To access its online representations, visual working memory (VWM) relies on a pointer-system that creates correspondence between objects in the environment with their memory representations. This pointer-system allows VWM to modify its representations using a process called updating. When the pointer is invalidated, however, VWM triggers a process called resetting in which the no longer relevant representation and pointer are replaced. Past studies used the contralateral delay activity (CDA) to differentiate between updating and resetting and found that resetting is followed by a drop in the CDA amplitude. The current study aimed to investigate the effects of occlusion on VWM representations and the resetting process across four experiments. Experiment 1 examined whether resetting occurs with occluded changes and compared the CDA of occluded versus visible objects. The results indicated a decline in CDA amplitude during occlusion, but it was unclear if resetting occurred when the change was occluded due to the lack of time-locked changes. To better isolate the resetting process, Experiment 2 used a brief occluder appearances (100 ms) and observed a CDA drop likely due to an ERP response to the sudden stimulus appearance. This drop occurred earlier than the resetting CDA drop and appeared even in conditions that did not trigger resetting, which indicates that it might be an ERP response to the short and sudden appearance of a stimulus. Experiment 3 further isolated this ERP response, confirming the early CDA drop as a reaction to the occluder's onset and offset. Experiment 4, which included occluders that did not flash to avoid ERP responses, found a CDA drop indicating that resetting can occur with inferred changes. These findings suggest that VWM maintains representations of occluded objects, and can update or reset these representations based on inferred changes, with brief stimuli eliciting ERP responses that affect CDA amplitude.

Functional Motor Disorders (FMD) consists in symptoms of altered motor function not attributable to typical neurological and medical conditions. This study aimed to explore explicit and perceptual measures of Sense of Ownership, Agency, and Body Schema in FMD patients, and assess whether these alterations are specific to FMD or shared with other functional disturbances. Twelve FMD patients, ten with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS, a functional gastrointestinal disorder) and fifteen healthy controls (HC) underwent: (i) the Mirror Box Illusion (MBI), requiring participants to perform tapping movements with their dominant hand concealed from sight, while visual feedback was provided by an alien hand under visuo-motor congruency or incongruency conditions; (ii) a Forearm Bisection Task before and after exposure to the MBI, and the Embodiment Questionnaire after the MBI, as perceptual and explicit indices of the embodiment illusion, respectively. At the Embodiment Questionnaire, all groups self-reported embodiment of the alien hand only under visuo-motor congruency; at the perceptual level, HC showed the expected distalized drift (an "elongated" arm in the Body Schema) under visuo-motor congruency, while FMD and IBS patients did not. FMD patients showed a proximalized drift when sensory feedback mismatched, possibly reflecting reliance on altered priors to avoid losing control over their movement. Results in IBS patients suggest Body Schema alterations differ across functional syndromes. In conclusion, we found that explicit Sense of Ownership and Agency are preserved in FMD and IBS patients, but dissociate from their implicit measures, differing in degree according to the specific disturbance.

The developing brain undergoes rapid changes throughout middle childhood and adolescence. The disambiguation of long-term changes in intrinsic activity following pediatric mild traumatic brain injury (pmTBI) from typical development can therefore only be ascertained in longitudinal studies with large sample size and at least three serial assessments. A comprehensive clinical battery and resting-state fMRI data were collected approximately 1-week (N = 263; 8-18 years old), 4-months (N = 192) and 1-year (N = 153) post-injury, with identical visits in a large cohort (N = 228) of age- and sex-matched healthy controls (HC). Results indicated persistent frontocerebellar and thalamic connectivity changes up to 1-year post-injury in pmTBI relative to controls (P's < .001), with similar longitudinal connectivity trajectories (i.e., typical neurodevelopment). Alterations in precuneal midline connectivity (p's < .05) and occupancy of a default mode/limbic dynamic brain state were present only up to 4-months (p's < .001) rather than 1-year (p's > .44) post-injury. However, absent group differences at 1-year post-injury may be explained as pseudo-normalization due to altered longitudinal connectivity trajectories in pmTBI associated with neurodevelopment. Persistent alterations of precuneal connectivity were also associated with lower executive function and long-term memory scores. In conclusion, pmTBI may result in chronic changes to both static and dynamic intrinsic connectivity which further interact with typical neurodevelopment. Longer follow-up studies may be needed to unravel this interaction.

Objects project different images when viewed from varying locations, but the visual system can correct perspective distortions and identify objects across viewpoints. This study investigated the conditions under which the visual system allocates computational resources to construct view-invariant, extraretinal representations, focusing on planar symmetry. When a symmetrical pattern lies on a plane, its symmetry in the retinal image is degraded by perspective. Visual symmetry activates the extrastriate visual cortex and generates an Event Related Potential (ERP) called Sustained Posterior Negativity (SPN). Previous research has shown that the SPN is reduced for perspective symmetry during secondary tasks. We hypothesized that perspective cost would decrease when visual cues support extraretinal representation. To test this, 120 participants viewed symmetrical and asymmetrical stimuli presented in a frontoparallel or perspective view. The task did not explicitly involve symmetry; participants discriminated the luminance of the patterns. Participants completed four experimental blocks: (1) Baseline block: no depth cues; (2) Monocular viewing block: stimuli viewed with one eye; (3) Static frame block: pictorial depth cues from elements within a flat surface with edges; (4) Moving frame block: motion parallax enhanced 3D interpretation before stimulus onset. Perspective cost was calculated as the difference between SPN responses to frontoparallel and perspective views. Contrary to our pre-registered hypotheses, the perspective cost was consistent across all four blocks. We conclude that the tested visual cues do not substantially reduce the computational cost of processing perspective symmetry.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) can be diagnosed by in vivo abnormalities of amyloid-β plaques (A) and tau accumulation (T) biomarkers. Previous studies have shown that analyses of serial position performance in episodic memory tests, and especially, delayed primacy, are associated with AD pathology even in individuals who are cognitively unimpaired. The earliest signs of cortical tau pathology are observed in medial temporal lobe (MTL) regions, yet it is unknown if serial position markers are also associated with early tau load in these regions. This study of cognitively unimpaired older individuals examined whether serial position scores in word-list recall cross-sectionally predicted tau PET load in the MTL, and were able to discriminate between biomarker profiles, based on AT classification.

The processing of stationary sounds relies on both local features and compact representations. As local information is compressed into summary statistics, abstract representations emerge. Whether the brain is endowed with distinct neural architectures predisposed to such computations is unknown. In this magnetoencephalography (MEG) study, we employed a validated protocol to localize cortical correlates of local and summary auditory representations, exposing participants to sequences embedding triplets of synthetic sound textures systematically varying for either local details or summary statistics. Sounds varied for their duration and could be short (40 ms) or long (478 ms) to favor change detections based on local or summary statistics, respectively. Results clearly revealed distinct activation patterns for local features and summary auditory statistics. Neural activations diverged in magnitude, spatiotemporal distribution, and hemispheric lateralization. The right auditory cortex, comprising both primary and neighboring temporal and frontal regions were engaged to detect sound changes in both local features (for short sounds) and summary statistics (for long sounds). Conversely, the left auditory cortex was not selective to these auditory changes. However, the ventro-lateral portion of left frontal lobe, a region associated with sound recognition, was engaged in processing changes in summary statistics at a long sound duration. These findings highlight the involvement of distinct cortical pathways and hemispheric lateralization for the computation of local and summary acoustic information occurring at different temporal resolutions. SIGNIFICANT STATEMENT: We revealed hemispheric specializations for auditory computations at high (local) and low (summary statistics) temporal resolutions. The right hemisphere was engaged for both computations, while the left hemisphere responded more to summary statistics changes. These findings highlight the multifaceted functions of the right hemisphere in capturing acoustic properties of stationary sounds and the left hemisphere's involvement in processing abstract representations.

While pre-verbal infants may be sensitive to others' mental states, they are not able to accurately answer questions about them until several years later, an ability referred to as having a theory of mind. Here we ask whether infant social-cognitive sensitivity is subserved by the same brain mechanisms as those that support theory of mind in childhood. To do so, we explored the relationship between functional sensitivity of the right temporal-parietal junction to mental state processing in infancy, a region known to underlie theory of mind in older children, and explicit theory of mind reasoning in the same group several years later. In a small initial sample (N = 33), we find evidence of a longitudinal brain-behavioral link from infancy to childhood, providing preliminary support for a common mechanism for theory of mind across development. However, the brain metric that was predictive of individual differences was not the response to conditions that required tracking the beliefs, but instead, the response to a control condition where belief tracking was not obligatory to predict others' behavior. In hindsight, the ambiguity of this control condition may have best distinguished between infants who had different propensities to engage in belief tracking, suggesting a potential role for active experience in infancy contributing to individual differences in later theory of mind development in childhood. Given the exploratory nature of the study, other alternative explanations for these results must also be considered.

Two event-related brain potential (ERP) components, the frontocentral feedback-related negativity (FRN) and the posterior P300, are key in feedback processing. The FRN typically exhibits greater amplitude in response to negative and unexpected outcomes, whereas the P300 is generally more pronounced for positive outcomes. In an influential ERP study, Hajcak et al., (2005) manipulated outcome valence and expectancy in a guessing task. They found the FRN was larger for negative outcomes regardless of expectancy, and the P300 larger for unexpected outcomes regardless of valence. These findings challenged the dominant Reinforcement Learning Theory of the ERN. We aimed to replicate these results within the #EEGManyLabs project (Pavlov et al., 2021) across thirteen labs. Our replication, including robustness tests, a PCA and Bayesian models, found that both FRN and P300 were significantly modulated by outcome valence and expectancy: FRN amplitudes (no-reward - reward) were largest for unexpected outcomes, and P300 amplitudes were largest for reward outcomes. These results were consistent across different methods and analyses. Although our findings only partially replicate the original study, they underscore the complexity of feedback processing and demonstrate how aspects of Reinforcement Learning Theory may apply to the P300 component, reinforcing the need for rigorous ERP research methodologies.

Effective social communication depends on the integration of emotional expressions coming from the face and the voice. Although there are consistent reports on how seeing and hearing emotion expressions can be automatically integrated, direct signatures of multisensory integration in the human brain remain elusive. Here we implemented a multi-input electroencephalographic (EEG) frequency tagging paradigm to investigate neural populations integrating facial and vocal fearful expressions. High-density EEG was acquired in participants attending to dynamic fearful facial and vocal expressions tagged at different frequencies (f, f). Beyond EEG activity at the specific unimodal facial and vocal emotion presentation frequencies, activity at intermodulation frequencies (IM) arising at the sums and differences of the harmonics of the stimulation frequencies (mf ± nf) were observed, suggesting non-linear integration of the visual and auditory emotion information into a unified representation. These IM provide evidence that common neural populations integrate signal from the two sensory streams. Importantly, IMs were absent in a control condition with mismatched facial and vocal emotion expressions. Our results provide direct evidence from non-invasive recordings in humans for common neural populations that integrate fearful facial and vocal emotional expressions.

The human visual system is tuned to symmetry, and the neural response to visual symmetry has been well studied. One line of research measures an Event Related Potential (ERP) component called the Sustained Posterior Negativity (SPN). Amplitude is more negative at posterior electrodes when participants see symmetrical patterns compared to asymmetrical patterns. Source localization confirms that the SPN is generated by two dipoles in the left and right extrastriate cortex, in line with fMRI results. However, exploratory analysis by Tyson-Carr, Bertamini, Rampone, and Makin (2021) found a third symmetry response located approximately in the posterior cingulate peaking at around 600 msec. The third symmetry response was only generated in conditions where symmetry was 1) task relevant and 2) salient. We tested whether these findings are reliable by running source localization analysis on all suitable datasets from the complete Liverpool SPN catalogue (an online repository of all 40 SPN projects with 2215 participants https://osf.io/2sncj/). We predicted that less variance would be explained by a two-dipole model in experiments where participants classified regularity (hypothesis 1), and, when the third dipole is present, amplitude would correlate with that of the sensor-level SPN (hypothesis 2). Hypothesis 1 was not supported, while hypothesis 2 was. We conclude that the bilateral extrastriate symmetry response is sometimes followed by a third activation near the posterior cingulate. However, this third symmetry response is not as predictable as we had assumed. One possibility is that it may sometimes be hidden from average waveforms by temporal inconsistency between trials. This may happen more in experiments with longer presentation durations.

Posner and Petersen (1990) suggested that the attention system is composed of three networks: alerting, orienting, and executive functioning or control. Drawing on this theory, the Attentional Networks Test (ANT) was designed to quantify the functionality of the three attention networks. The ANT is used extensively in psychology, neuroscience, and medicine. Later adjustments of the ANT have demonstrated that the three attention networks do not operate independently and can interact. The current study examined whether such interactions are constant or result from task demands. In three experiments (N = 147) we measured alerting, orienting, executive control and their interactions while manipulating task demands. The interactions between the three networks differed between experiments, with no interactions detected in the third experiment. We conclude that the interactions between executive functioning and alertness, and between executive functioning and orienting depend on spatial processes and are not an innate feature of attention. Our results suggest that the three attention networks can function independently, depending on task demands. Our findings offer experimental support for Posner and Petersen's theory (1990) and suggest a novel way to optimize attention measurements.

This study aimed to evaluate the capacity of neuropsychological assessment to predict the regional brain metabolism in a cohort of patients with amnestic Alzheimer's disease (AD) and behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) using Machine Learning algorithms.

The precise cognitive mechanisms underlying spatial neglect are not fully understood. Recent studies have provided the first evidence for aberrant behavioral and electrophysiological prediction and prediction error responses in patients with neglect, but also in right-hemispheric (RH) stroke patients without neglect. For prediction-dependent attention, as assessed with Posner-type cueing paradigms with volatile cue-target contingencies, studies in healthy volunteers point to a crucial role of the right temporo-parietal junction (rTPJ) - as part of a network commonly disrupted in neglect. In order to study altered prediction-dependent attention in patients with RH damage and neglect, the present study employed a spatial cueing paradigm with unsignalled changes in the cue's predictive value in 26 RH patients, 21 left-hemispheric (LH) patients, and 33 healthy elderly controls. The inference of the changing cue's predictive value was assessed with a Rescorla-Wagner learning model of response times (RTs) and participants' ratings. We tested for lesion-side-dependent relationships between the computational model parameters, ratings, and neuropsychological performance. Moreover, we investigated links between the behavioral signatures of predictive processing and lesion anatomy (lesion location and disconnection). The results provided no evidence for a predictive inference deficit, but revealed a correlation between a hypersensitivity of RTs to inferred predictions for ipsilesional stimuli and neglect symptoms in RH patients. Irrespective of symptoms of neglect, the rating of the cue's predictive value deviated more from the actual values in RH patients. RT hypersensitivity for ipsilesional targets was linked to disconnection within fronto-parietal, fronto-occipital, and temporo-parietal pathways. These findings provide novel insights into the role of altered prediction-dependent processing for neglect as assessed by different read-outs, highlighting an exaggerated response adaption to predictions of ipsilesional stimuli.

Retrieving words quickly and correctly is an important language competence. Semantic contexts, such as prior naming of categorically related objects, can induce conceptual priming but also lexical-semantic interference, the latter likely due to enhanced competition during lexical selection. In the continuous naming (CN) paradigm, such semantic interference is evident in a linear increase in naming latency with each additional member of a category out of a seemingly random sequence of pictures being named (cumulative semantic interference/CSI effect). Extensively studied in neurotypical participants, CSI studies in people with aphasia (PWA) are rare, although some lesions regularly and persistently impair word retrieval. In the present study, 20 PWA with lesions in the extended left hemispheric language network and 20 matched controls underwent a CN paradigm, naming photographs of closely related objects from 24 categories (e.g., birds) with 5 members each. The experiment was conducted web-based (Stark et al., 2022) on three days (day 1, 2, and 8). The main results are: (i) Mild-moderate aphasia does not preclude web-based testing. (ii) The CSI effect in naming latencies (∼21 ms per ordinal position) did not differ significantly between groups but was more variable in the PWA; the effect was stable across days. (iii) Overall response times decreased between day 1 and day 2, but remained stable on day 8. (iv) In PWA, increased error-rates paralleled the latency-based CSI effect, suggesting stronger interference in this group. (v) Exploratory analyses suggest that lesions in a large area, including frontal, inferior parietal, pre- and post-central opercular cortices, are linked to a larger CSI effect. At a more lenient statistical threshold, lesions in occipital and supramarginal cortices were associated with increased overall naming latencies. These results offer an initial step toward identifying the neuronal underpinnings of semantic context effects in PWA. We conclude that web-based assessment is feasible in PWA and yields a stable CSI effect over repetitive testing. While not directly clinically applicable, the findings could serve as a foundation for exploring training-interventions targeting lexical activation, interference resolution, or word selection.