Time course of brain activity during the processing of motor- and vision-related abstract concepts: flexibility and task dependency

Background.Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is an important regulator of synaptogenesis and synaptic plasticity underlying learning. However, a relationship between circulating BDNF levels and brain activity during learning has not been demonstrated in humans. Reduced brain BDNF levels are found in schizophrenia and functional neuroimaging studies of probabilistic association learning in schizophrenia have demonstrated reduced activity in a neural network that includes the prefrontal and parietal cortices and the caudate nucleus. We predicted that brain activity would correlate positively with peripheral BDNF levels during probabilistic association learning in healthy adults and that this relationship would be altered in schizophrenia.Method.Twenty-five healthy adults and 17 people with schizophrenia or schizo-affective disorder performed a probabilistic association learning test during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Plasma BDNF levels were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA).Results.We found a positive correlation between circulating plasma BDNF levels and brain activity in the parietal cortex in healthy adults. There was no relationship between plasma BDNF levels and task-related activity in the prefrontal, parietal or caudate regions in schizophrenia. A direct comparison of these relationships between groups revealed a significant diagnostic difference.Conclusions.This is the first study to show a relationship between peripheral BDNF levels and cortical activity during learning, suggesting that plasma BDNF levels may reflect learning-related brain activity in healthy humans. The lack of relationship between plasma BDNF and task-related brain activity in patients suggests that circulating blood BDNF may not be indicative of learning-dependent brain activity in schizophrenia.

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Performance Evaluation Tests for Environmental Research (Peter): Evaluation of 114 Measures

Perceptual and Motor Skills ◽

10.2466/pms.1986.63.2.683 ◽

1986 ◽

Vol 63 (2) ◽

pp. 683-708 ◽

Cited By ~ 60

Author(s):

Alvah C. Bittner ◽

Robert C. Carter ◽

Robert S. Kennedy ◽

Mary M. Harbeson ◽

Michele Krause

Keyword(s):

Performance Evaluation ◽

Repeated Measures ◽

Time Course ◽

Environmental Studies ◽

Acceptable Level ◽

Environmental Research ◽

Human Capabilities ◽

Task Definition ◽

And Task

The goal of the Performance Evaluation Tests for Environmental Research (PETER) Program was to identify a set of measures of human capabilities for use in the study of environmental and other time-course effects. 114 measures studied in the PETER Program were evaluated and categorized into four groups based upon task stability and task definition. The Recommended category contained 30 measures that clearly obtained total stabilization and had an acceptable level of reliability efficiency. The Acceptable-But-Redundant category contained 15 measures. The 37 measures in the Marginal category, which included an inordinate number of slope and other derived measures, usually had desirable features which were outweighed by faults. The 32 measures in the Unacceptable category had either differential instability or weak reliability efficiency. It is our opinion that the 30 measures in the Recommended category should be given first consideration for environmental research applications. Further, it is recommended that information pertaining to preexperimental practice requirements and stabilized reliabilities should be utilized in repeated-measures environmental studies.

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Contributions of Brain Function and Structure to Three Different Domains of Cognitive Control in Normal Aging

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience ◽

10.1162/jocn_a_01685 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-22

Author(s):

Jenny R. Rieck ◽

Giulia Baracchini ◽

Cheryl L. Grady

Keyword(s):

Working Memory ◽

Cognitive Control ◽

Task Performance ◽

Brain Structure ◽

Functional Activity ◽

Brain Activity ◽

Diffusion Imaging ◽

Normal Aging ◽

Control Mechanisms ◽

And Task

Cognitive control involves the flexible allocation of mental resources during goal-directed behavior and comprises three correlated but distinct domains—inhibition, shifting, and working memory. The work of Don Stuss and others has demonstrated that frontal and parietal cortices are crucial to cognitive control, particularly in normal aging, which is characterized by reduced control mechanisms. However, the structure–function relationships specific to each domain and subsequent impact on performance are not well understood. In the current study, we examined both age and individual differences in functional activity associated with core domains of cognitive control in relation to fronto-parietal structure and task performance. Participants ( N = 140, aged 20–86 years) completed three fMRI tasks: go/no-go (inhibition), task switching (shifting), and n-back (working memory), in addition to structural and diffusion imaging. All three tasks engaged a common set of fronto-parietal regions; however, the contributions of age, brain structure, and task performance to functional activity were unique to each domain. Aging was associated with differences in functional activity for all tasks, largely in regions outside common fronto-parietal control regions. Shifting and inhibition showed greater contributions of structure to overall decreases in brain activity, suggesting that more intact fronto-parietal structure may serve as a scaffold for efficient functional response. Working memory showed no contribution of structure to functional activity but had strong effects of age and task performance. Together, these results provide a comprehensive and novel examination of the joint contributions of aging, performance, and brain structure to functional activity across multiple domains of cognitive control.

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Spontaneous perception: a framework for task-free, self-paced perception

Neuroscience of Consciousness ◽

10.1093/nc/niab016 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 2021 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Shira Baror ◽

Biyu J He

Keyword(s):

Time Course ◽

Visual Experience ◽

Brain Activity ◽

Human Perception ◽

Future Research ◽

Task Constraints ◽

Spontaneous Brain Activity ◽

The Brain ◽

Coarse To Fine ◽

Organizing Principles

Abstract Flipping through social media feeds, viewing exhibitions in a museum, or walking through the botanical gardens, people consistently choose to engage with and disengage from visual content. Yet, in most laboratory settings, the visual stimuli, their presentation duration, and the task at hand are all controlled by the researcher. Such settings largely overlook the spontaneous nature of human visual experience, in which perception takes place independently from specific task constraints and its time course is determined by the observer as a self-governing agent. Currently, much remains unknown about how spontaneous perceptual experiences unfold in the brain. Are all perceptual categories extracted during spontaneous perception? Does spontaneous perception inherently involve volition? Is spontaneous perception segmented into discrete episodes? How do different neural networks interact over time during spontaneous perception? These questions are imperative to understand our conscious visual experience in daily life. In this article we propose a framework for spontaneous perception. We first define spontaneous perception as a task-free and self-paced experience. We propose that spontaneous perception is guided by four organizing principles that grant it temporal and spatial structures. These principles include coarse-to-fine processing, continuity and segmentation, agency and volition, and associative processing. We provide key suggestions illustrating how these principles may interact with one another in guiding the multifaceted experience of spontaneous perception. We point to testable predictions derived from this framework, including (but not limited to) the roles of the default-mode network and slow cortical potentials in underlying spontaneous perception. We conclude by suggesting several outstanding questions for future research, extending the relevance of this framework to consciousness and spontaneous brain activity. In conclusion, the spontaneous perception framework proposed herein integrates components in human perception and cognition, which have been traditionally studied in isolation, and opens the door to understand how visual perception unfolds in its most natural context.

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The rapid emergence of auditory object representations in cortex reflect central acoustic attributes

10.31234/osf.io/t8gp2 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Mattson Ogg ◽

Thomas A. Carlson ◽

L. Robert Slevc

Keyword(s):

Time Course ◽

Music Perception ◽

Brain Activity ◽

Auditory Pathway ◽

Stimulus Onset ◽

Object Representations ◽

Human Environment ◽

Require Time ◽

Acoustic Information ◽

Auditory Object

Human listeners are bombarded by acoustic information that the brain rapidly organizes into coherent percepts of objects and events in the environment, which aids speech and music perception. The efficiency of auditory object recognition belies the critical constraint that acoustic stimuli necessarily require time to unfold. Using magentoencephalography (MEG), we studied the time course of the neural processes that transform dynamic acoustic information into auditory object representations. Participants listened to a diverse set of 36 tokens comprising everyday sounds from a typical human environment. Multivariate pattern analysis was used to decode the sound tokens from the MEG recordings. We show that sound tokens can be decoded from brain activity beginning 90 milliseconds after stimulus onset with peak decoding performance occurring at 155 milliseconds post stimulus onset. Decoding performance was primarily driven by differences between category representations (e.g., environmental vs. instrument sounds), although within-category decoding was better than chance. Representational similarity analysis revealed that these emerging neural representations were related to harmonic and spectrotemporal differences among the stimuli, which correspond to canonical acoustic features processed by the auditory pathway. Our findings begin to link the processing of physical sound properties with the perception of auditory objects and events in cortex.

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The Rapid Emergence of Auditory Object Representations in Cortex Reflect Central Acoustic Attributes

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience ◽

10.1162/jocn_a_01472 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 32 (1) ◽

pp. 111-123 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Mattson Ogg ◽

Thomas A. Carlson ◽

L. Robert Slevc

Keyword(s):

Time Course ◽

Music Perception ◽

Brain Activity ◽

Auditory Pathway ◽

Stimulus Onset ◽

Object Representations ◽

Human Environment ◽

Require Time ◽

Acoustic Information ◽

Auditory Object

Human listeners are bombarded by acoustic information that the brain rapidly organizes into coherent percepts of objects and events in the environment, which aids speech and music perception. The efficiency of auditory object recognition belies the critical constraint that acoustic stimuli necessarily require time to unfold. Using magnetoencephalography, we studied the time course of the neural processes that transform dynamic acoustic information into auditory object representations. Participants listened to a diverse set of 36 tokens comprising everyday sounds from a typical human environment. Multivariate pattern analysis was used to decode the sound tokens from the magnetoencephalographic recordings. We show that sound tokens can be decoded from brain activity beginning 90 msec after stimulus onset with peak decoding performance occurring at 155 msec poststimulus onset. Decoding performance was primarily driven by differences between category representations (e.g., environmental vs. instrument sounds), although within-category decoding was better than chance. Representational similarity analysis revealed that these emerging neural representations were related to harmonic and spectrotemporal differences among the stimuli, which correspond to canonical acoustic features processed by the auditory pathway. Our findings begin to link the processing of physical sound properties with the perception of auditory objects and events in cortex.

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The Special Role of Higher-Frequency Neighbors at the Phonological Level: An Event-Related Potential Study of Chinese Character Naming

ISRN Neuroscience ◽

10.1155/2013/579216 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 2013 ◽

pp. 1-6 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Jing Zhao ◽

John X. Zhang ◽

Hong-Yan Bi

Keyword(s):

Undergraduate Students ◽

Time Course ◽

Brain Activity ◽

Event Related Potential ◽

Frequency Effect ◽

Chinese Characters ◽

Special Role ◽

Neighborhood Frequency ◽

Chinese Character Naming ◽

Neighborhood Frequency Effect

The present study explored the time course of neighborhood frequency effect at the early processing stages, examining whether orthographic neighbors with higher frequency exerted an influence on target processing especially at the phonological stage by using the event-related potential (ERP). Thirteen undergraduate students were recruited in this study, and they were required to covertly name Chinese characters with or without higher-frequency neighbors (HFNs); meanwhile, their brain activity was recorded. Results showed that the effect of neighborhood frequency was significant in frontocentral P2 amplitude, with a reduction for naming characters with HFNs compared to those without HFNs; while there was no effect in posterior N1 amplitude. The only neighborhood frequency effect in P2 component suggested a special role for the HFNs in phonological access of Chinese characters. The decrease in amplitude for naming with-HFN characters might be associated with the phonological interference of higher-frequency neighbors due to their different pronunciations from the target characters.

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