scholarly journals Humans and mice fluctuate between external and internal modes of sensory processing

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veith Andreas Weilnhammer ◽  
Heiner Stuke ◽  
Anna-Lena Eckert ◽  
Kai Standvoss ◽  
Philipp Sterzer

Perception cycles through periods of enhanced and reduced sensitivity to external information. Here, we asked whether such infra-slow oscillations arise as a noise-related epiphenomenon of limited processing capacity or, alternatively, represent a structured mechanism of perceptual inference. Using two large-scale datasets, we found that humans and mice waver between alternating intervals of externally- and internally-oriented modes of sensory analysis. During external mode, perception was more sensitive to external sensory information, whereas internal mode was characterized by enhanced biases toward perceptual history. Computational modeling indicated that dynamic changes in mode are governed by two interlinked factors: (i), the integration of subsequent stimuli over time and, (ii), infra-slow anti-phase oscillations in the perceptual impact of external sensory information versus internal predictions that are provided by perceptual history. Between-mode fluctuations may benefit perception by enabling the generation of stable representations of the environment despite an ongoing stream of noisy sensory inputs.

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zsófia Pálffy ◽  
Kinga Farkas ◽  
Gábor Csukly ◽  
Szabolcs Kéri ◽  
Bertalan Polner

AbstractIt is a widely held assumption that the brain performs perceptual inference by combining sensory information with prior expectations, weighted by their uncertainty. A distinction can be made between higher- and lower-level priors, which can be manipulated with associative learning and sensory priming, respectively. Here, we simultaneously investigate priming and the differential effect of auditory vs. visual associative cues on visual perception, and we also examine the reliability of individual differences. Healthy individuals (N = 29) performed a perceptual inference task twice with a one-week delay. They reported the perceived direction of motion of dot pairs, which were preceded by a probabilistic visuo-acoustic cue. In 30% of the trials, motion direction was ambiguous, and in half of these trials, the auditory versus the visual cue predicted opposing directions. Cue-stimulus contingency could change every 40 trials. On ambiguous trials where the visual and the auditory cue predicted conflicting directions of motion, participants made more decisions consistent with the prediction of the acoustic cue. Increased predictive processing under stimulus uncertainty was indicated by slower responses to ambiguous (vs. non-ambiguous) stimuli. Furthermore, priming effects were also observed in that perception of ambiguous stimuli was influenced by perceptual decisions on the previous ambiguous and unambiguous trials as well. Critically, behavioural effects had substantial inter-individual variability which showed high test–retest reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) > 0.78). Overall, higher-level priors based on auditory (vs. visual) information had greater influence on visual perception, and lower-level priors were also in action. Importantly, we observed large and stable differences in various aspects of task performance. Computational modelling combined with neuroimaging could allow testing hypotheses regarding the potential mechanisms causing these behavioral effects. The reliability of the behavioural differences implicates that such perceptual inference tasks could be valuable tools during large-scale biomarker and neuroimaging studies.


Author(s):  
Hai Wang ◽  
Baoshen Guo ◽  
Shuai Wang ◽  
Tian He ◽  
Desheng Zhang

The rise concern about mobile communication performance has driven the growing demand for the construction of mobile network signal maps which are widely utilized in network monitoring, spectrum management, and indoor/outdoor localization. Existing studies such as time-consuming and labor-intensive site surveys are difficult to maintain an update-to-date finegrained signal map within a large area. The mobile crowdsensing (MCS) paradigm is a promising approach for building signal maps because collecting large-scale MCS data is low-cost and with little extra-efforts. However, the dynamic environment and the mobility of the crowd cause spatio-temporal uncertainty and sparsity of MCS. In this work, we leverage MCS as an opportunity to conduct the city-wide mobile network signal map construction. We propose a fine-grained city-wide Cellular Signal Map Construction (CSMC) framework to address two challenges including (i) the problem of missing and unreliable MCS data; (ii) spatio-temporal uncertainty of signal propagation. In particular, CSMC captures spatio-temporal characteristics of signals from both inter- and intra- cellular base stations and conducts missing signal recovery with Bayesian tensor decomposition to build large-area fine-grained signal maps. Furthermore, CSMC develops a context-aware multi-view fusion network to make full use of external information and enhance signal map construction accuracy. To evaluate the performance of CSMC, we conduct extensive experiments and ablation studies on a large-scale dataset with over 200GB MCS signal records collected from Shanghai. Experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in the accuracy of signal estimation and user localization.


Author(s):  
Gerard Derosiere ◽  
David Thura ◽  
Paul Cisek ◽  
Julie Duqué

Humans and other animals often need to balance the desire to gather sensory information (to make the best choice) with the urgency to act, facing a speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT). Given the ubiquity of SAT across species, extensive research has been devoted to understanding the computational mechanisms allowing its regulation at different timescales, including from one context to another, and from one decision to another. However, animals must frequently change their SAT on even shorter timescales - i.e., over the course of an ongoing decision - and little is known about the mechanisms that allow such rapid adaptations. The present study aimed at addressing this issue. Human subjects performed a decision task with changing evidence. In this task, subjects received rewards for correct answers but incurred penalties for mistakes. An increase or a decrease in penalty occurring halfway through the trial promoted rapid SAT shifts, favoring speeded decisions either in the early or in the late stage of the trial. Importantly, these shifts were associated with stage-specific adjustments in the accuracy criterion exploited for committing to a choice. Those subjects who decreased the most their accuracy criterion at a given decision stage exhibited the highest gain in speed, but also the highest cost in terms of performance accuracy at that time. Altogether, the current findings offer a unique extension of previous work, by suggesting that dynamic changes in accuracy criterion allow the regulation of the SAT within the timescale of a single decision.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shinya Ito ◽  
Yufei Si ◽  
Alan M. Litke ◽  
David A. Feldheim

AbstractSensory information from different modalities is processed in parallel, and then integrated in associative brain areas to improve object identification and the interpretation of sensory experiences. The Superior Colliculus (SC) is a midbrain structure that plays a critical role in integrating visual, auditory, and somatosensory input to assess saliency and promote action. Although the response properties of the individual SC neurons to visuoauditory stimuli have been characterized, little is known about the spatial and temporal dynamics of the integration at the population level. Here we recorded the response properties of SC neurons to spatially restricted visual and auditory stimuli using large-scale electrophysiology. We then created a general, population-level model that explains the spatial, temporal, and intensity requirements of stimuli needed for sensory integration. We found that the mouse SC contains topographically organized visual and auditory neurons that exhibit nonlinear multisensory integration. We show that nonlinear integration depends on properties of auditory but not visual stimuli. We also find that a heuristically derived nonlinear modulation function reveals conditions required for sensory integration that are consistent with previously proposed models of sensory integration such as spatial matching and the principle of inverse effectiveness.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 185-201
Author(s):  
Ana Roknić ◽  
Sanja Vuković

Introduction. Sensory processing is a neurobiological process in which a person uses their senses, sends information to an appropriate reception and processing center, and responds to environmental stimulations. Previous research has shown that sensory processing difficulties are more common among people with autism spectrum disorder than among people of the typical population. Objectives. The aim of this paper was to determine the patterns of sensory processing in subjects of the typical population and subjects with autism spectrum disorder, as well as gender and age differences in sensory profiles in these groups of subjects. Methods. Using The Child Sensory Profile 2 as the measuring instrument, the characteristics of sensory processing were examined in 120 subjects of both genders, 60 subjects with autism spectrum disorder and 60 subjects of typical development, ages three to 13 years and 11 months. Results. The obtained results show that there are differences between the two groups of respondents and that these differences occur in all nine subscales of the instrument. It was found that subjects with autismspectrumdisorder hadmore difficulty in processing sensory information compared to subjects of the typical population, especially in the domain of tactile perception. The results also show that the quality of sensory information processing in both groups of respondents improved with age. In relation to the respondents' gender, the obtained differences were significant in the domain of the total score of the instrument, in favor of the boys, but this was not observed in the measurements on all subscales. Conclusion. In accordance with the above findings, when creating an individual educational plan, it is necessary to take into account all the specifics of sensory processing of children with autism spectrum disorder.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 1506
Author(s):  
Annalisa Tosoni ◽  
Emanuele Cosimo Altomare ◽  
Marcella Brunetti ◽  
Pierpaolo Croce ◽  
Filippo Zappasodi ◽  
...  

One fundamental principle of the brain functional organization is the elaboration of sensory information for the specification of action plans that are most appropriate for interaction with the environment. Using an incidental go/no-go priming paradigm, we have previously shown a facilitation effect for the execution of a walking-related action in response to far vs. near objects/locations in the extrapersonal space, and this effect has been called “macro-affordance” to reflect the role of locomotion in the coverage of extrapersonal distance. Here, we investigated the neurophysiological underpinnings of such an effect by recording scalp electroencephalography (EEG) from 30 human participants during the same paradigm. The results of a whole-brain analysis indicated a significant modulation of the event-related potentials (ERPs) both during prime and target stimulus presentation. Specifically, consistent with a mechanism of action anticipation and automatic activation of affordances, a stronger ERP was observed in response to prime images framing the environment from a far vs. near distance, and this modulation was localized in dorso-medial motor regions. In addition, an inversion of polarity for far vs. near conditions was observed during the subsequent target period in dorso-medial parietal regions associated with spatially directed foot-related actions. These findings were interpreted within the framework of embodied models of brain functioning as arising from a mechanism of motor-anticipation and subsequent prediction error which was guided by the preferential affordance relationship between the distant large-scale environment and locomotion. More in general, our findings reveal a sensory-motor mechanism for the processing of walking-related environmental affordances.


Author(s):  
Silvia-Raluca Matei ◽  
Damian Mircea Totolan ◽  
Claudia Salceanu

Occupational therapy focuses on children's sensory processing and modulation. This chapter approaches specific interventions on children with ASD from several perspectives. OT is based on sensory integrative approach when working with children with ASD: helping parents understand their child's behavior, helping children organize responses to sensory input. The sensory integrative approach is a formulated activity plan that helps people who haven't been able to develop their own sensory recognition program. This plan allows a child to integrate all sorts of different sensory activities in their day so they can engage in and begin to work with a wide variety of sensory inputs. This provides a wide number of benefits. Their focus and attention span increases because they won't have meltdowns from trying to process too much information; sensory integrative approach helps to rebuild/reform the child's nervous system. This allows them to physically handle more sensory input. As a result, OT has been proven effective in working with children with ASD.


Materials ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (17) ◽  
pp. 2745 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis Camuñas-Mesa ◽  
Bernabé Linares-Barranco ◽  
Teresa Serrano-Gotarredona

Inspired by biology, neuromorphic systems have been trying to emulate the human brain for decades, taking advantage of its massive parallelism and sparse information coding. Recently, several large-scale hardware projects have demonstrated the outstanding capabilities of this paradigm for applications related to sensory information processing. These systems allow for the implementation of massive neural networks with millions of neurons and billions of synapses. However, the realization of learning strategies in these systems consumes an important proportion of resources in terms of area and power. The recent development of nanoscale memristors that can be integrated with Complementary Metal–Oxide–Semiconductor (CMOS) technology opens a very promising solution to emulate the behavior of biological synapses. Therefore, hybrid memristor-CMOS approaches have been proposed to implement large-scale neural networks with learning capabilities, offering a scalable and lower-cost alternative to existing CMOS systems.


Complexity ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Kongfan Zhu ◽  
Rundong Guo ◽  
Weifeng Hu ◽  
Zeqiang Li ◽  
Yujun Li

Legal judgment prediction (LJP), as an effective and critical application in legal assistant systems, aims to determine the judgment results according to the information based on the fact determination. In real-world scenarios, to deal with the criminal cases, judges not only take advantage of the fact description, but also consider the external information, such as the basic information of defendant and the court view. However, most existing works take the fact description as the sole input for LJP and ignore the external information. We propose a Transformer-Hierarchical-Attention-Multi-Extra (THME) Network to make full use of the information based on the fact determination. We conduct experiments on a real-world large-scale dataset of criminal cases in the civil law system. Experimental results show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art LJP methods on all judgment prediction tasks.


2012 ◽  
Vol 03 (02) ◽  
pp. 159-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos V Rizzo-Sierra ◽  
Martha E Leon-S ◽  
Fidias E Leon-Sarmiento

ABSTRACTThe highly sensitive trait present in animals, has also been proposed as a human neurobiological trait. People having such trait can process larger amounts of sensory information than usual, making it an excellent attribute that allows to pick up subtle environmental details and cues. Furthermore, this trait correlates to some sort of giftedness such as higher perception, inventiveness, imagination and creativity. We present evidences that support the existance of key neural connectivity between the mentioned trait, higher sensory processing sensitivity, introversion, ectomorphism and creativity. The neurobiological and behavioral implications that these biomarkers have in people living in developing rural areas are discussed as well.


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