Search results for " EXPERIMENTAL"
showing 10 items of 3530 documents
The auditory N1 suppression rebounds as prediction persists over time
2016
International audience; The predictive coding model of perception proposes that neuronal responses reflect prediction errors. Repeated as well as predicted stimuli trigger suppressed neuronal responses because they are associated with reduced prediction errors. However, many predictable events in our environment are not isolated but sequential, yet there is little empirical evidence documenting how suppressed neuronal responses reflecting reduced prediction errors change in the course of a predictable sequence of events. Here we conceived an auditory electroencephalography (EEG) experiment where prediction persists over series of four tones to allow for the delineation of the dynamics of th…
Speed on the dance floor : auditory and visual cues for musical tempo
2016
Musical tempo is most strongly associated with the rate of the beat or “tactus,” which may be defined as the most prominent rhythmic periodicity present in the music, typically in a range of 1.67–2 Hz. However, other factors such as rhythmic density, mean rhythmic inter-onset interval, metrical (accentual) structure, and rhythmic complexity can affect perceived tempo (Drake et al., 1999 and London, 2011Drake, Gros, & Penel, 1999; London, 2011). Visual information can also give rise to a perceived beat/tempo (Iversen, et al., 2015), and auditory and visual temporal cues can interact and mutually influence each other (Soto-Faraco and Kingstone, 2004 and Spence, 2015). A five-part experiment w…
Speech- and sound-segmentation in dyslexia: evidence for a multiple-level cortical impairment
2006
Developmental dyslexia involves deficits in the visual and auditory domains, but is primarily characterized by an inability to translate the written linguistic code to the sound structure. Recent research has shown that auditory dysfunctions in dyslexia might originate from impairments in early pre-attentive processes, which affect behavioral discrimination. Previous studies have shown that whereas dyslexic individuals are deficient in discriminating sound distinctions involving consonants or simple pitch changes, discrimination of other sound aspects, such as tone duration, is intact. We hypothesized that such contrasts that can be discriminated by dyslexic individuals when heard in isolat…
Accident ahead? Difficulties of drivers with and without reading impairment recognising words and pictograms in variable message signs
2017
A timely and accurate acquisition of the information provided by variable message signs (VMS) can be crucial while driving. In the current study, we assess the difficulties of adults with dyslexia acquiring the information shown in VMS and provide evidence to discuss the controversial use of pictograms as potential countermeasures. Twenty-two adults with dyslexia and 22 matched controls completed a simulated driving session. The legibility of 12 VMS was assessed, including six text messages (e.g. "ACCIDENT") and six single pictograms (e.g. the icon for "accident ahead"). On average, participants with dyslexia started reading text messages when they were closer to the VMS. In addition, while…
Increasing the default interletter spacing of words can help drivers to read traffic signs at longer distances
2018
Would an increase in the default interletter spacing improve the legibility of words in traffic signs? Previous evidence on traffic sign design and recent studies on the cognitive processes involved in visual word recognition have provided conflicting results. The present work examined whether an increase in the default interletter spacing would improve the search of a word in direction traffic signs. To achieve this objective, twenty-two drivers participated in a driving simulation experiment. They followed a highway route and indicated whether a target place name was present among a set of distractors shown on direction traffic signs along the route. We compared the default interletter sp…
Semantic distance as a critical factor in icon design for in-car infotainment systems
2017
In-car infotainment systems require icons that enable fluent cognitive information processing and safe interaction while driving. An important issue is how to find an optimised set of icons for different functions in terms of semantic distance. In an optimised icon set, every icon needs to be semantically as close as possible to the function it visually represents and semantically as far as possible from the other functions represented concurrently. In three experiments (N = 21 each), semantic distances of 19 icons to four menu functions were studied with preference rankings, verbal protocols, and the primed product comparisons method. The results show that the primed product comparisons me…
Learning by heart : cardiac cycle reveals an effective time window for learning
2018
Cardiac cycle phase is known to modulate processing of simple sensory information. This effect of the heartbeat on brain function is likely exerted via baroreceptors, the neurons sensitive for changes in blood pressure. From baroreceptors, the signal is conveyed all the way to the forebrain and the medial prefrontal cortex. In the two experiments reported, we examined whether learning, as a more complex form of cognition, can be modulated by the cardiac cycle phase. Human participants ( experiment 1) and rabbits ( experiment 2) were trained in trace eyeblink conditioning while neural activity was recorded. The conditioned stimulus was presented contingently with either the systolic or dias…
Inhibitory Control for Emotional and Neutral Scenes in Competition: An Eye-Tracking Study in Bipolar Disorder
2017
This study examined the inhibitory control of attention to social scenes in manic, depressive, and euthymic episodes of bipolar disorder (BD). Two scenes were simultaneously presented (happy/threatening/neutral [target] versus control). Participants were asked either to look at the emotional pictures (i.e., attend-to-emotional block) or to avoid looking at the emotional pictures (i.e., attend-to-neutral block) while their eye movements were recorded. The initial orienting (latency and percentage of first fixation) and subsequent attentional engagement (gaze duration) were computed. Manic patients showed a higher percentage of initial fixations on happy scenes than on the other scenes, regar…
Complex network analysis of resting-state fMRI of the brain.
2016
Due to the fact that the brain activity hardly ever diminishes in healthy individuals, analysis of resting state functionality of the brain seems pertinent. Various resting state networks are active inside the idle brain at any time. Based on various neuro-imaging studies, it is understood that various structurally distant regions of the brain could be functionally connected. Regions of the brain, that are functionally connected, during rest constitutes to the resting state network. In the present study, we employed the complex network measures to estimate the presence of community structures within a network. Such estimate is named as modularity. Instead of using a traditional correlation …
Frontal hypoactivation and alterations in the reward-system during humor processing in patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders
2018
Humor is a ubiquitous human ability with important implications for both social and emotional functioning. Patients with neuropsychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, experience difficulties in the comprehension and appreciation of humor. However, the specific neural mechanisms underlying these deficits are unknown. In the current study, we sought to elucidate the neural correlates of humor processing in patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD). Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) was used in thirty-one patients with SSD and a control group, performing a humor processing paradigm. Both regional brain activation and parametric modulation of brain responses via subje…