Search results for "Stimulus"

The cortical representation of pain.

1999

Anatomical and physiological studies in animals, as well as functional imaging studies in humans have shown that multiple cortical areas are activated by painful stimuli. The view that pain is perceived only as a result of thalamic processing has, therefore, been abandoned, and has been replaced by the question of what functions can be assigned to individual cortical areas. The following cortical areas have been shown to be involved in the processing of painful stimuli: primary somatosensory cortex, secondary somatosensory cortex and its vicinity in the parietal operculum, insula, anterior cingulate cortex and prefrontal cortex. These areas probably process different aspects of pain in para…

A current source density analysis of field potentials evoked in slices of visual cortex

1987

The method of one-dimensional current source density (CSD) analysis was applied to field potentials recorded from 350 microns thick slices of the primary visual cortex of rats and cats. Field potentials were elicited by stimulation of the white matter and recorded along trajectories perpendicular to the cortical layers at spatial intervals of 25 to 50 microns. The resulting CSD distributions resembled closely those recorded from the cat visual cortex "in vivo". The responses with the shortest latency were distinct sinks in layers IV and VI probably reflecting monosynaptic EPSP's from specific thalamic afferents. From layer IV activity was relayed along three major routes: 1. to the supragra…

Asymmetries in classically conditioned head movements and cingulate cortex slow potentials in cats.

1991

Presuming that conditioned head movements in the cat indicate a preference for a specific direction, asymmetries were also expected to be found in bilaterally recorded cingulate cortex slow potentials to a symmetrical tone stimulus during discriminative conditioning. Conditioned stimuli (CS, 1000 and 2500 Hz tones) were delivered through two miniature loudspeakers fitted to the head in front of both ears. The unconditioned stimulus (US) was an electrical stimulation of either the left or right lateral hypothalamus yielding, in addition to its rewarding effects, an unconditioned head turning response (UR) either to the left, right, forwards or upwards. Discrimination learning appeared as mor…

Space counts! Brain correlates of spatial and numerical representations in synaesthesia

2018

Over-learned semantic representations, such as numbers, are strongly associated with space in normal cognition, and in the phenomenon called number-space synaesthesia. In number-space synaesthesia, numbers are linked to spatial locations in an idiosyncratic way. Synaesthetes report numbers as belonging to a specific location, or feelings that a specific location is the right location for that number. What does really differentiate synaesthetes from non-synaesthetes with respect to their number-space representation? Here we present a number-space synaesthete, MkM, whose number-space representation dramatically differs from that of controls. We examined the impact of spatial distance with res…

Context specificity of both acquisition and extinction of a Pavlovian conditioned response

2016

It is widely held that the extinction of a conditioned response is more context specific than its initial acquisition. One proposed explanation is that context serves to disambiguate the meaning of a stimulus. Using a procedure that equated the learning histories of the contexts, we show that the memory of an appetitive Pavlovian association can be highly context specific despite being unambiguous. This result is inconsistent with predictions of the Rescorla–Wagner model of learning but in line with configural accounts of contextual control of behavior. We propose an explanatory model in which context serves to modulate the gain of associative strength and which expands upon the configural …

Visual mismatch negativity (vMMN): A review and meta-analysis of studies in psychiatric and neurological disorders

2015

The visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) response is an event-related potential (ERP) component, which is automatically elicited by events that violate predictions based on prior events. VMMN experiments use visual stimulus repetition to induce predictions, and vMMN is obtained by subtracting the response to rare unpredicted stimuli from those to frequent stimuli. One increasingly popular interpretation of the mismatch response postulates that vMMN, similar to its auditory counterpart (aMMN), represents a prediction error response generated by cortical mechanisms forming probabilistic representations of sensory signals. Here we discuss the physiological and theoretical basis of vMMN and review…

An empirical test of Sokolov's entropy model of the orienting response.

1974

Several hypotheses, most of them deduced from Sokolov's entropy model of the Orienting Response (OR), were tested. The Galvanic Skin Response (GSR) served as the indicator of the OR. Printed language, analyzed with regard to the information content in bits, was used as stimulus material. Forty-eight female students served as subjects. The results indicate: (1) that the uncertainty of a situation does not determine the strength of the OR, (2) that the strength of the OR depends on the information carried by an event, and (3) that the processing of this information, as indicated by the OR, may be delayed by one or more events in a serial application. For tonic level over a series of events no…

Blocking NMDA-receptors in the pigeon's "prefrontal" caudal nidopallium impairs appetitive extinction learning in a sign-tracking paradigm

2015

Extinction learning provides the ability to flexibly adapt to new contingencies by learning to inhibit previously acquired associations in a context-dependent manner. The neural networks underlying extinction learning were mostly studied in rodents using fear extinction paradigms. To uncover invariant properties of the neural basis of extinction learning, we employ pigeons as a model system. Since the prefrontal cortex of mammals is a key structure for extinction learning, we assessed the role of N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors (NMDARs) in the nidopallium caudolaterale, the avian functional equivalent of mammalian prefrontal cortex. Since NMDARs in prefrontal cortex have been shown to be rel…

TREC: A tool kit for programming cognitive experiments in Applesoft BASIC

1987

Introduction to Non-regular Nanosystems

2017

The chapter presents a short description of the main topics in non-regular nanosystems. In general, the scientific content of the discussed problems is based on the research interests of the authors of this book. Non-regularity is considered as a basic stimulus for the operational abilities of novel nanomaterials.