scholarly journals Decoding visible and memorized stimulus features from neuronal ensembles in the prefrontal and visual cortices

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (9) ◽  
pp. 2053
Author(s):  
Panagiotis Sapountzis ◽  
Sofia Paneri ◽  
Sotirios Papadopoulos ◽  
Georgia Gregoriou
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jermyn Z. See ◽  
Natsumi Y. Homma ◽  
Craig A. Atencio ◽  
Vikaas S. Sohal ◽  
Christoph E. Schreiner

AbstractNeuronal activity in auditory cortex is often highly synchronous between neighboring neurons. Such coordinated activity is thought to be crucial for information processing. We determined the functional properties of coordinated neuronal ensembles (cNEs) within primary auditory cortical (AI) columns relative to the contributing neurons. Nearly half of AI cNEs showed robust spectro-temporal receptive fields whereas the remaining cNEs showed little or no acoustic feature selectivity. cNEs can therefore capture either specific, time-locked information of spectro-temporal stimulus features or reflect stimulus-unspecific, less-time specific processing aspects. By contrast, we show that individual neurons can represent both of those aspects through membership in multiple cNEs with either high or absent feature selectivity. These associations produce functionally heterogeneous spikes identifiable by instantaneous association with different cNEs. This demonstrates that single neuron spike trains can sequentially convey multiple aspects that contribute to cortical processing, including stimulus-specific and unspecific information.


2008 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 218-225 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bertram Gawronski ◽  
Roland Deutsch ◽  
Etienne P. LeBel ◽  
Kurt R. Peters

Over the last decade, implicit measures of mental associations (e.g., Implicit Association Test, sequential priming) have become increasingly popular in many areas of psychological research. Even though successful applications provide preliminary support for the validity of these measures, their underlying mechanisms are still controversial. The present article addresses the role of a particular mechanism that is hypothesized to mediate the influence of activated associations on task performance in many implicit measures: response interference (RI). Based on a review of relevant evidence, we argue that RI effects in implicit measures depend on participants’ attention to association-relevant stimulus features, which in turn can influence the reliability and the construct validity of these measures. Drawing on a moderated-mediation model (MMM) of task performance in RI paradigms, we provide several suggestions on how to address these problems in research using implicit measures.


Author(s):  
Sarah Schäfer ◽  
Dirk Wentura ◽  
Christian Frings

Abstract. Recently, Sui, He, and Humphreys (2012) introduced a new paradigm to measure perceptual self-prioritization processes. It seems that arbitrarily tagging shapes to self-relevant words (I, my, me, and so on) leads to speeded verification times when matching self-relevant word shape pairings (e.g., me – triangle) as compared to non-self-relevant word shape pairings (e.g., stranger – circle). In order to analyze the level at which self-prioritization takes place we analyzed whether the self-prioritization effect is due to a tagging of the self-relevant label and the particular associated shape or due to a tagging of the self with an abstract concept. In two experiments participants showed standard self-prioritization effects with varying stimulus features or different exemplars of a particular stimulus-category suggesting that self-prioritization also works at a conceptual level.


Author(s):  
Yoav Bar-Anan ◽  
Brian A. Nosek ◽  
Michelangelo Vianello

The sorting paired features (SPF) task measures four associations in a single response block. Using four response options (e.g., good-Republicans, bad-Republicans, good-Democrats, and bad-Democrats), each trial requires participants to categorize two stimuli at once to a category pair (e.g., wonderful-Clinton to good-Democrats). Unlike other association measures, the SPF requires simultaneous categorization of both components of the association in the same trial. Providing measurement flexibility, it is sensitive to both focal, attended concepts and nonfocal, unattended stimulus features (e.g., gender of individuals in a politics SPF). Three studies measure race, gender, and political evaluations, differentiate automatic evaluations between known groups, provide evidence of convergent and discriminant validity with other attitude measures, and illustrate the SPF’s unique measurement qualities.


Author(s):  
Ángel Correa ◽  
Paola Cappucci ◽  
Anna C. Nobre ◽  
Juan Lupiáñez

Would it be helpful to inform a driver about when a conflicting traffic situation is going to occur? We tested whether temporal orienting of attention could enhance executive control to select among conflicting stimuli and responses. Temporal orienting was induced by presenting explicit cues predicting the most probable interval for target onset, which could be short (400 ms) or long (1,300 ms). Executive control was measured both by flanker and Simon tasks involving conflict between incompatible responses and by the spatial Stroop task involving conflict between perceptual stimulus features. The results showed that temporal orienting facilitated the resolution of perceptual conflict by reducing the spatial Stroop effect, whereas it interfered with the resolution of response conflict by increasing flanker and Simon effects. Such opposite effects suggest that temporal orienting of attention modulates executive control through dissociable mechanisms, depending on whether the competition between conflicting representations is located at perceptual or response levels.


2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Li Liu ◽  
Geb Thomas ◽  
Clark Stanford ◽  
Lynn Johnson

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deon T. Benton ◽  
David H. Rakison

The ability to reason about causal events in the world is fundamental to cognition. Despite the importance of this ability, little is known about how adults represent causal events, what structure or form those representations take, and what the mechanism is that underpins such representations. We report four experiments with adults that examine the perceptual basis on which adults represent four-object launching sequences (Experiments 1 and 2), whether adults representations reflect sensitivity to the causal, perceptual, or causal and perceptual relation among the objects that comprise such sequences (Experiment 3), and whether such representations extend beyond spatiotemporal contiguity to include other low-level stimulus features such as an object’s shape and color (Experiment 4). Based on these results of the four experiments, we argue that a domain-general associative mechanism, rather a modular, domain-specific, mechanism subserves adults’ representations of four-object launching sequences.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document