Search results for "NEUROSCIENCE"

2017

Some years ago Cheung et al. (2008) proposed the complete design (CD) for measuring the failure of selective attention in composite objects. Since the CD is a fully balanced design, analysis of response bias may reveal potential effects of the experimental manipulation, the stimulus material, and/or attributes of the observers. Here we used the CD to prove whether external features modulate perception of internal features with the context congruency paradigm (Nachson et al., 1995; Meinhardt-Injac et al., 2010) in a larger sample of N = 303 subjects. We found a large congruency effect (Cohen's d = 1.78), which was attenuated by face inversion (d = 1.32). The congruency relation also strongly…

A survey on sleep assessment methods

2018

Purpose A literature review is presented that aims to summarize and compare current methods to evaluate sleep. Methods Current sleep assessment methods have been classified according to different criteria; e.g., objective (polysomnography, actigraphy…) vs. subjective (sleep questionnaires, diaries…), contact vs. contactless devices, and need for medical assistance vs. self-assessment. A comparison of validation studies is carried out for each method, identifying their sensitivity and specificity reported in the literature. Finally, the state of the market has also been reviewed with respect to customers’ opinions about current sleep apps. Results A taxonomy that classifies the sleep detect…

Brain representation of action observation in human infants.

2015

Imitative learning has long been established as extremely important for early development. However, neural mechanisms involved in early imitative behaviours are still areas of active research. Neurophysiological and brain-imaging studies have been recently performed that provide initial evidence of brain activation associated with action observation in the first months of life. In this review we examine all studies exploring the effects of action observation on brain function assessed by means of non-invasive brain-mapping techniques. Seventeen papers were selected as a result of our literature search. The strongest evidence for a neural signature of action observation comes from studies ex…

2014

Some years ago an improved design (the "complete design") was proposed to assess the composite face effect in terms of a congruency effect, defined as the performance difference for congruent and incongruent target to no-target relationships (Cheung et al., 2008). In a recent paper Rossion(2013) questioned whether the congruency effect was a valid hallmark of perceptual integration, because it may contain confounds with face-unspecific interference effects. Here we argue that the complete design is well-balanced and allows one to separate face-specific from face-unspecific effects. We used the complete design for a same/different composite stimulus matching task with face and non-face objec…

Representational flexibility in children's drawings: Effects of age and verbal instructions

1999

This study aims to investigate representational and syntactical flexibility in children's drawing behaviour, and the extent to which changes introduced at both representational and syntactical levels are related to age or can be induced by contextual manipulations. A Deletion task required three age groups of 5-, 7- and 9-year-old children to draw objects that had been rendered partially invisible, thanks to magic transformations. Two different verbal instructions about what was to remain visible in the objects, and two different objects, one regularly and one non-regularly drawn, were designed to investigate contextual sensitivity in children's representational and syntactical behaviour re…

Principled animation design improves comprehension of complex dynamics

2016

International audience; Learners can have difficulty in decomposing conventionally designed animations to obtain raw material suitable for building high quality mental models. A composition approach to designing animations based on the Animation Processing Model was developed as a principled alternative to prevailing approaches. Outcomes from studying novel and conventional animation designs (independent variable) were compared with respect to mental model quality, knowledge of local kinematics, and capacity to transfer (dependent variables). Study of a compositional animation that presented material in a contiguous fashion resulted in higher quality mental models of a piano mechanism than …

Automatic auditory intelligence: an expression of the sensory-cognitive core of cognitive processes.

2010

Abstract In this article, we present a new view on the nature of cognitive processes suggesting that there is a common core, viz., automatic sensory–cognitive processes that form the basis for higher-order cognitive processes. It has been shown that automatic sensory–cognitive processes are shared by humans and various other species and occur at different developmental stages and even in different states of consciousness. This evidence, based on the automatic electrophysiological change-detection response mismatch negativity (MMN), its magnetoencephalographic equivalent MMNm, and behavioral data, indicates that in audition surprisingly complex processes occur automatically and mainly in the…

Music as a mnemonic to learn gesture sequences in normal aging and Alzheimer’s disease

2014

Strong links between music and motor functions suggest that music could represent an interesting aid for motor learning. The present study aims for the first time to test the potential of music to assist in the learning of sequences of gestures in normal and pathological aging. Participants with mild Alzheimer's disease (AD) and healthy older adults (Controls) learned sequences of meaningless gestures that were either accompanied by music or a metronome. We also manipulated the learning procedure such that participants had to imitate the gestures to-be-memorized in synchrony with the experimenter or after the experimenter during encoding. Results show different patterns of performance for t…

The relationship between vigilance capacity and physical exercise: a mixed-effects multistudy analysis

2019

We thank to all the participants who took part in the experiment.

Insula and sensory insular cortex and somatosensory control in patients with insular stroke

2014

Background In functional imaging studies, the insular cortex (IC) has been identified as an essential part of the processing of a whole spectrum of multimodal sensory input. However, there are no lesion studies including a sufficient number of patients, which would reinforce the functional imaging data obtained from healthy subjects. Such lesion studies should examine how damage to the IC affects sensory perception. We chose acute stroke patients with lesions affecting the IC in order to fill this gap. Methods A comprehensive sensory profiling by applying a quantitative sensory testing protocol was performed and a voxel-lesion behaviour mapping analysis in 24 patients with acute unilateral …