Effect of the electromagnetic induction on a modified memristive neural map model

The significance of discrete neural models lies in their mathematical simplicity and computational ease. This research focuses on enhancing a neural map model by incorporating a hyperbolic tangent-based memristor. The study extensively explores the impact of magnetic induction strength on the model's dynamics, analyzing bifurcation diagrams and the presence of multistability. Moreover, the investigation extends to the collective behavior of coupled memristive neural maps with electrical, chemical, and magnetic connections. The synchronization of these coupled memristive maps is examined, revealing that chemical coupling exhibits a broader synchronization area. Additionally, diverse chimera states and cluster synchronized states are identified and discussed

Perceptual rivalry with vibrotactile stimuli

This is the final version. Available on open access from Springer via the DOI in this recordAvailability of data and materials: The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are available in the GitHub repository farzaneh-darki/Darki2021_perceptual: https://github.com/farzaneh-darki/Darki2021_perceptual.In perceptual rivalry, ambiguous sensory information leads to dynamic changes in the perceptual interpretation of fixed stimuli. This phenomenon occurs when participants receive sensory stimuli that support two or more distinct interpretations; this results in spontaneous alternations between possible perceptual interpretations. Perceptual rivalry has been widely studied across different sensory modalities including vision, audition, and to a limited extent, in the tactile domain. Common features of perceptual rivalry across various ambiguous visual and auditory paradigms characterize the randomness of switching times and their dependence on input strength manipulations (Levelt’s propositions). It is still unclear whether the general characteristics of perceptual rivalry are preserved with tactile stimuli. This study aims to introduce a simple tactile stimulus capable of generating perceptual rivalry and explores whether general features of perceptual rivalry from other modalities extend to the tactile domain. Our results confirm that Levelt’s proposition II extends to tactile bistability, and that the stochastic characteristics of irregular perceptual alternations agree with non-tactile modalities. An analysis of correlations between subsequent perceptual phases reveals a significant positive correlation at lag 1 (as found in visual bistability), and a negative correlation for lag 2 (in contrast with visual bistability).Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC

Cholinergic Potentiation Alters Perceptual Eye Dominance Plasticity Induced by a Few Hours of Monocular Patching in Adults

A few hours of monocular deprivation with a diffuser eye patch temporarily strengthens the contribution of the deprived eye to binocular vision. This shift in favor of the deprived eye is characterized as a form of adult visual plasticity. Studies in animal and human models suggest that neuromodulators can enhance adult brain plasticity in general. Specifically, acetylcholine has been shown to improve certain aspects of visual function and plasticity in adulthood. We investigated whether a single administration of donepezil (a cholinesterase inhibitor) could further augment the temporary shift in perceptual eye dominance that occurs after 2 h of monocular patching. Twelve healthy adults completed two experimental sessions while taking either donepezil (5 mg, oral) or a placebo (lactose) pill. We measured perceptual eye dominance using a binocular phase combination task before and after 2 h of monocular deprivation with a diffuser eye patch. Participants in both groups demonstrated a significant shift in favor of the patched eye after monocular deprivation, however our results indicate that donepezil significantly reduces the magnitude and duration of the shift. We also investigated the possibility that donepezil reduces the amount of time needed to observe a shift in perceptual eye dominance relative to placebo control. For this experiment, seven subjects completed two sessions where we reduced the duration of deprivation to 1 h. Donepezil reduces the magnitude and duration of the patching-induced shift in perceptual eye dominance in this experiment as well. To verify whether the effects we observed using the binocular phase combination task were also observable in a different measure of sensory eye dominance, six subjects completed an identical experiment using a binocular rivalry task. These results also indicate that cholinergic enhancement impedes the shift that results from short-term deprivation. In summary, our study demonstrates that enhanced cholinergic potentiation interferes with the consolidation of the perceptual eye dominance plasticity induced by several hours of monocular deprivation

The relative contribution of noise and adaptation to competition during tri-stable motion perception

International audienceAnimals exploit antagonistic interactions for sensory processing and these can cause oscillations between competing states. Ambiguous sensory inputs yield such perceptual multi-stability. Despite numerous empirical studies using binocular rivalry or plaid pattern motion, the driving mechanisms behind the spontaneous transitions between alternatives remain unclear. In the current work, we used a tri-stable barberpole motion stimulus combining empirical and modelling approaches to elucidate the contributions of noise and adaptation to underlying competition. We first robustly characterised the coupling between perceptual reports of transitions and continuously recorded eye direction, identifying a critical window of 480ms before button presses within which both measures were most strongly correlated. Second, we identified a novel non monotonic relationship between stimulus contrast and average perceptual switching rate with an initially rising rate before a gentle reduction at higher contrasts. A neural fields model of the underlying dynamics introduced in previous theoretical work and incorporating noise and adaptation mechanisms was adapted, extended and empirically validated. Noise and adaptation contributions were confirmed to dominate at the lower, and higher, contrasts respectively. Model simulations with two free parameters, controlling adaptation dynamics and direction thresholds, captured the measured mean transition rates for participants. We verified the shift from noise dominated towards adaptation-driven in both the eye direction distributions and inter-transition duration statistics. This work combines modelling and empirical evidence to demonstrate the signal strength dependent interplay between noise and adaptation during tri- stability. We propose that the findings generalise beyond the barberpole stimulus case to ambiguous perception in continuous feature spaces

Experimental Manipulation of Action Perception Based on Modeling Computations in Visual Cortex

Action perception, planning and execution is a broad area of study, crucial for future development of clinical therapies treating social cognitive disorders, as well as for building human-computer interaction systems and for giving foundation to an emerging field of developmental robotics. We took interest in basic mechanisms of action perception, and as a model area chose dynamic perception of body motion. The focus of this thesis has been on understanding how perception of actions can be manipulated, how to distill this understanding experimentally, and how to summarize via numerical simulation the neural mechanisms helping explain observed dynamic phenomena. Experimentally we have, first, shown how a careful manipulation of a static object depth cue can in principle modulate perception of actions. We chose the luminance gradient as a model cue, and linked action perception to a perceptual prior previously studied in object recognition – the lighting from above-prior. Second, we have explored the dynamic relationship between representations of actions that are naturally observed in spatiotemporal proximity. We have shown an adaptation aftereffect that may speak of brain mechanisms encoding social interactions. To qualitatively capture neural mechanisms behind ours and previous findings, we have additionally appealed to the perceptual bistability phenomenon. Bistable perception refers to the ability to spontaneously switch between two perceptual alternatives arising from an observation of a single stimulus. Addition of depth cues to biological motion stimulus resolves depth-ambiguity. To account for neural dynamics as well as for modulation of action percept by light source position, we used a combined architecture with a convolutional neural network computing shading and form features in biological motion stimuli, and a 2-dimensional neural field coding for walking direction and body configuration in the gait cycle. This single unified model matches experimentally observed switching statistics, dependence of recognized walking direction on the light source position, and makes a prediction for the adaptation aftereffect in perception of biological motion

A cross-modal investigation into the relationships between bistable perception and a global temporal mechanism

When the two eyes are presented with sufficiently different images, Binocular Rivalry (BR) occurs. BR is a form of bistable perception involving stochastic alternations in awareness between distinct images shown to each eye. It has been suggested that the dynamics of BR are due to the activity of a central temporal process and are linked to involuntary mechanisms of selective attention (aka exogenous attention). To test these ideas, stimuli designed to evoke exogenous attention and central temporal processes were employed during BR observation. These stimuli included auditory and visual looming motion and streams of transient events of varied temporal rate and pattern. Although these stimuli exerted a strong impact over some aspects of BR, they were unable to override its characteristic stochastic pattern of alternations completely. It is concluded that BR is subject to distributed influences, but ultimately, is achieved in neural processing areas specific to the binocular conflict

Aportes al estudio cuantitativo del lenguaje y la comunicación animal en tres etapas: recepción, elaboración y emisión de un mensaje

Este trabajo de tesis trata sobre la comunicación oral y está dividida en tres grandes subtemas. El primero de ellos comprende la conversión de ondas de presión en el tímpano (sonido) en conceptos; el segundo aborda la transición mental entre ideas y finalmente el tercero, la emisión de una vocalización. De esta manera cubrimos el recorrido completo que experimenta una señal en un hablante. Cada una de estas tres secciones es un campo en si mismo y lo que se encuentra en este trabajo son pequeños aportes a cada uno de ellos. En el área del proceso de comprensión del habla estudiamos un efecto que se conoce como Efecto de Transformación Verbal (ETV) que se produce frente a la escucha repetida de la misma palabra y mostramos que su dinámica cumple con todas las características de percepción biestable. Esto agrega al ETV a la lista de fenómenos biestables junto con las figuras ambiguas, tonos galopantes, rivalidad binocular, etc. y sugiere modificaciones a los modelos vigentes de reconocimiento de palabras. En el campo de la semántica cuantitativa, construimos un grafo semántico de co-ocurrencias (una medida estadística de la similitud entre palabras a partir de la estructura de sus ocurrencias en texto escrito) y mostramos que el proceso de asociación libre (decir la primera palabra que se nos viene a la cabeza frente a la presentaci ón de una palabra estímulo) puede ser capturado, en esencia, por un proceso difusivo anómalo dentro de dicho grafo. Finalmente, estudiamos la emisión de vocalizaciones, no ya en humanos sino en ratas, analizando la riqueza de su comportamiento vocal con miras a establecerlas como un modelo animal de comunicación vocal. En particular, desarrollamos algoritmos de clasificación automática para sus vocalizaciones ultrasónicas y mostramos que se estructuran de manera probabilística en el tiempo. Con esto se cierra nuestro ciclo de recepción, elaboración y emisión de un mensaje.The work presented here is a study on oral communication and is subdivided into three big areas. The first one deals with the translation of pressure waves at the eardrums (sound) into concepts in the brain; the second one explores the mental transition between thoughts and finally, the third one investigates vocal output. In this manner, we cover the whole excursion of a signal through a communicating agent. Each one of these stages represents an active and broad field of research. Here, we present our contributions to each one of those areas. In the area of spoken word recognition we study the Verbal Transformation Effect (VTE) which entails a change in the perceived word after repeated presentations. We show that the dynamics of this effect has all the characteristics of bistable perception. This appends the VTE to the list of bistable percepts (together with ambiguous figures, galloping tones, binocular rivalry, etc) and suggests corrections to current models of spoken word recognition. In the field of quantitative semantics, we constructed a semantic graph of word co-occurrence (a statistical measure of similarity between words based on the structure of occurrences in written text) and showed that the process of free association (i.e saying first thing that comes to mind upon the presentation of a stimulus word) can be understood as an anomalous diffusion process in the mentioned graph. Finally, we study the production of vocalizations, not in humans but in the rat. We analyze the richness of their vocal behavior in an attempt to establish them as an animal model for vocal communication. In particular, we developed algorithms for automatic classification of ultrasonic vocalizations and showed that they are probabilistically structured in time. This closes the communication loop: to receive, elaborate and send a message.Fil:Costa, Martín Elías. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales; Argentina

Neural mechanisms for reducing uncertainty in 3D depth perception

In order to navigate and interact within their environment, animals must process and interpret sensory information to generate a representation or ‘percept’ of that environment. However, sensory information is invariably noisy, ambiguous, or incomplete due to the constraints of sensory apparatus, and this leads to uncertainty in perceptual interpretation. To overcome these problems, sensory systems have evolved multiple strategies for reducing perceptual uncertainty in the face of uncertain visual input, thus optimizing goal-oriented behaviours. Two available strategies have been observed even in the simplest of neural systems, and are represented in Bayesian formulations of perceptual inference: sensory integration and prior experience. In this thesis, I present a series of studies that examine these processes and the neural mechanisms underlying them in the primate visual system, by studying depth perception in human observers. Chapters 2 & 3 used functional brain imaging to localize cortical areas involved in integrating multiple visual depth cues, which enhance observers’ ability to judge depth. Specifically, we tested which of two possible computational methods the brain uses to combine depth cues. Based on the results we applied disruption techniques to examine whether these select brain regions are critical for depth cue integration. Chapters 4 & 5 addressed the question of how memory systems operating over different time scales interact to resolve perceptual ambiguity when the retinal signal is compatible with more than one 3D interpretation of the world. Finally, we examined the role of higher cortical regions (parietal cortex) in depth perception and the resolution of ambiguous visual input by testing patients with brain lesions