Mcgarrygammelgaard3887

Our findings identify beta band cortico-muscular coupling as a potential underlying mechanism of motor entrainment, further elucidating the nature of the link between sensory and motor systems in humans.Previous studies in the macaque monkey have provided clear causal evidence for an involvement of the medial-superior-temporal area (MST) in the perception of self-motion. These studies also revealed an overrepresentation of contraversive heading. Human imaging studies have identified a functional equivalent (hMST) of macaque area MST. Yet, causal evidence of hMST in heading perception is lacking. We employed neuronavigated transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to test for such a causal relationship. We expected TMS over hMST to induce increased perceptual variance (i.e., impaired precision), while leaving mean heading perception (accuracy) unaffected. We presented 8 human participants with an optic flow stimulus simulating forward self-motion across a ground plane in one of 3 directions. read more Participants indicated perceived heading. In 57% of the trials, TMS pulses were applied, temporally centered on self-motion onset. TMS stimulation site was either right-hemisphere hMST, identified by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) localizer, or a control-area, just outside the fMRI localizer activation. As predicted, TMS over area hMST, but not over the control-area, increased response variance of perceived heading as compared with noTMS stimulation trials. As hypothesized, this effect was strongest for contraversive self-motion. These data provide a first causal evidence for a critical role of hMST in visually guided navigation.A crucial question in skill learning research is how instruction affects the performance or the underlying representations. Little is known about the effects of instructions on one critical aspect of skill learning, namely, picking-up statistical regularities. More specifically, the present study tests how prelearning speed or accuracy instructions affect the acquisition of non-adjacent second-order dependencies. We trained 2 groups of participants on an implicit probabilistic sequence learning task one group focused on being fast and the other on being accurate. As expected, we detected a strong instruction effect accuracy instruction resulted in a nearly errorless performance, and speed instruction caused short reaction times (RTs). Despite the differences in the average RTs and accuracy scores, we found a similar level of statistical learning performance in the training phase. After the training phase, we tested the 2 groups under the same instruction (focusing on both speed and accuracy), and they showed comparable performance, suggesting a similar level of underlying statistical representations. Our findings support that skill learning can result in robust representations, and they highlight that this form of knowledge may appear with almost errorless performance. Moreover, multiple sessions with different instructions enabled the separation of competence from performance.The prioritized processing of emotional as compared to neutral stimuli is reflected in enlarged event-related potentials (ERPs). However, perceptual load theory proposes that under conditions of high perceptual load, information processing is attenuated or abolished. The parametrical effects of load on ERPs to emotional pictures are unknown. To shed light on this question, the current preregistered ERP study (N = 30) systematically investigated the effects of load on ERPs to task-irrelevant negative, neutral, and positive pictures. Crucially, while perceptual input was held constant, perceptual load was systematically manipulated so that it increased linearly across 4 load levels, which was evident in behavioral data. In contrast, load effects on ERP differences between emotional and neutral stimuli did not follow a linear function. For the N1, early posterior negativity and late positive potential, a nonlinear function with reversed emotion effects at the third load level provided the best fit. These findings do not only show that perceptual load attenuates emotional picture processing but also suggest that active processes are initiated to reduce distraction by emotional information. Moreover, these effects of perceptual load on emotional ERP components appear to deviate from theoretically expected functions.Bidirectionally aberrant medial orbitofrontal cortical (mOFC) activity has been consistently linked with compulsive disorders and related behaviors. Although rodent studies have established a causal link between mOFC excitation and compulsive-like actions, no such link has been made with mOFC inhibition. Here, we use excitotoxic lesions of mOFC to investigate its role in sensitivity to punishment; a core characteristic of many compulsive disorders. In our first experiment, we demonstrated that mOFC lesions prevented rats from learning to avoid a lever that was punished with a stimulus that coterminated with footshock. Our second experiment demonstrated that retrieval of punishment learning is also somewhat mOFC-dependent, as lesions prevented the extended retrieval of punishment contingencies relative to shams. In contrast, mOFC lesions did not prevent rats from reacquiring the ability to avoid a punished lever when it was learned prior to lesions being administered. In both experiments, Pavlovian fear conditioning to the stimulus was intact for all animals. Together, these results reveal that the mOFC regulates punishment learning and retrieval in a manner that is separate from any role in Pavlovian fear conditioning. These results imply that aberrant mOFC activity may contribute to the punishment insensitivity that is observed across multiple compulsive disorders.Debate continues on whether encoding of symbolic number is grounded in nonsymbolic numerical magnitudes. Nevertheless, fluency of perceiving both number formats, and translating between them, predicts math skills across the life span. Therefore, this study asked if numbers share cortical activation patterns across formats and tasks, and whether neural response to number predicts math-related behaviors. We analyzed patterns of neural activation using 7 Tesla functional magnetic resonance imaging in a sample of 39 healthy adults. Discrimination was successful between numerosities 2, 4, 6, and 8 dots and generalized to activation patterns of the same numerosities represented as Arabic digits in the bilateral parietal lobes and left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) (and vice versa). This indicates that numerosity-specific neural resources are shared between formats. Generalization was also successful across tasks where participants either identified or compared numerosities in bilateral parietal lobes and IFG. Individual differences in decoding did not relate to performance on a number comparison task completed outside of the scanner, but generalization between formats and across tasks negatively related to math achievement in the parietal lobes.