Interregional synchrony of visuomotor tracking: perturbation effects and individual differences

The present study evaluated the neural and behavioural correlates associated with a visuomotor tracking task during which a sensory perturbation was introduced that created a directional bias between moving hand and cursor position. The results revealed that trajectory error increased as a result of the perturbation in conjunction with a dynamic neural reorganization of cluster patterns that reflected distinct processing. In particular, a negatively activated cluster, characterizing the degraded information processing due to the perturbation, involved both hemispheres as well as midline area. Conversely, a positively activated cluster, indicative of compensatory processing was strongly confined to the left (dominant) hemisphere. In addition, a brain-behavioural association of good vs. poor performing participants enabled to localize a neural circuit within the left hemisphere and midline area that linked with successful performance. Overall, these data reinforce the functional significance of interregional synchrony in defining response output and behavioural success

Prediction of collision events: an EEG coherence analysis

Objective: A common daily-life task is the interaction with moving objects for which prediction of collision events is required. To evaluate the sources of information used in this process, this EEG study required participants to judge whether two moving objects would collide with one another or not. In addition, the effect of a distractor object is evaluated. Methods: The measurements included the behavioural decision time and accuracy, eye movement fixation times, and the neural dynamics which was determined by means of EEG coherence, expressing functional connectivity between brain areas. Results: Collision judgment involved widespread information processing across both hemispheres. When a distractor object was present, task-related activity was increased whereas distractor activity induced modulation of local sensory processing. Also relevant were the parietial regions communicating with bilateral occipital and midline areas and a left-sided sensorimotor circuit. Conclusions: Besides visual cues, cognitive and strategic strategies are used to establish a decision of events in time. When distracting information is introduced into the collision judgment process, it is managed at different processing levels and supported by distinct neural correlates

Motor awareness and dissociable levels of action representation

The present study evaluated the performance of a tracking task during which no, a small (subliminal: 20°) or a large (conscious: 60°) rotational perturbation was implemented. The instantaneous as well as carry-over effects of the perturbations were assessed. The subjective reports revealed that the subjects did not discriminate between the 0° and 20° perturbation conditions, despite increased trajectory error and directional trajectory changes in the latter than former condition, which suggests augmented error processing and task monitoring. Conversely, the 60° perturbation condition was characterized by subjective awareness in association with objective performance changes. Furthermore, a carry-over effect for the 60° but not for the 20° perturbation was observed when the distortion was removed midway into the trajectory. Together, the data underline distinct functioning of motor control and motor awareness with implications across time scales

The developing cognitive substrate of sequential action control in 9- to 12-month-olds: Evidence for concurrent activation models

Infants interpret third-person sequential actions as goal directed by 6 months of age, around 9 months of age they start to perform sequential actions to accomplish higher order goals. The present study employed an innovative pupillometric and oculomotor paradigm to study how infants represent first-person sequential actions. We aimed to contrast chaining-, concurrent- and integrated models of sequential-action representation. 9- and 12- month olds were taught action sequences consisting of two elementary actions. Thereafter the secondary action was selectively activated to assess any interactions with the primary action. Results suggest that concurrent models best capture the representations formed

Individual differences in affective touch: Behavioral inhibition and gender define how an interpersonal touch is perceived

Receiving a tender caress from a caregiver or spouse reduces stress and promotes emotional wellbeing, but receiving the same caress from a stranger makes us feel uncomfortable. According to recent neurophysiological findings, we not only react differently to the invited versus uninvited touch but also perceive the touch differently depending on context. A virtual reality experiment was conducted to investigate whether individual differences regarding behavioral inhibition system (BIS) and gender contribute to this affective touch perception. Touch perception was measured directly using self-reports and indirectly using the touch-related orienting response. The results showed that touch perception depended on the emotional expression of the virtual agents. High-arousal approach-related (happiness, anger) and avoidance-related (fear) expressions increased self-reported touch intensity, while happiness reduced the orienting response to touch. Moreover, interpersonal differences in behavioral inhibition and gender played distinct roles: BIS sensitivity in males was associated with stronger affective touch perception, particularly with high-arousal emotions whereas in females BIS sensitivity did not affect touch perception. The results suggest that individual differences that are related to preferences regarding tactile communication also determine how touch is perceived

Exploring Peripheral Physiology as a Predictor of Perceived Relevance in Information Retrieval

Peripheral physiological signals, as obtained using electrodermal activity and facial electromyography over the corrugator supercilii muscle, are explored as indicators of perceived relevance in information retrieval tasks. An experiment with 40 participants is reported, in which these physiological signals are recorded while participants perform information retrieval tasks. Appropriate feature engineering is defined, and the feature space is explored. The results indicate that features in the window of 4 to 6 seconds after the relevance judgment for electrodermal activity, and from 1 second before to 2 seconds after the relevance judgment for corrugator supercilii activity, are associated with the users’ perceived relevance of information items. A classifier verified the predictive power of the features and showed up to 14% improvement predicting relevance. Our research can help the design of intelligent user interfaces for information retrieval that can detect the user’s perceived relevance from physiological signals and complement or replace conventional relevance feedback

Manual dexterity: functional lateralisation patterns and motor efficiency

Manual tasks are an important goal-directed ability. In this EEG work, we studied how handedness affects the hemispheric lateralisation patterns during performance of visually-driven movements with either hand. The neural correlates were assessed by means of EEG coherence whereas behavioural output was measured by motor error. The EEG data indicated that left- and right-handers showed distinct recruitment patterns. These involved local interactions between brain regions as well as more widespread associations between brain systems. Despite these differences, brain-behaviour correlations highlighted that motor efficiency depended on left-sided brain regions across groups. These results suggest that skilled hand motor control relies on different neural patterns as a function of handedness whereas behavioural efficiency is linked with the left hemisphere. In conclusion, the present findings add to our understanding about principles of lateralised organisation as a function of handedness

Predicting term-relevance from brain signals (Proceedings of the 37th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research & development in information retrieval)

Term-Relevance Prediction from Brain Signals (TRPB) is proposed to automatically detect relevance of text information directly from brain signals. An experiment with forty participants was conducted to record neural activity of participants while providing relevance judgments to text stimuli for a given topic. High-precision scientific equipment was used to quantify neural activity across 32 electroencephalography (EEG) channels. A classifier based on a multi-view EEG feature representation showed improvement up to 17% in relevance prediction based on brain signals alone. Relevance was also associated with brain activity with significant changes in certain brain areas. Consequently, TRPB is based on changes identified in specific brain areas and does not require user-specific training or calibration. Hence, relevance predictions can be conducted for unseen content and unseen participants. As an application of TRPB we demonstrate a high-precision variant of the classifier that constructs sets of relevant terms for a given unknown topic of interest. Our research shows that detecting relevance from brain signals is possible and allows the acquisition of relevance judgments without a need to observe any other user interaction. This suggests that TRPB could be used in combination or as an alternative for conventional implicit feedback signals, such as dwell time or click-through activity

BCI for physiological text annotation

IUI'17Peer reviewe