Search results for "Sensory Systems"
showing 10 items of 793 documents
3.5. Saccular activations in the brainstem and the cerebellum (fMRI)
2007
Evaluation of olfactory intensity : comparative study of two methods
2004
Two experimental procedures recommended for the evaluation of the psychophysical characteristics of odorous compounds, olfactory matching with the 1-butanol scale and cross-modality matching with the finger span are compared. The intensity of ethyl butyrate and guaiacol solutions presented at four different concentration levels was evaluated by a panel of sixteen subjects over five repetitions using the two methods. Each stimulus was delivered to the subject from a Teflon bag through a nose-shaped glass sniffing port. The discrimination ability, repeatability, panel homogeneity and within-subject variability of the methods were assessed. Results indicate that with both methods, subjects wer…
Childhood Adversities and Adult Headache in Poland and Germany.
2015
Objective Various childhood adversities have been found to be associated with chronic pain in adulthood. However, associations were moderate in most studies, i.e. odds ratios (OR) were between one and two. Method An internet survey was performed in 508 Polish and 500 German subjects. A total of 19 childhood adversities were selected and their associations with headaches explored. Age, gender and country were included as potential confounders, as well as their two-way interaction with the risk factors. Results Two strong risk factors were identified. (1) A combined score for physical and emotional neglect showed an odds ratio (OR) of 2.78 (p < .002) to the frequency of headache in adulthood …
Music and Emotions in the Brain: Familiarity Matters
2011
The importance of music in our daily life has given rise to an increased number of studies addressing the brain regions involved in its appreciation. Some of these studies controlled only for the familiarity of the stimuli, while others relied on pleasantness ratings, and others still on musical preferences. With a listening test and a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment, we wished to clarify the role of familiarity in the brain correlates of music appreciation by controlling, in the same study, for both familiarity and musical preferences. First, we conducted a listening test, in which participants rated the familiarity and liking of song excerpts from the pop/rock repe…
Sparse Distributed Representation of Odors in a Large-scale Olfactory Bulb Circuit
2013
In the olfactory bulb, lateral inhibition mediated by granule cells has been suggested to modulate the timing of mitral cell firing, thereby shaping the representation of input odorants. Current experimental techniques, however, do not enable a clear study of how the mitral-granule cell network sculpts odor inputs to represent odor information spatially and temporally. To address this critical step in the neural basis of odor recognition, we built a biophysical network model of mitral and granule cells, corresponding to 1/100th of the real system in the rat, and used direct experimental imaging data of glomeruli activated by various odors. The model allows the systematic investigation and g…
Auditory cortical and hippocampal-system mismatch responses to duration deviants in urethane-anesthetized rats.
2013
Any change in the invariant aspects of the auditory environment is of potential importance. The human brain preattentively or automatically detects such changes. The mismatch negativity (MMN) of event-related potentials (ERPs) reflects this initial stage of auditory change detection. The origin of MMN is held to be cortical. The hippocampus is associated with a later generated P3a of ERPs reflecting involuntarily attention switches towards auditory changes that are high in magnitude. The evidence for this cortico-hippocampal dichotomy is scarce, however. To shed further light on this issue, auditory cortical and hippocampal-system (CA1, dentate gyrus, subiculum) local-field potentials were …
Do Grading Gray Stimuli Help to Encode Letter Position?
2021
Numerous experiments in the past decades recurrently showed that a transposed-letter pseudoword (e.g., JUGDE) is much more wordlike than a replacement-letter control (e.g., JUPTE). Critically, there is an ongoing debate as to whether this effect arises at a perceptual level (e.g., perceptual uncertainty at assigning letter position of an array of visual objects) or at an abstract language-specific level (e.g., via a level of “open bigrams” between the letter and word levels). Here, we designed an experiment to test the limits of perceptual accounts of letter position coding. The stimuli in a lexical decision task were presented either with a homogeneous letter intensity or with a graded gra…
A Note on the Horizontal-Vertical Illusion - A Reply to Wade (2014).
2016
Like many others before him, Nicholas Wade, in a recent publication in this journal, did not provide the correct title of Adolf Fick's dissertation, approved by the University at Marburg, Germany, in 1851, and Wade also wrongly attributed now famous illusion figures, meant to illustrate the so-called horizontal-vertical illusion (the +, the L, and the inverted T), to this author. After having corrected these errors, I briefly relate Fick’s work to modern work in the field and note that it has been widely neglected.