Perception of Urban Habitat and the Structure of Human Interaction. Dialogues with the Artist as Part of Creative Intervention

In this paper I bring closer some of the aspects of my work, I show the approach to the space when working in public locations. The components of this approach are a careful observation of the environment, spending time with the locals, talking to them, taking into account the symbolic nature of the contents brought by the people. So I quote and comment some of the dialogues that happened between me and the passers by during a four week creative intervention in the city’s oldest street

Charakterystyka pacjentów przerywających stacjonarną terapię uzależnień uzyskana na podstawie analizy dokumentów medycznych

Patients addicted to alcohol often give up psychotherapeutic treatment programs. On one side, in out-patients’ clinics they are exposed to several factors which make abstinence and finishing the treatment program difficult. On the other, patients who participate in the stationary psychotherapy for addicted people are less exposed to these factors and a lot of them still are not able to finish the treatment program. The aim of the research was to describe patients discontinuing the stationary psychotherapy program for alcoholics. The empirical data was taken from analysing medical documentation and the history of patient addiction of those who had stayed for over a year in a stationary department of the hospital participating in the basic treatment program for alcoholics. The received results show that 27,6% of patients do not finish the taken treatment program for alcoholics. Men statistically more often than wo­men break off this psychotherapy treatment. Patients who discontinued the psychotherapy more often live alone (divorced or unmarried). Personality disorders and mental diseases (depression, alcohol hallucinations when entering the hospital, schizophrenia, bipolar affective disorder). Among patients who gave up stationary addiction therapy, the most common were people who had previously attempted addiction therapy once. In the result we state that it is necessary to increase and make the offer of therapeutic programs in the stationary clinical centers more flexible. The difficulties and deficiencies of patients who discontinued the therapeutic programs should be considered. During psychotherapy, motivational methods should be used to encourage patients to change.Osoby uzależnione od alkoholu często nie kończą podejmowanego leczenia psychoterapeutycznego. O ile w leczeniu ambulatoryjnym pacjenci stale narażeni są na działanie czynników mogących utrudnić utrzymanie abstynencji i dokończenie leczenia, o tyle osoby leczące się w ośrodkach stacjonarnych doświadczają powyższych czynników w zredukowanym wymiarze. Pomimo tego, znaczny odsetek pacjentów nie kończy programów terapeutycznych realizowanych w ośrodkach stacjonarnych. Celem podjętych badań było dokonanie charakterystyki osób przerywających stacjonarną terapię uzależnień od alkoholu. Wykorzystano w tym celu dane dostępne w historiach choroby pacjentów. Dane empiryczne uzyskano analizując dokumentację medyczną – historie choroby pacjentów uzależnionych od alkoholu przebywających w ciągu jednego roku w stacjonarnym oddziale odwykowym i podejmujących podstawowy program terapii uzależnień. Uzyskane wyniki wskazują, że osoby z grupy badawczej w znacznym odsetku (27,6%) nie kończą podejmowanego leczenia stacjonarnego. Mężczyźni statystycznie częściej od kobiet przerywali terapię, ponadto osoby niekończące terapii często żyją samotnie (kawalerowie, rozwodnicy i panny). Kończeniu terapii nie sprzyja obecność zaburzeń i chorób psychicznych (depresji, halucynozy alkoholowej przy przyjęciu do szpitala, schizofrenii i choroby afektywnej dwubiegunowej). Wśród pacjentów rezygnujących ze stacjonarnej terapii uzależnień najczęściej były osoby, które wcześniej jednorazowo podejmowały próbę terapii odwykowej. Warto poszerzać i uelastyczniać ofertę programów terapeutycznych ośrodków stacjonarnych, uwzględniając trudności i deficyty osób niekończących terapii. W psychoterapii należy korzystać z metod i technik podtrzymywania motywacji pacjentów do dokonywania zmian

Independent effects of bottom-up temporal expectancy and top-down spatial attention. An audiovisual study using rhythmic cueing

Selective attention to a spatial location has shown enhanced perception and facilitate behavior for events at attended locations. However, selection relies not only on where but also when an event occurs. Recently, interest has turned to how intrinsic neural oscillations in the brain entrain to rhythms in our environment, and, stimuli appearing in or out of sync with a rhythm have shown to modulate perception and performance. Temporal expectations created by rhythms and spatial attention are two processes which have independently shown to affect stimulus processing but it remains largely unknown how, and if, they interact. In four separate tasks, this study investigated the effects of voluntary spatial attention and bottom-up temporal expectations created by rhythms in both unimodal and crossmodal conditions. In each task the participant used an informative cue, either color or pitch, to direct their covert spatial attention to the left or right, and respond as quickly as possible to a target. The lateralized target (visual or auditory) was then presented at the attended or unattended side. Importantly, although not task relevant, the cue was a rhythm of either flashes or beeps. The target was presented in or out of sync (early or late) with the rhythmic cue. Results showed participants were faster responding to spatially attended compared to unattended targets in all tasks. Moreover, there was an effect of rhythmic cueing upon response times in both unimodal and crossmodal conditions. Responses were faster to targets presented in sync with the rhythm compared to when they appeared too early in both crossmodal tasks. That is, rhythmic stimuli in one modality influenced the temporal expectancy in the other modality, suggesting temporal expectancies created by rhythms are crossmodal. Interestingly, there was no interaction between top-down spatial attention and rhythmic cueing in any task suggesting these two processes largely influenced behavior independently

Linking Pathological Oscillations With Altered Temporal Processing in Parkinsons Disease: Neurophysiological Mechanisms and Implications for Neuromodulation.

Emerging evidence suggests that Parkinson's disease (PD) results from disrupted oscillatory activity in cortico-basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical (CBGTC) and cerebellar networks which can be partially corrected by applying deep brain stimulation (DBS). The inherent dynamic nature of such oscillatory activity might implicate that is represents temporal aspects of motor control. While the timing of muscle activities in CBGTC networks constitute the temporal dimensions of distinct motor acts, these very networks are also involved in somatosensory processing. In this respect, a temporal aspect of somatosensory processing in motor control concerns matching predicted (feedforward) and actual (feedback) sensory consequences of movement which implies a distinct contribution to demarcating the temporal order of events. Emerging evidence shows that such somatosensory processing is altered in movement disorders. This raises the question how disrupted oscillatory activity is related to impaired temporal processing and how/whether DBS can functionally restore this. In this perspective article, the neural underpinnings of temporal processing will be reviewed and translated to the specific alternated oscillatory neural activity specifically found in Parkinson's disease. These findings will be integrated in a neurophysiological framework linking somatosensory and motor processing. Finally, future implications for neuromodulation will be discussed with potential implications for strategy across a range of movement disorders

Temporal Dynamics of Visual Attention Allocation

We often temporally prepare our attention for an upcoming event such as a starter pistol. In such cases, our attention should be properly allocated around the expected moment of the event to process relevant sensory input efficiently. In this study, we examined the dynamic changes of attention levels near the expected moment by measuring contrast sensitivity to a target that was temporally cued by a five-second countdown. We found that the overall attention level decreased rapidly after the expected moment, while it stayed relatively constant before it. Results were not consistent with the predictions of existing explanations of temporal attention such as the hazard rate or the stimulus-driven oscillations. A control experiment ruled out the possibility that the observed pattern was due to biased time perception. In a further experiment with a wider range of cue-stimulus-intervals, we observed that attention level increased until the last 500 ms of the interval range, and thereafter, started to decrease. Based on the performances of a generative computational model, we suggest that our results reflect the nature of temporal attention that takes into account the subjectively estimated hazard rate and the probability of relevant events occurring in the near future

Consensus paper:Decoding the Contributions of the Cerebellum as a Time Machine. From Neurons to Clinical Applications

Time perception is an essential element of conscious and subconscious experience, coordinating our perception and interaction with the surrounding environment. In recent years, major technological advances in the field of neuroscience have helped foster new insights into the processing of temporal information, including extending our knowledge of the role of the cerebellum as one of the key nodes in the brain for this function. This consensus paper provides a state-of-the-art picture from the experts in the field of the cerebellar research on a variety of crucial issues related to temporal processing, drawing on recent anatomical, neurophysiological, behavioral, and clinical research. The cerebellar granular layer appears especially well-suited for timing operations required to confer millisecond precision for cerebellar computations. This may be most evident in the manner the cerebellum controls the duration of the timing of agonist-antagonist EMG bursts associated with fast goal-directed voluntary movements. In concert with adaptive processes, interactions within the cerebellar cortex are sufficient to support sub-second timing. However, supra-second timing seems to require cortical and basal ganglia networks, perhaps operating in concert with cerebellum. Additionally, sensory information such as an unexpected stimulus can be forwarded to the cerebellum via the climbing fiber system, providing a temporally constrained mechanism to adjust ongoing behavior and modify future processing. Patients with cerebellar disorders exhibit impairments on a range of tasks that require precise timing, and recent evidence suggest that timing problems observed in other neurological conditions such as Parkinson\u2019s disease, essential tremor, and dystonia may reflect disrupted interactions between the basal ganglia and cerebellum. The complex concepts emerging from this consensus paper should provide a foundation for further discussion, helping identify basic research questions required to understand how the brain represents and utilizes time, as well as delineating ways in which this knowledge can help improve the lives of those with neurological conditions that disrupt this most elemental sense. The panel of experts agrees that timing control in the brain is a complex concept in whom cerebellar circuitry is deeply involved. The concept of a timing machine has now expanded to clinical disorders

No changes in parieto-occipital alpha during neural phase locking to visual quasi-periodic theta-, alpha-, and beta-band stimulation

Recent studies have probed the role of the parieto‐occipital alpha rhythm (8 – 12 Hz) in human visual perception through attempts to drive its neural generators. To that end, paradigms have used high‐intensity strictly‐periodic visual stimulation that created strong predictions about future stimulus occurrences and repeatedly demonstrated perceptual consequences in line with an entrainment of parieto‐occipital alpha. Our study, in turn, examined the case of alpha entrainment by non‐predictive low‐intensity quasi‐periodic visual stimulation within theta‐ (4 – 7 Hz), alpha‐ (8 – 13 Hz) and beta (14 – 20 Hz) frequency bands, i.e. a class of stimuli that resemble the temporal characteristics of naturally occurring visual input more closely. We have previously reported substantial neural phase‐locking in EEG recording during all three stimulation conditions. Here, we studied to what extent this phase‐locking reflected an entrainment of intrinsic alpha rhythms in the same dataset. Specifically, we tested whether quasi‐periodic visual stimulation affected several properties of parieto‐occipital alpha generators. Speaking against an entrainment of intrinsic alpha rhythms by non‐predictive low‐intensity quasi‐periodic visual stimulation, we found none of these properties to show differences between stimulation frequency bands. In particular, alpha band generators did not show increased sensitivity to alpha band stimulation and Bayesian inference corroborated evidence against an influence of stimulation frequency. Our results set boundary conditions for when and how to expect effects of entrainment of alpha generators and suggest that the parieto‐occipital alpha rhythm may be more inert to external influences than previously thought

Optimal perceived timing: integrating sensory information with dynamically updated expectations

The environment has a temporal structure, and knowing when a stimulus will appear translates into increased perceptual performance. Here we investigated how the human brain exploits temporal regularity in stimulus sequences for perception. We find that the timing of stimuli that occasionally deviate from a regularly paced sequence is perceptually distorted. Stimuli presented earlier than expected are perceptually delayed, whereas stimuli presented on time and later than expected are perceptually accelerated. This result suggests that the brain regularizes slightly deviant stimuli with an asymmetry that leads to the perceptual acceleration of expected stimuli. We present a Bayesian model for the combination of dynamically-updated expectations, in the form of a priori probability of encountering future stimuli, with incoming sensory information. The asymmetries in the results are accounted for by the asymmetries in the distributions involved in the computational process