Temporal binding of Visual and Motor cortical oscillations revealed by BOLD response in Humans

SummaryAction and perception need to be coordinated continuously over time, and neural oscillations may be instrumental in achieving such synchronization. Here we demonstrate that behavioral visual discrimination and the BOLD activity of V1 oscillates rhythmically in the theta range (around 5 Hz), synchronized to motor action (button press). The oscillations are present in V1 even when participants do not make a visual discrimination, suggesting an automatic modulation in synchrony with action onset. The amplitude of the oscillation in V1 is predicted by the activity in M1 before action onset, and functional connectivity between V1 and M1 change as a function of stimulus-delay. The results are well modelled by considering that V1 BOLD is modulated by preparatory motor signal and by rhythmic gain modulation in phase with action onset. They suggest that synchronous oscillatory activity between V1 and M1 mediates the strong temporal binding fundamental for active visual perception.

Motor context dominates output from purkinje cell functional regions during reflexive visuomotor behaviours

The cerebellum integrates sensory stimuli and motor actions to enable smooth coordination and motor learning. Here we harness the innate behavioral repertoire of the larval zebrafish to characterize the spatiotemporal dynamics of feature coding across the entire Purkinje cell population during visual stimuli and the reflexive behaviors that they elicit. Population imaging reveals three spatially-clustered regions of Purkinje cell activity along the rostrocaudal axis. Complementary single-cell electrophysiological recordings assign these Purkinje cells to one of three functional phenotypes that encode a specific visual, and not motor, signal via complex spikes. In contrast, simple spike output of most Purkinje cells is strongly driven by motor-related tail and eye signals. Interactions between complex and simple spikes show heterogeneous modulation patterns across different Purkinje cells, which become temporally restricted during swimming episodes. Our findings reveal how sensorimotor information is encoded by individual Purkinje cells and organized into behavioral modules across the entire cerebellum.

Motor context dominates output from Purkinje cell functional regions during reflexive visuomotor behaviours

SUMMARYThe cerebellum integrates sensory stimuli and motor actions to enable smooth coordination and motor learning. Here we harness the innate behavioral repertoire of the larval zebrafish to characterize the spatiotemporal dynamics of feature coding across the entire Purkinje cell population during visual stimuli and the reflexive behaviors that they elicit. Population imaging reveals three spatially-clustered regions of Purkinje cell activity along the rostrocaudal axis. Complementary single-cell electrophysiological recordings assign these Purkinje cells to one of three functional phenotypes that encode a specific visual, and not motor, signal via complex spikes. In contrast, simple spike output of most Purkinje cells is strongly driven by motor-related tail and eye signals. Interactions between complex and simple spikes show heterogeneous modulation patterns across different Purkinje cells, which become temporally restricted during swimming episodes. Our findings reveal how sensorimotor information is encoded by individual Purkinje cells and organized into behavioral modules across the entire cerebellum.

Automatic Analysis of Psychotherapy Videos by Using Synchrony Signal

IntroductionSome techniques of psychotherapy are now widely evidence-based and very cost effective, especially cognitive and behavioral therapies. Most of the studies are indirectly based on patient reported outcomes or problematic behaviors evaluated before and after the psychotherapy. Unfortunately, studies struggle to control for what is actually happening during psychotherapy, especially the non-specific aspects, like the interaction between the patient and the therapist, that is a known predictor of psychotherapeutic efficacy. Consequently, it is difficult to make precise links between theory and practice, control its application and understand which of its ingredients are the most important.ObjectivesHere, we suggest a research framework to extract automatically social signals from psychotherapy videos. We focused on the extraction of synchrony of the motor signal since it was considered to be a predictor of psychotherapeutic outcome in an earlier study and a relevant signal for the study of mother-child interactions.MethodsWe developed open source python and R scripts to compute this synchrony of motion history on a database of interaction between a parent and a child http://bit.ly/syncpsyResultsWe confirmed that synchrony, was a relevant signal for studying social interactions since the scores are completely different from synchrony scores computed on shuffle motion history data. However, these scores alone are unable to distinguish the two periods of the videos (with and without disagreement).ConclusionSynchrony of motion history is a promising marker of social interactions.