paper, we explore differences in connotative word processing between men and women as measured by Osgood's semantic differential and what those differences imply about affective processing in the two genders. We recruited 94 young participants (47 men, 47 women, ages 18-39) using an online survey and collected their affective ratings of 120 words on three rating tasks: Evaluation (E), Potency (P), and Activity (A).

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Recovery of visual discrimination thresholds inside cortically-blinded (CB) fields is most commonly attained at a single, trained location at a time, with iterative progress deeper into the blind field as performance improves over several months. As such, training is slow, inefficient, burdensome, and often frustrating for patients. Here, we investigated whether double-location training, coupled with a covert spatial-attention (SA) pre-cue, could improve the efficiency of training.

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All eyes on attention.

Elife

March 2022

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, the Center for Visual Science and the Department of Neuroscience, University of Rochester, Rochester, United States.

Article Synopsis
  • Eye movements aren't required to explain how covert attention influences neural activity.
  • Covert attention refers to focusing on something without physically looking at it.
  • The study suggests that neural changes linked to attention can occur independently of eye movements.
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Introduction: Developing biomarkers that distinguish individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) from those with normal cognition remains a crucial goal for improving the health of older adults. We investigated adding brain spatial information to temporal event-related potentials (ERPs) to increase AD identification accuracy over temporal ERPs alone.

Methods: With two-step principal components analysis, we applied multivariate analyses that incorporated temporal and spatial ERP information from a cognitive task.

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Complex natural systems from brains to bee swarms have evolved to make adaptive multifactorial decisions. Recent theoretical and empirical work suggests that many evolved systems may take advantage of common motifs across multiple domains. We are particularly interested in value sensitivity (i.

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Humans tend to avoid mental effort. Previous studies have demonstrated this tendency using various demand-selection tasks; participants generally avoid options associated with higher cognitive demand. However, it remains unclear whether humans avoid mental effort adaptively in uncertain and nonstationary environments.

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Reactivation of associative structure specific outcome responses during prospective evaluation in reward-based choices.

Nat Commun

June 2017

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627, USA.

Before making a reward-based choice, we must evaluate each option. Some theories propose that prospective evaluation involves a reactivation of the neural response to the outcome. Others propose that it calls upon a response pattern that is specific to each underlying associative structure.

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Rule Encoding in Orbitofrontal Cortex and Striatum Guides Selection.

J Neurosci

November 2016

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14618.

Unlabelled: Active maintenance of rules, like other executive functions, is often thought to be the domain of a discrete executive system. An alternative view is that rule maintenance is a broadly distributed function relying on widespread cortical and subcortical circuits. Tentative evidence supporting this view comes from research showing some rule selectivity in the orbitofrontal cortex and dorsal striatum.

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A Spotlight on Reward.

Neuron

June 2016

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, USA.

Research published in this issue of Neuron from McGinty et al. (2016) suggests that attention may help bind information about value to specific options in economic choice. Responses of orbitofrontal neurons are strongly modulated by the distance from gaze to the position of a reward-predicting target.

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Recovering stereo vision by squashing virtual bugs in a virtual reality environment.

Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci

June 2016

School of Optometry and Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA

Stereopsis is the rich impression of three-dimensionality, based on binocular disparity-the differences between the two retinal images of the same world. However, a substantial proportion of the population is stereo-deficient, and relies mostly on monocular cues to judge the relative depth or distance of objects in the environment. Here we trained adults who were stereo blind or stereo-deficient owing to strabismus and/or amblyopia in a natural visuomotor task-a 'bug squashing' game-in a virtual reality environment.

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Objective: To determine how aging and dementia affect the brain's initial storing of task-relevant and irrelevant information in short-term memory.

Methods: We used brain Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to measure short-term memory storage (ERP component C250) in 36 Young Adults, 36 Normal Elderly, and 36 early-stage AD subjects. Participants performed the Number-Letter task, a cognitive paradigm requiring memory storage of a first relevant stimulus to compare it with a second stimulus.

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Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex: A Bottom-Up View.

Annu Rev Neurosci

July 2016

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627; email:

The dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) has attracted great interest from neuroscientists because it is associated with so many important cognitive functions. Despite, or perhaps because of, its rich functional repertoire, we lack a single comprehensive view of its function. Most research has approached this puzzle from the top down, using aggregate measures such as neuroimaging.

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Neuronal selectivity for spatial positions of offers and choices in five reward regions.

J Neurophysiol

March 2016

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York; and.

When we evaluate an option, how is the neural representation of its value linked to information that identifies it, such as its position in space? We hypothesized that value information and identity cues are not bound together at a particular point but are represented together at the single unit level throughout the entirety of the choice process. We examined neuronal responses in two-option gambling tasks with lateralized and asynchronous presentation of offers in five reward regions: orbitofrontal cortex (OFC, area 13), ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC, area 14), ventral striatum (VS), dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), and subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC, area 25). Neuronal responses in all areas are sensitive to the positions of both offers and of choices.

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The Psychology and Neuroscience of Curiosity.

Neuron

November 2015

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14620, USA. Electronic address:

Curiosity is a basic element of our cognition, but its biological function, mechanisms, and neural underpinning remain poorly understood. It is nonetheless a motivator for learning, influential in decision-making, and crucial for healthy development. One factor limiting our understanding of it is the lack of a widely agreed upon delineation of what is and is not curiosity.

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Ramping ensemble activity in dorsal anterior cingulate neurons during persistent commitment to a decision.

J Neurophysiol

October 2015

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York.

We frequently need to commit to a choice to achieve our goals; however, the neural processes that keep us motivated in pursuit of delayed goals remain obscure. We examined ensemble responses of neurons in macaque dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), an area previously implicated in self-control and persistence, in a task that requires commitment to a choice to obtain a reward. After reward receipt, dACC neurons signaled reward amount with characteristic ensemble firing rate patterns; during the delay in anticipation of the reward, ensemble activity smoothly and gradually came to resemble the postreward pattern.

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Introduction: Neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS) in Alzheimer's disease (AD) are associated with significant negative outcomes for patients and their caregivers. Agitation, one of the most distressing NPS, lacks well-established long-term interventions that are both effective and safe. While non-pharmacological interventions are the suggested first-line treatment, it isn't effective in managing symptoms for every patient.

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Visual phenomena demonstrating striking perceptual disappearances of salient stimuli have fascinated researchers because of their utility in identifying neural processes that underlie subjective visibility and invisibility. Motion-induced blindness (MIB) is appealing for such purposes because it, like a class of ostensibly related paradigms such as binocular rivalry, features periods of unequivocal subjective disappearances despite constant physical stimulation. It remains unclear, however, exactly how the mechanisms that cause MIB are related to subjectively observed fluctuations in visual awareness.

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Signatures of Value Comparison in Ventral Striatum Neurons.

PLoS Biol

June 2015

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, United States of America.

The ventral striatum (VS), like its cortical afferents, is closely associated with processing of rewards, but the relative contributions of striatal and cortical reward systems remains unclear. Most theories posit distinct roles for these structures, despite their similarities. We compared responses of VS neurons to those of ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) Area 14 neurons, recorded in a risky choice task.

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Time discounting and time preference in animals: A critical review.

Psychon Bull Rev

February 2016

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, 14620, USA.

Animals are an important model for studies of impulsivity and self-control. Many studies have made use of the intertemporal choice task, which pits small rewards available sooner against larger rewards available later (typically several seconds), repeated over many trials. Preference for the sooner reward is often taken to indicate impulsivity and/or a failure of self-control.

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Neuropsychiatric symptoms in dementia: a cause or consequence?

Am J Psychiatry

May 2015

From the Alzheimer's Disease Care, Research and Education Program (AD-CARE), Department of Psychiatry, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Rochester, N.Y.; and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Science at the University of Rochester, Rochester, N.Y.

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Monkeys are more patient in a foraging task than in a standard intertemporal choice task.

PLoS One

January 2016

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, United States of America.

Studies of animal impulsivity generally find steep subjective devaluation, or discounting, of delayed rewards - often on the order of a 50% reduction in value in a few seconds. Because such steep discounting is highly disfavored in evolutionary models of time preference, we hypothesize that discounting tasks provide a poor measure of animals' true time preferences. One prediction of this hypothesis is that estimates of time preferences based on these tasks will lack external validity, i.

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Memory timeline: Brain ERP C250 (not P300) is an early biomarker of short-term storage.

Brain Res

April 2015

Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester, Meliora Hall, Rochester, NY 14627, United States.

Brain event-related potentials (ERPs) offer a quantitative link between neurophysiological activity and cognitive performance. ERPs were measured while young adults performed a task that required storing a relevant stimulus in short-term memory. Using principal components analysis, ERP component C250 (maximum at 250 ms post-stimulus) was extracted from a set of ERPs that were separately averaged for various task conditions, including stimulus relevancy and stimulus sequence within a trial.

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Decision makers are curious and consequently value advance information about future events. We made use of this fact to test competing theories of value representation in area 13 of orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). In a new task, we found that monkeys reliably sacrificed primary reward (water) to view advance information about gamble outcomes.

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