Search results for " Experimental"

Interference of Illusory Contour Perception by a Distractor

2021

The visual system is capable of recognizing objects when object information is widely separated in space, as revealed by the Kanizsa-type illusory contours (ICs). Attentional involvement in perception of ICs is an important topic, and the present study examined whether and how the processing of ICs is interfered with by a distractor. Discrimination between thin and short deformations of an illusory circle was investigated in the absence or presence of a central dynamic patch, with difficulty of discrimination varied in three levels (easy, medium, and hard). Reaction time (RT) was significantly shorter in the absence compared to the presence of the distractor in the easy and medium condition…

Visual mismatch negativity for changes in orientation - a sensory memory-dependent response

2008

It remains unclear whether the mismatch negativity of event-related potentials (ERPs) in vision resembles its auditory counterpart in terms of memory relatedness. We recorded ERPs to visual bars in adult humans engaged in an auditory task. In one condition, a bar ('standard') repeated at 400- or 1100-ms non-stimulated intervals was rarely (P = 0.1) replaced by another bar of a different orientation ('deviant'). In the other condition (400-ms intervals), the occurrences of the standards were replaced by 10 (P = 0.1 each) bars of different orientations, including that of the deviant ('control-deviant'). Deviants shifted ERPs towards negative polarity relative to standards in occipital electro…

Cortical Patterns of Pleasurable Musical Chills Revealed by High-Density EEG

2020

Music has the capacity to elicit strong positive feelings in humans by activating the brain’s reward system. Because group emotional dynamics is a central concern of social neurosciences, the study of emotion in natural/ecological conditions is gaining interest. This study aimed to show that high-density EEG (HD-EEG) is able to reveal patterns of cerebral activities previously identified by fMRI or PET scans when the subject experiences pleasurable musical chills. We used HD-EEG to record participants (11 female, 7 male) while listening to their favorite pleasurable chill-inducing musical excerpts; they reported their subjective emotional state from low pleasure up to chills. HD-EEG results…

The Feasibility of Using Guided Self-Help in Anorexia Nervosa: An Analysis of Drop-Out From the Study Protocol and Intervention Adherence

2020

The implementation of online technologies to promote wellbeing is increasingly becoming a worldwide priority. This study includes secondary analyses of data and examined drop-out rates in an online guided self-help intervention for patients with anorexia nervosa. Specifically, rates of drop-out at end of treatment (i.e., 6 weeks assessment), as well as intervention adherence (minimum of four of six online guided sessions) and differences between completers and drop-outs were examined. Motivation to change and associated patient variables were assessed as predictors of drop-out using structural equation modeling. Ninety-nine patients were randomized to the intervention arm of the trial. Data…

Validation study of Italian version of inventory for déjà vu experiences assessment (I-IDEA): A screening tool to detect déjà vu phenomenon in Italia…

2017

The Inventory Déjà Vu Experiences Assessment (IDEA) is the only screening instrument proposed to evaluate the Déjà vu (DV) experience. Here, we intended to validate the Italian version of IDEA (I-IDEA) and at the same time to investigate the incidence and subjective qualities of the DV phenomenon in healthy Italian adult individuals on basis of an Italian multicentre observational study. In this study, we report normative data on the I-IDEA, collected on a sample of 542 Italian healthy subjects aging between 18-70 years (average age: 40) with a formal educational from 1-19 years. From September 2013 to March 2016, we recruited 542 healthy volunteers from 10 outpatient neurological clinics i…

Quantifying Intermodal Distraction by Emotion During Math Performance: An Electrophysiological Approach

2019

Emotionally engaging stimuli are powerful competitors for limited attention capacity. In the cognitive neuroscience laboratory, the presence of task-irrelevant emotionally arousing visual distractors prompts decreased performance and attenuated brain responses measured in concurrent visual tasks. The extent to which distraction effects occur across different sensory modalities is not yet established, however. Here, we examined the extent and time course of competition between a naturalistic distractor sound and a visual task stimulus, using dense-array electroencephalography (EEG) recordings from 20 college students. Steady-state visual evoked potentials (ssVEPs) were quantified from EEG, e…

Combining Quantitative and Qualitative Data in the Study of Feeding Behavior in Male Wistar Rats

2019

The first step in a behavioral study is represented by the organization of a suitable ethogram, that is, a formal description of individual components of the behavior. Then, each component of such a behavioral repertoire can be quantified (e.g., how many times it occurs, its duration, percent distribution, latency, etc.). However, it is our contention that the possibility to describe the behavior of a living being by means of hundreds or even thousands of numbers concerning isolated components, disjointed from the comprehensive behavioral architecture, does not imply the possibility to use those numbers to reconstruct the meaning of behavior. Such a level of comprehension requires a qualita…

2017

The mere presence of a depiction of eyes can elicit a sense of being watched in the perceiver. To this date, the factors affecting the intensity of this sense of being watched, however, have not been investigated. In the present experiment, we tested the impact of two potentially relevant variables: arousal (manipulated using specific musical pieces) and duration of the perceptual episode (manipulated using presentation times of 200 ms and 10 s, respectively). We asked participants to report how intensely they felt being watched while we exposed them to various observation cues ranging from human eyes to surveillance cameras. We found that, on average, reported intensities were higher if pa…

Glucose metabolism and self-regulation — Is insulin resistance a valid proxy of self-control?

2016

Abstract Glucose metabolism has been suggested as an underlying biological factor of self-control stimulating a range of studies exploring the associations between glucose and self-control. Research on interindividual trait-like differences in glucose metabolism and self-control is sparse, as most previous research has focused on associations between state self-control performance and momentary glucose levels. In two experiments in healthy participants (n = 60, mean age 35.2 ± 13.9, 58% women; n = 103, mean age 25.8 ± 6.3, 67% women) consisting of a baseline assessment and a laboratory session, we examined whether trait markers of glucose metabolism (fasting glucose levels, oral glucose tol…

Predictors of visually induced motion sickness in women

2019

Abstract Background Visually induced motion sickness (VIMS) is commonly experienced when visual motion information is in conflict with motion information provided by the vestibular system and/or tactile and kinesthetic senses. According to some studies, women experience higher levels of VIMS than men, whereas other studies do not find this to be the case. Hypothesis This study investigated whether gender differences can be attributed to changes in VIMS-susceptibility due to the menstrual cycle and perceived menstrual pain. We hypothesized that higher perceived menstrual pain correlates positively with VIMS susceptibility. Methods We measured the influence of estimated concentrations of four…