Parallel mechanisms signal a hierarchy of sequence structure violations in the auditory cortex.

The brain predicts regularities in sensory inputs at multiple complexity levels, with neuronal mechanisms that remain elusive. Here, we monitored auditory cortex activity during the local-global paradigm, a protocol nesting different regularity levels in sound sequences. We observed that mice encode local predictions based on stimulus occurrence and stimulus transition probabilities, because auditory responses are boosted upon prediction violation.

Modality-Specific and Amodal Language Processing by Single Neurons.

According to psycholinguistic theories, during language processing, spoken and written words are first encoded along independent phonological and orthographic dimensions, then enter into modality-independent syntactic and semantic codes. Non-invasive brain imaging has isolated several cortical regions putatively associated with those processing stages, but lacks the resolution to identify the corresponding neural codes. Here, we describe the firing responses of over 1000 neurons, and mesoscale field potentials from over 1400 microwires and 1500 iEEG contacts in 21 awake neurosurgical patients with implanted electrodes during written and spoken sentence comprehension.

Motor inhibition prevents motor execution during typing imagery: Evidence from an action-mode switching paradigm.

Motor imagery is accompanied by a subjective multisensory experience. This sensory experience is thought to result from the deployment of internal models developed for the execution and monitoring of overt actions. If so, how is it that motor imagery does not lead to overt execution? It has been proposed that inhibitory mechanisms may prevent execution during imagined actions such as imagined typing.

Mapping and modeling the semantic space of math concepts.

Mathematics is an underexplored domain of human cognition. While many studies have focused on subsets of math concepts such as numbers, fractions, or geometric shapes, few have ventured beyond these elementary domains. Here, we attempted to map out the full space of math concepts and to answer two specific questions: can distributed semantic models, such a GloVe, provide a satisfactory fit to human semantic judgements in mathematics? And how does this fit vary with education? We first analyzed all of the French and English Wikipedia pages with math contents, and used a semi-automatic procedure to extract the 1000 most frequent math terms in both languages.

Dynamical structure-function correlations provide robust and generalizable signatures of consciousness in humans.

Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging evolves through a repertoire of functional connectivity patterns which might reflect ongoing cognition, as well as the contents of conscious awareness. We investigated whether the dynamic exploration of these states can provide robust and generalizable markers for the state of consciousness in human participants, across loss of consciousness induced by general anaesthesia or slow wave sleep. By clustering transient states of functional connectivity, we demonstrated that brain activity during unconsciousness is dominated by a recurrent pattern primarily mediated by structural connectivity and with a reduced capacity to transition to other patterns.

Pronouns reactivate conceptual representations in human hippocampal neurons.

During discourse comprehension, every new word adds to an evolving representation of meaning that accumulates over consecutive sentences and constrains the next words. To minimize repetition and utterance length, languages use pronouns, like the word "she," to refer to nouns and phrases that were previously introduced. It has been suggested that language comprehension requires that pronouns activate the same neuronal representations as the nouns themselves.

Preserved functional organization of auditory cortex in two individuals missing one temporal lobe from infancy.

Human cortical responses to natural sounds, measured with fMRI, can be approximated as the weighted sum of a small number of canonical response patterns (components), each having interpretable functional and anatomical properties. Here, we asked whether this organization is preserved in cases where only one temporal lobe is available due to early brain damage by investigating a unique family: one sibling missing their left temporal lobe from infancy, another missing the right temporal lobe from infancy, and a third anatomically neurotypical. None of the siblings manifested behavioral deficits.

Optimal level of human intracranial theta activity for behavioral switching in the subthalamo-medio-prefrontal circuit.

The ability to switch between rules associating stimuli and responses depend on a circuit including the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) and the subthalamic nucleus (STN). However, the precise neural implementations of switching remain unclear. To address this issue, we recorded local field potentials from the STN and from the dmPFC of neuropsychiatric patients during behavioral switching.

Cracking the neural code for word recognition in convolutional neural networks.

Learning to read places a strong challenge on the visual system. Years of expertise lead to a remarkable capacity to separate similar letters and encode their relative positions, thus distinguishing words such as FORM and FROM, invariantly over a large range of positions, sizes and fonts. How neural circuits achieve invariant word recognition remains unknown.

Slow ramping emerges from spontaneous fluctuations in spiking neural networks.

The capacity to initiate actions endogenously is critical for goal-directed behavior. Spontaneous voluntary actions are typically preceded by slow-ramping activity in medial frontal cortex that begins around two seconds before movement, which may reflect spontaneous fluctuations that influence action timing. However, the mechanisms by which these slow ramping signals emerge from single-neuron and network dynamics remain poorly understood.

Five years on: analysis of university lecturers' experiences of the French government's health promotion education program.

Background: The National Health Promotion Intervention Program by Student (HPIPS) is a French government educational program introduced in 2018, aiming at developing all health students' health promotion knowledge and abilities, as well as implementing health promotion interventions for specific subpopulations in the general public. Its pedagogical framework was elaborated in 2018 and then evaluated by the French Council for Public Health in 2022, highlighting certain difficulties for the program to be homogeneously implemented in France. The aim of this study was to explore and describe the experiences and feedback of university lecturers in charge of this HPIPS training.

The Language Network Reliably "Tracks" Naturalistic Meaningful Nonverbal Stimuli.

The language network, comprised of brain regions in the left frontal and temporal cortex, responds robustly and reliably during language comprehension but shows little or no response during many nonlinguistic cognitive tasks (e.g., Fedorenko & Blank, 2020).

Transient brain activity dynamics discriminate levels of consciousness during anesthesia.

The awake mammalian brain is functionally organized in terms of large-scale distributed networks that are constantly interacting. Loss of consciousness might disrupt this temporal organization leaving patients unresponsive. We hypothesize that characterizing brain activity in terms of transient events may provide a signature of consciousness.

The interplay between spatial and non-spatial grouping cues over approximate number perception.

Humans and animals share the cognitive ability to quickly extract approximate number information from sets. Main psychophysical models suggest that visual approximate numerosity relies on segmented units, which can be affected by Gestalt rules. Indeed, arrays containing spatial grouping cues, such as connectedness, closure, and even symmetry, are underestimated compared to ungrouped arrays with equal low-level features.

Individual Brain Charting dataset extension, third release for movie watching and retinotopy data.

The Individual Brain Charting (IBC) is a multi-task functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging dataset acquired at high spatial-resolution and dedicated to the cognitive mapping of the human brain. It consists in the deep phenotyping of twelve individuals, covering a broad range of psychological domains suitable for functional-atlasing applications. Here, we present the inclusion of task data from both naturalistic stimuli and trial-based designs, to uncover structures of brain activation.

General mechanisms of task engagement in the primate frontal cortex.

Staying engaged is necessary to maintain goal-directed behaviors. Despite this, engagement exhibits continuous, intrinsic fluctuations. Even in experimental settings, animals, unlike most humans, repeatedly and spontaneously move between periods of complete task engagement and disengagement.

Characterizing different types of developmental dyslexias in French: The Malabi screener.

Reading is a complex process involving multiple stages. An impairment in any of these stages may cause distinct types of reading deficits- distinct types of dyslexia. We describe the Malabi, a screener to identify deficits in various orthographic, lexical, and sublexical components of the reading process in French.

A brief tablet-based intervention benefits linguistic and communicative abilities in toddlers and preschoolers.

Young children's linguistic and communicative abilities are foundational for their academic achievement and overall well-being. We present the positive outcomes of a brief tablet-based intervention aimed at teaching toddlers and preschoolers new word-object and letter-sound associations. We conducted two experiments, one involving toddlers ( ~ 24 months old, n = 101) and the other with preschoolers ( ~ 42 months old, n = 152).

Examining the Impact of Reading Fluency on Lexical Decision Results in French 6th Graders.

Purpose: How does lexical decision behavior vary in students with the same grade level (all students were in their first year of middle-school), but different levels of reading fluency? Here, we tested a prediction of the dual-route model: as fluency increases, variations in the results may reflect a decreasing reliance on decoding and an increasing reliance on the lexical route.

Method: 1,501 French 6 graders passed a one-minute speeded reading-aloud task evaluating fluency, and a ten-minute computerized lexical decision task evaluating the impact of lexicality, length, word frequency and pseudoword type.

Results: As predicted, the word length effect varied dramatically with reading fluency, with the least fluent students showing a length effect even for frequent words.

Right-sided vagus nerve stimulation for drug-resistant epilepsy: A systematic review of the literature and perspectives.

Background: Right-sided vagus nerve stimulation (RS-VNS) is indicated when the procedure was deemed not technically feasible or too risky on the indicated left side.

Objective: The present study aims to systematically review the literature on RS-VNS, assessing its effectiveness and safety.

Methods: A systematic review following PRISMA guidelines was conducted: Pubmed/MEDLINE, The Cochrane Library, Scopus, Embase and Web of science databases were searched from inception to August 13th,2023.

Multiple and subject-specific roles of uncertainty in reward-guided decision-making.

Decision-making in noisy, changing, and partially observable environments entails a basic tradeoff between immediate reward and longer-term information gain, known as the exploration-exploitation dilemma. Computationally, an effective way to balance this tradeoff is by leveraging uncertainty to guide exploration. Yet, in humans, empirical findings are mixed, from suggesting uncertainty-seeking to indifference and avoidance.

Spontaneously emerging internal models of visual sequences combine abstract and event-specific information in the prefrontal cortex.

When exposed to sensory sequences, do macaque monkeys spontaneously form abstract internal models that generalize to novel experiences? Here, we show that neuronal populations in macaque ventrolateral prefrontal cortex jointly encode visual sequences by separate codes for the specific pictures presented and for their abstract sequential structure. We recorded prefrontal neurons while macaque monkeys passively viewed visual sequences and sequence mismatches in the local-global paradigm. Even without any overt task or response requirements, prefrontal populations spontaneously form representations of sequence structure, serial order, and image identity within distinct but superimposed neuronal subspaces.

Local orchestration of distributed functional patterns supporting loss and restoration of consciousness in the primate brain.

A central challenge of neuroscience is to elucidate how brain function supports consciousness. Here, we combine the specificity of focal deep brain stimulation with fMRI coverage of the entire cortex, in awake and anaesthetised non-human primates. During propofol, sevoflurane, or ketamine anaesthesia, and subsequent restoration of responsiveness by electrical stimulation of the central thalamus, we investigate how loss of consciousness impacts distributed patterns of structure-function organisation across scales.

Spectrotemporal cues and attention jointly modulate fMRI network topology for sentence and melody perception.

Speech and music are two fundamental modes of human communication. Lateralisation of key processes underlying their perception has been related both to the distinct sensitivity to low-level spectrotemporal acoustic features and to top-down attention. However, the interplay between bottom-up and top-down processes needs to be clarified.