Imaging the Creative Unconscious:Reflexive Neural Responses to Objects in the Visual and Parahippocampal Region Predicts State and Trait Creativity

Abstract What does it take to have a creative mind? Theories of creative cognition assert that the quantity of automatic associations places fundamental constraints on the probability of reaching creative solutions. Due to the difficulties inherent in isolating automated associative responses from cognitive control, the neural basis underlying this faculty remains unknown. Here we acquired fMRI data in an incidental-viewing paradigm in which subjects performed an attention-demanding task whilst viewing task-irrelevant objects. By assigning a standard creativity task on the same objects out of the scanner, as well as a battery of psychometric creativity tests, we could assess whether stimulus-bound neural activity was predictive of state or trait variability in creativity. We found that stimulus-bound responses in superior occipital regions were linearly predictive of trial-by-trial variability in creative performance (state-creativity), and that in more creative individuals (trait-creativity) this response was more strongly expressed in entorhinal cortex. Additionally, the mean response to the onset of objects in parahippocampal gyrus was predictive of trait differences in creativity. This work suggests that, creative individuals are endowed with occipital and medial temporal reflexes that generate a greater fluency in associative representations, making them more accessible for ideation even when no ideation is explicitly called for

PSYCHOACOUSTICS: a comprehensive MATLAB toolbox for auditory testing

PSYCHOACOUSTICS is a new MATLAB toolbox which implements three classic adaptive procedures for auditory threshold estimation. The first includes those of the Staircase family (method of limits, simple up-down and transformed up-down); the second is the Parameter Estimation by Sequential Testing (PEST); and the third is the Maximum Likelihood Procedure (MLP). The toolbox comes with more than twenty built-in experiments each provided with the recommended (default) parameters. However, if desired, these parameters can be modified through an intuitive and user friendly graphical interface and stored for future use (no programming skills are required). Finally, PSYCHOACOUSTICS is very flexible as it comes with several signal generators and can be easily extended for any experiment

Livre blanc de l'usage des tableaux numériques interactifs rapport final du projet d'étude concernant la lecture sur tableaux numériques interactifs (TNI) /

Titre de l'écran-titre (visionné le 5 mars 2012

Automaticity in the Recognition of Nonverbal Emotional Vocalizations

The ability to perceive the emotions of others is crucial for everyday social interactions. Important aspects of visual socioemotional processing, such as the recognition of facial expressions, are known to depend on largely automatic mechanisms. However, whether and how properties of automaticity extend to the auditory domain remains poorly understood. Here we ask if nonverbal auditory emotion recognition is a controlled deliberate or an automatic efficient process, using vocalizations such as laughter, crying, and screams. In a between-subjects design (N = 112), and covering eight emotions (four positive), we determined whether emotion recognition accuracy (a) is improved when participants actively deliberate about their responses (compared with when they respond as fast as possible) and (b) is impaired when they respond under low and high levels of cognitive load (concurrent task involving memorizing sequences of six or eight digits, respectively). Response latencies were also measured. Mixed-effects models revealed that recognition accuracy was high across emotions, and only minimally affected by deliberation and cognitive load; the benefits of deliberation and costs of cognitive load were significant mostly for positive emotions, notably amusement/laughter, and smaller or absent for negative ones; response latencies did not suffer under low or high cognitive load; and high recognition accuracy (approximately 90%) could be reached within 500 ms after the stimulus onset, with performance exceeding chance-level already between 300 and 360 ms. These findings indicate that key features of automaticity, namely fast and efficient/effortless processing, might be a modality-independent component of emotion recognition

Visual rehabilitation and reorganization: case studies of cortical plasticity in patients with age-related macular degeneration

The extent to which cortical maps may reorganize in adult humans is a significant and topical debate in visual neuroscience. Though there are conflicting findings, evidence from humans and animals indicates that the topography of the visual cortex may change after retinal deafferentation. Remarkably, this reorganization seems to be possible in adults, whose brains are less amenable to plastic change. If adult visual reorganization is legitimate, an understanding of its causes and consequences could be profound considering the millions suffering from age-related visual disorders. This dissertation explores whether visual training may yield a reorganization of sensory maps in the adult visual cortex. It describes research in which patients, diagnosed with age-related macular degeneration (AMD), underwent visual rehabilitation therapy. Functional brain scans and behavioral tests were conducted pre and post training. These interventions generated valuable knowledge regarding whether "reorganized" activity is a true rewiring of feed forward cortical processes or an artifact of attentional feedback. The rehabilitation training produced demonstrable differences in activation patterns along the primary visual cortex (V1), but sparse improvement in the behavioral tests. In contrast, there was significant improvement in fixation tests which assessed oculomotor control. These results suggest that the nature of reorganized activity has more to do with attentional mechanisms than feed forward reorganization. Future investigations could benefit from examining the brain sites that govern visual attention in the frontal and parietal cortices. These areas may have more to do with visual adaptation in AMD patients than V1.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Eric Schumacher; Committee Member: Audrey Duarte; Committee Member: Paul Corballis; Committee Member: Paul Verhaeghen; Committee Member: Susan Prim

Mirror touch: Electrophysiological and behavioural evidence on the effects of observing others’ tactile sensations on somatosensory processing in the observer and possible links to trait empathy

Recent neuroimaging evidence suggests that the sight of somebody else being touched vicariously triggers activity in the secondary (SII) and possibly also the primary (SI) somatosensory cortex in the absence of any actual tactile stimulation on the onlooker’s own body. The present PhD thesis aimed to investigate electrophysiological and behavioural correlates of such shared neural representations for actually experienced and merely observed touch, importantly, not only in the context of observing somebody else being passively touched on their body but also in the context of witnessing somebody else perform actions with a tactile component (such as actively touching an object). In addition, the present thesis intended to explore possible links between variations in the strength of touch observation-related modulations in somatosensory processing and interindividual differences in dispositional empathy. The obtained electrophysiological data indicated that, first of all, the sight of others’ passive tactile sensations modulated somatosensory activity relatively consistently at both early and late processing stages within the first 200 ms after tactile stimulus onset. These modulations occurred independently of whether the touch target was actually a human body or merely an inanimate object (Exp. 2.1). The perspective from which a body part was observed to be touched did differentially affect touch observation-related ERP modulations, but only during later-stage somatosensory processing (Exp. 2.2). The electrophysiological evidence further suggested that while the somatotopic organisation of vicarious somatosensory activations might not be fine-grained enough to represent which location within a given body part was seen to be touched (Exp. 2.3), it might nevertheless be sufficiently detailed (at least in SI) to code the touched location at the level of different body parts (Exp. 2.4). The sight of others’ action-embedded tactile sensations was, too, found to alter ongoing somatosensory activity but the pattern of modulations was rather complex and fragile (Exp.s 3.1-3.6), possibly in the context of movement observation-related vicarious somatosensory activity which might sometimes have obscured much subtler touch observation-related resonance responses, especially if participants were not sufficiently aware of the tactile component in the observed actions. Behaviourally, the sight of other’s (active) touch sensations was nevertheless associated with systematic shifts in tactile perception (Exp.s 4.1.3 and 4.1.5), even though the measurability of such changes appeared somewhat task-sensitive (Exp. 4.1.4). Finally, a highly complex pattern of correlations between the strength of touch observation-related ERP modulations and interindividual differences in trait empathy associated the automatic sharing of others’ bodily states with complex emotional and cognitive empathy phenomena. How we respond to others’ somatic sensations thus appears to be fundamentally linked to how readily we respond emotionally to others’ mental and emotional states and how easily we can infer those states by intentionally putting ourselves into somebody else’s shoes. More research will be needed to shed more light on the intricate interplay between low-level resonance mechanisms and higher-order affective and cognitive processes in mediating the empathic understanding of others’ and the occurrence of appropriate other-related emotional responses