The vertical-horizontal illusion: Assessing the contributions of anisotropy, abutting, and crossing to the misperception of simple line stimuli

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Perceptual History Acts in World-Centred Coordinates

Serial dependence effects have been observed using a variety of stimuli and tasks, revealing that the recent past can bias current percepts, leading to increased similarity between two. The aim of this study is to determine whether this temporal integration occurs in egocentric or allocentric coordinates. We asked participants to perform an orientation reproduction task using grating stimuli while the head was kept at a fixed position, or after a 40° yaw rotation between trials, from left (−20°) to right (+20°), putting the egocentric and allocentric cues in conflict. Under these conditions, allocentric cues prevailed

Evidence against global attention filters selective for absolute bar-orientation in human vision

The finding that an item of type A pops out from an array of distractors of type B typically is taken to support the inference that human vision contains a neural mechanism that is activated by items of type A but not by items of type B. Such a mechanism might be expected to yield a neural image in which items of type A produce high activation and items of type B low (or zero) activation. Access to such a neural image might further be expected to enable accurate estimation of the centroid of an ensemble of items of type A intermixed with to-be-ignored items of type B. Here, it is shown that as the number of items in stimulus displays is increased, performance in estimating the centroids of horizontal (vertical) items amid vertical (horizontal) distractors degrades much more quickly and dramatically than does performance in estimating the centroids of white (black) items among black (white) distractors. Together with previous findings, these results suggest that, although human vision does possess bottom-up neural mechanisms sensitive to abrupt local changes in bar-orientation, and although human vision does possess and utilize top-down global attention filters capable of selecting multiple items of one brightness or of one color from among others, it cannot use a top-down global attention filter capable of selecting multiple bars of a given absolute orientation and filtering bars of the opposite orientation in a centroid task

LeverAge: a European network to leverage the multi-age workforce

Bringing together 150+ scholars and practitioners from 50+ countries, and funded by the European Commission, COST Action LeverAge (https:// www.cost.eu/actions/CA22120/) is the first network-building project of its kind in the work and organizational psychology and human resource management (WOP/HRM) aspects of work and aging. Focused on the aging workforce, the Action aims to foster interdisciplinary and multinational scientific excellence and the translation of science to practical and societal impact across 4 years. Based on a research synthesis, we identify five broad research directions for work and aging science including work and organizational practices for a multi-age workforce, successful aging at work, the integration of age-diverse workers and knowledge transfer, aging and technology at work, and career development in later life and retirement. We provide key research questions to guide scientific inquiry along these five research directions alongside best practice recommendations to expand scholarly impact in WOP/HRM

brainlife.io: a decentralized and open-source cloud platform to support neuroscience research

Neuroscience is advancing standardization and tool development to support rigor and transparency. Consequently, data pipeline complexity has increased, hindering FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) access. brainlife.io was developed to democratize neuroimaging research. The platform provides data standardization, management, visualization and processing and automatically tracks the provenance history of thousands of data objects. Here, brainlife.io is described and evaluated for validity, reliability, reproducibility, replicability and scientific utility using four data modalities and 3,200 participants

Encounters with the Dead in Fifth-Century Drama

The present thesis is concerned with the hermeneutic significance of a recurrent, yet understudied, plot element in fifth-century drama: the staged encounter between the living and the dead. The investigation is organised in three chapters based on the three motifs whereby this encounter is achieved – necromancy, katabasis, and spontaneous ghost-apparition. Each chapter starts with an introductory discussion about the archaic and classical representations of the motif under examination in eschatology, culture, literature, and art, and then proceeds to a thorough study of its dramatic occurrences in tragic and comic plays, both extant and fragmentary. Chapter one focuses on necromancy, namely the practice of summoning the dead temporarily in order to consult them, and examines four of its dramatic treatments: the evocation of the dead Darius in Aeschylus’ Persae, the dramatisation of the Homeric Nekuia in Aeschylus’ fragmentary Psychagogoi (frr. 273-278), the necromantic prayer preserved in Euripides’ fr. 912, and the narrated scene of Peisander’s necromantic experience in Aristophanes’ Birds (1553-1564). Chapter two investigates instances of katabatic journeys, namely infernal descents performed by the living. Katabasis is examined through the dramatisation of Peirithus’ mythical descent in Euripides’ fragmentary Peirithus, as well as its offstage use in Euripides’ Heracles. However, comedy occupies the largest part of this chapter, as the motif is conspicuously treated in Aristophanes’ Frogs, while it also appears in a number of fragmentary plays – Aristophanes’ Gerytades, Eupolis’ Demoi, and Pherecrates’ Metalleis and Crapataloi. Chapter three shifts the emphasis onto the motif of the spontaneous ghost-apparition, which is undertaken by unburied (ataphoi) and violently killed (biaiothanatoi) individuals, as well as cultic heroes. These restless dead, who intrude uninvited upon the territory of the living to communicate claims and desires, are exemplified by Clytaemestra in Aeschylus’ Eumenides, Polydorus and Achilles in Euripides’ Hecuba, and the chorus of heroes in Aristophanes’ fragmentary Heroes. The aim of this investigation is not to offer a commentary on the plays examined; nor does it aspire to reconstruct contemporary eschatological ideas by extracting what seems to be a historic core from the dramatic material. Rather, by employing Greek eschatology as a stepping-stone to literary exploration, it attempts a new reading premised on the fact that the dramatised encounters between the living and the dead are far from decorative and incidental. They are organically integrated into the plays, thematised, and endowed with a significant dramatic role, participating actively in the construction of form, structure, and meaning

The visual white matter connecting human area prostriata and the thalamus is retinotopically organized

The human visual system is capable of processing visual information from fovea to the far peripheral visual field. Recent fMRI studies have shown a full and detailed retinotopic map in area prostriata, located ventro-dorsally and anterior to the calcarine sulcus along the parieto-occipital sulcus with strong preference for peripheral and wide-field stimulation. Here, we report the anatomical pattern of white matter connections between area prostriata and the thalamus encompassing the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). To this end, we developed and utilized an automated pipeline comprising a series of Apps that run openly on the cloud computing platform brainlife.io to analyse 139 subjects of the Human Connectome Project (HCP). We observe a continuous and extended bundle of white matter fibers from which two subcomponents can be extracted: one passing ventrally parallel to the optic radiations (OR) and another passing dorsally circumventing the lateral ventricle. Interestingly, the loop travelling dorsally connects the thalamus with the central visual field representation of prostriata located anteriorly, while the other loop travelling more ventrally connects the LGN with the more peripheral visual field representation located posteriorly. We then analyse an additional cohort of 10 HCP subjects using a manual plane extraction method outside brainlife.io to study the relationship between the two extracted white matter subcomponents and eccentricity, myelin and cortical thickness gradients within prostriata. Our results are consistent with a retinotopic segregation recently demonstrated in the OR, connecting the LGN and V1 in humans and reveal for the first time a retinotopic segregation regarding the trajectory of a fiber bundle between the thalamus and an associative visual area

Plasticity of the human visual brain after an early cortical lesion

In adults, partial damage to V1 or optic radiations abolishes perception in the corresponding part of the visual field, causing a scotoma. However, it is widely accepted that the developing cortex has superior capacities to reorganize following an early lesion to endorse adaptive plasticity. Here we report a single patient case (G.S.) with near normal central field vision despite a massive unilateral lesion to the optic radiations acquired early in life. The patient underwent surgical removal of a right hemisphere parieto-temporal-occipital atypical choroid plexus papilloma of the right lateral ventricle at four months of age, which presumably altered the visual pathways during in utero development. Both the tumor and surgery severely compromised the optic radiations. Residual vision of G.S. was tested psychophysically when the patient was 7 years old. We found a close-to-normal visual acuity and contrast sensitivity within the central 25° and a great impairment in form and contrast vision in the far periphery (40-50°) of the left visual hemifield. BOLD response to full field luminance flicker was recorded from the primary visual cortex (V1) and in a region in the residual temporal-occipital region, presumably corresponding to the middle temporal complex (MT+), of the lesioned (right) hemisphere. A population receptive field analysis of the BOLD responses to contrast modulated stimuli revealed a retinotopic organization just for the MT+ region but not for the calcarine regions. Interestingly, consistent islands of ipsilateral activity were found in MT+ and in the parieto-occipital sulcus (POS) of the intact hemisphere. Probabilistic tractography revealed that optic radiations between LGN and V1 were very sparse in the lesioned hemisphere consistently with the post-surgery cerebral resection, while normal in the intact hemisphere. On the other hand, strong structural connections between MT+ and LGN were found in the lesioned hemisphere, while the equivalent tract in the spared hemisphere showed minimal structural connectivity. These results suggest that during development of the pathological brain, abnormal thalamic projections can lead to functional cortical changes, which may mediate functional recovery of vision