Search results for "Genetic Structures"
showing 10 items of 2107 documents
Electrophysiological signatures of masked transposition priming in a same-different task: Evidence with strings of letters vs. pseudoletters
2012
Research on masked transposed-letter priming (i.e., jugde-JUDGE triggers a faster response than jupte-JUDGE) has become a key phenomenon to reveal how the brain encodes letter position. Recent behavioural evidence suggests that the mechanism responsible for position coding in a masked priming procedure works with familiar "object" identities (e.g., letters, digits, symbols) but not with unfamiliar object identities (e.g., pseudoletters). Here we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to explore the time course of masked transposition priming of letters vs. pseudoletters in a cue-target same-different matching task. Target stimuli were preceded by a masked prime that could be: (i) identical to…
Anatomical correlate of positive spontaneous visual phenomena: a voxelwise lesion study.
2010
Objectives: Visual phenomena such as phosphenes, photopsias, or complex visual hallucinations occur in patients with lesions affecting the occipital, parietal, or temporal lobe. Whether these phenomena are provoked by lesions in specific anatomical regions is still uncertain. To determine which brain regions might be involved in such visual phenomena, we used new brain imaging and lesion analysis tools that allow a direct comparison with control patients. Methods: Visual phenomena were investigated in a total of 23 patients with acute infarctions along the visual pathways (6 patients with left-sided and 17 patients with right-sided lesions). Results: Ten of these 23 patients (43%) reported …
Specific forms of neural activity associated with tactile space awareness
2002
Left tactile extinction, in which a left tactile stimulus fails to access consciousness only when a right stimulus is presented simultaneously, offers a model for studying tactile awareness from its transitory absence. Pairs of transcranial magnetic stimuli (TMS) on the parietal cortex inhibit contralateral tactile perception when separated by an interval of 1 ms. We have applied this technique on the left parietal cortex of right brain damaged (RBD) patients and normal subjects and have shown a selective lack of paired TMS inhibitory effects on right tactile perception of patients during bimanual stimulation. TMS effects were normal during unimanual right stimulation. These results suggest…
fMRI signal increases and decreases in cortical areas during small-field optokinetic stimulation and central fixation
2001
Small-field optokinetic nystagmus (OKN) was performed in seven healthy volunteers in order to analyze the activation and deactivation patterns of visual motion, ocular motor, and multisensory vestibular cortex areas by means of fMRI during coherent visual motion stimulation. BOLD signal decreases (deactivations) were found in the first and second long insular gyri and retroinsular areas (the human homologue of the parietoinsular vestibular cortex and the visual posterior sylvian area in the monkey) of both hemispheres, extending into the transverse temporal gyrus and inferior-anterior parts of the superior temporal gyrus (BA 22), and the precentral gyri at two separate sites (BA 4 and 6). F…
Visual tracking combined with hand-tracking improves time perception of moving stimuli
2014
A number of studies have shown that performing a secondary task while executing a time-judgment task impairs performance on the latter task. However, this turns out not to be the case for certain motor secondary tasks. We show that concomitant secondary motor tasks involving pointing, when performed during a time-judgment task, can actually improve our time-judgment abilities. We compared adult participants' performance in a time-of-movement paradigm with visual pursuit-only and with visual pursuit plus hand pursuit. Rather than interfering with their estimation of stimulus movement duration, the addition of hand pursuit significantly improved their judgment. In addition, we considered the …
Evidence for cortical visual substitution of chronic bilateral vestibular failure (an fMRI study).
2007
Bilateral vestibular failure (BVF) is a rare disorder of the labyrinth or the eighth cranial nerve which has various aetiologies. BVF patients suffer from unsteadiness of gait combined with blurred vision due to oscillopsia. Functional MRI (fMRI) in healthy subjects has shown that stimulation of the visual system induces an activation of the visual cortex and ocular motor areas bilaterally as well as simultaneous deactivations of multisensory vestibular cortex areas. Our question was whether the chronic absence of bilateral vestibular input (BVF) causes a plastic cortical reorganization of the above-described visual-vestibular interaction. We used fMRI to measure the differential effects of…
Accommodation Responds to Optical Vergence and Not Defocus Blur Alone.
2017
Purpose To determine whether changes in wavefront spherical curvature (optical vergence) are a directional cue for accommodation. Methods Nine subjects participated in this experiment. The accommodation response to a monochromatic target was measured continuously with a custom-made adaptive optics system while astigmatism and higher-order aberrations were corrected in real time. There were two experimental open-loop conditions: vergence-driven condition, where the deformable mirror provided sinusoidal changes in defocus at the retina between -1 and +1 diopters (D) at 0.2 Hz; and blur-driven condition, in which the level of defocus at the retina was always 0 D, but a sinusoidal defocus blur …
Position but not color deviants result in visual mismatch negativity in an active oddball task.
2009
Changes in the visual environment might be detected automatically. This function is provided by the sensory systems and showed, for instance, by the pop-out phenomenon. Automatic change detection is also observable within visual oddball paradigms, where rare changes are introduced in an irrelevant stimulus feature; the detection of deviant stimuli is accompanied by a negative component (so-called visual mismatch negativity) in the human event-related brain potential. In this study, the deviating stimulus feature was embedded in a task-relevant object presented in the focus of attention. With this, visual mismatch negativity was observable only with position deviants presented in the upper v…
Blue-yellow deficiency in workers exposed to low concentrations of organic solvents
1997
Objectives: To evaluate the effects of low concentrations of organic solvents on color vision. Methods: Color vision was examined in 24 workers exposed to mixtures of solvents and in 24 control subjects. Exposure to mixtures was below the threshold-limit values. Color vision ability was assessed using the Ishihara plates (to screen for congenital dyschromatopsia), the Farnsworth panel D-15 test, the Lanthony desaturated panel D-15 test, and the Standard Pseudoisochromatic Plates part 2 (SPP2 test). Results: The comparatively less sensitive Farnsworth panel D-15 test failed to show any difference between the groups, but the Lanthony panel D-15 desaturated test as well as the SPP2 test showed…
Amplitude envelope correlation detects coupling among incoherent brain signals.
2000
Event-related potentials (ERPs) to changes in the visual environment were recorded in rabbits. In the oddball condition, infrequently presented (deviant) stimuli occurred in a series of frequently presented (standard) stimuli. In the deviant-alone condition, standards were omitted. ERPs to oddball-deviants differed from those to standards in all recording sites (cerebellar cortex, visual cortex, dentate gyrus). No corresponding differences were found between ERPs to deviants in the oddball condition and those in the deviant-alone condition. However, because ERPs to deviants in the deviant-alone condition and those to standards did not differ either, ERPs to stimulus changes in the oddball c…