Review
Neurosciences
Bruno Averbeck, John P. O'Doherty
Summary: This article reviews the current state of knowledge on the computational and neural mechanisms of reinforcement learning, with a focus on fronto-striatal circuits. Five broad research themes are identified, including learning targets, algorithms driving learning and inference, value conversion into choices and actions, state representations, and brain control over reinforcement learning subsystems. The authors argue that bridging algorithmic level descriptions to implementation level models is essential to better understand how reinforcement learning emerges from multiple distributed neural networks in the brain.
NEUROPSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY
(2022)
Article
Neurosciences
Eunhee Bae, Joo Yeon Kim, Suk Won Han
Summary: The study found that the activation of the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) is proportional to the demand of the evaluative process of matching sensory inputs with internal representations, with a greater and more sustained pattern as the sensory evidence for the matching process accumulates over time.
BRAIN AND COGNITION
(2021)
Article
Neurosciences
Armien Lanssens, Dante Mantini, Hans Op de Beeck, Celine R. Gillebert
Summary: In day-to-day activities, stimulus representations in the visual cortex are modulated based on their attentional priority. This study found that the activity of subregions in the fronto-parietal dorsal attention network and the visual cortex is modulated by feature-based attentional weighting.
FRONTIERS IN NEUROSCIENCE
(2022)
Article
Biology
Brent M. M. Berry, Laura R. R. Miller, Meaghan Berns, Michal Kucewicz
Summary: This paper reports a patient with right-sided language dominance and seizure onset zone in the right temporo-parietal-occipital cortex. The patient's medically refractory epilepsy and hyperactive cortex could possibly contribute to near eidetic ability with paired-associates learning tasks. While epilepsy is known to negatively affect memory, there is limited evidence of any lesion enhancing cognitive functions localized to the seizure onset zone.
Article
Neurosciences
Ibrahim Kiremitci, Ozgur Yilmaz, Emin Celik, Mo Shahdloo, Alexander G. Huth, Tolga Cukur
Summary: Attention plays a crucial role in selectively listening to desired speakers in noisy environments, causing broad modulations in speech representations at multiple levels and growing stronger towards later stages of processing. Unattended speech is still represented up to the semantic level in parabelt auditory cortex.
Article
Neurosciences
Jena Velji-Ibrahim, J. Douglas Crawford, Luigi Cattaneo, Simona Monaco
Summary: The study used functional MRI and pattern classification methods to investigate how object features are represented during action planning. Results showed that preparatory signals for specific movements modulate object representation in the frontal and parietal cortex, with limited influence in the early visual cortex.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
(2022)
Review
Psychology, Clinical
Jules Roger Dugre, Stephane Potvin
Summary: Meta-analyses of resting-state fMRI studies on individuals with antisocial behaviors revealed significant connectivity deficits in various brain regions and a negative relationship between the severity of antisocial behaviors and connectivity with the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. These findings suggest the importance of socio-affective and attentional processes in the pathophysiology of conduct and antisocial personality disorders.
PSYCHOLOGICAL MEDICINE
(2021)
Article
Neurosciences
Marcus Grueschow, Birgit Kleim, Christian Carl Ruff
Summary: The locus coeruleus (LC) and noradrenaline (NE) play a crucial role in brain functions such as arousal, attention, and cognitive control. Recent findings suggest the existence of functional connectivity between LC-NE and the parietal cortex and striatum. The current study provides further evidence for this connectivity in humans, highlighting the importance of converging evidence between human and nonhuman neurophysiology.
Article
Oncology
Mickael Tordjman, Guillaume Madelin, Pradeep Kumar Gupta, Christine Cordova, Sylvia C. Kurz, Daniel Orringer, John Golfinos, Douglas Kondziolka, Yulin Ge, Ruoyu Luie Wang, Mariana Lazar, Rajan Jain
Summary: This study aimed to assess the disruption of functional connectivity in three brain networks in glioma patients using rsfMRI. The results showed global increased connectivity in the DMN, small areas of increased connectivity in the DAN, and increased connectivity in certain areas of the FPN in glioma patients. There was no significant difference in network connectivity between low- and high-grade gliomas, as well as based on IDH1-R132H mutation status.
JOURNAL OF NEURO-ONCOLOGY
(2021)
Article
Education & Educational Research
Sisi Liu, Zhengye Xu, Duo Liu
Summary: The study found that visual-spatial attention associated with reading development is primarily driven by goal-directed rather than stimulus-driven attention. This attention is positively correlated with Chinese character recognition and reading fluency and explains unique variance in character recognition accuracy. Additionally, children with good reading skills show smaller decreases in search accuracy with larger set sizes.
JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN READING
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Sara Bertoni, Sandro Franceschini, Giovanna Puccio, Martina Mancarella, Simone Gori, Andrea Facoetti
Summary: This study investigated the impact of AVG and non-AVG training on attentional control in children with DD. It was found that only 12 hours of efficient AVG training could significantly improve attentional control and phonological decoding speed in children with DD.
Review
Neurosciences
Brett L. L. Foster, Seth R. R. Koslov, Lyndsey Aponik-Gremillion, Megan E. E. Monko, Benjamin Y. Y. Hayden, Sarah R. R. Heilbronner
Summary: The posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) is a region of the brain that is not well understood, but it plays an important role in higher cognitive functions and brain diseases. Recent research suggests that the PCC can be divided into three subregions that support the integration of executive, mnemonic, and spatial processing systems. This tripartite subregional view reconciles previous theories and provides new avenues for future research.
NATURE REVIEWS NEUROSCIENCE
(2023)
Article
Neurosciences
Donisha D. Smith, Alan Meca, Katherine L. Bottenhorn, Jessica E. Bartley, Michael C. Riedel, Taylor Salo, Julio A. Peraza, Robert W. Laird, Shannon M. Pruden, Matthew T. Sutherland, Eric Brewe, Angela R. Laird
Summary: The purpose of this study was to investigate the neurobiological associations between science and math anxiety and cognitive performance among physics undergraduate students. The results showed that there were no significant differences in performance between students with high math anxiety and those with low science and math anxiety. However, significant differences in brain connectivity were observed between these two groups during the answer selection phase of the task, particularly in the dorsal attention network (DAN), ventral attention network (VAN), and default mode network (DMN). These findings provide new insight into the underlying brain dynamics associated with anxiety and physics cognition, supporting the relevance of attentional control theory (ACT) for science and math anxiety.
TRENDS IN NEUROSCIENCE AND EDUCATION
(2023)
Article
Physiology
Marta Moraschi, Daniele Mascali, Silvia Tommasin, Tommaso Gili, Ibrahim Eid Hassan, Michela Fratini, Mauro DiNuzzo, Richard G. Wise, Silvia Mangia, Emiliano Macaluso, Federico Giove
FRONTIERS IN PHYSIOLOGY
(2020)
Article
Neurosciences
Amelie J. Reynaud, Elvio Blini, Eric Koun, Emiliano Macaluso, Martine Meunier, Fadila Hadj-Bouziane
Summary: The study used NE reuptake inhibitors to conduct experiments on monkeys, and found that NE regulates attentional orienting, affecting the impact of low-level visual salience on attentional orientation during free viewing of images.
Article
Anatomy & Morphology
Ilenia Salsano, Valerio Santangelo, Emiliano Macaluso
Summary: Previous studies have shown that long-term memory associated with object positions in natural scenes can guide visuo-spatial attention during subsequent search tasks. Memory-guided attention involves the activation of memory regions and the fronto-parietal attention network, which represent external locations with different frames of reference. The study used behavioral measures and fMRI to assess the roles of egocentric and allocentric spatial information during memory-guided attention, revealing that memory contributes to visual search regardless of changes in perspective.
BRAIN STRUCTURE & FUNCTION
(2021)
Article
Neurosciences
Daniele Mascali, Marta Moraschi, Mauro DiNuzzo, Silvia Tommasin, Michela Fratini, Tommaso Gili, Richard G. Wise, Silvia Mangia, Emiliano Macaluso, Federico Giove
Summary: In-scanner head motion is a major confounding factor in functional connectivity studies, and the performance of denoising pipelines varies between task and resting-state conditions. The most effective approaches include aCompCor and global signal regression, but they struggle to mitigate spurious distance-dependent associations between motion and connectivity. Censoring motion-contaminated volumes is the only method that substantially reduces distance-dependent artifacts, but at the cost of reduced network identifiability.
HUMAN BRAIN MAPPING
(2021)
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Samy-Adrien Foudil, Claire Pleche, Emiliano Macaluso
Summary: Episodic memory involves storage of events with their spatio-temporal context and retrieval of the link between the person and the episode. Mobile-phone encoding, virtual town exploration, and standard laboratory paradigm were used to examine memory. Accurate context-memory increased remember responses, and participants were tested on temporal-order judgement.Temporal similarity model showed scale-invariant properties of order-retrieval with contribution of non-chronological factors.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2021)
Article
Psychology, Biological
Einat Rashal, Mehdi Senoussi, Elisa Santandrea, Suliann Ben-Hamed, Emiliano Macaluso, Leonardo Chelazzi, C. Nico Boehler
Summary: Through two experiments, the study examined the effects of combined top-down and bottom-up attentional control sources on attention selection and suppression. The results showed that valid cues facilitated responses to targets in visual search, while salient distractors consistently worsened performance.
Article
Neurosciences
Mauro DiNuzzo, Daniele Mascali, Giorgia Bussu, Marta Moraschi, Maria Guidi, Emiliano Macaluso, Silvia Mangia, Federico Giove
Summary: The right hemisphere exhibits stronger activation and connectivity patterns in visuospatial attention than the left hemisphere. The direction of attention significantly modulates the strength of connectivity between brain networks, with leftward attention primarily involving connections between the right visual network and dorsal and ventral attention networks in both hemispheres. Hemispheric functional segregation is significantly correlated with better performance.
HUMAN BRAIN MAPPING
(2022)
Article
Neurosciences
Bertrand Beffara, Fadila Hadj-Bouziane, Suliann Ben Hamed, C. Nico Boehler, Leonardo Chelazzi, Elisa Santandrea, Emiliano Macaluso
Summary: This study measured occipital activity in different spatial regions during the processing of visual displays and found that goal-directed attention and salience jointly modulate activity distribution in the occipital cortex, with involvement of multiple functional paths and interactions.
Article
Multidisciplinary Sciences
Liya Merzon, Kati Pettersson, Eeva T. Aronen, Hanna Huhdanpaa, Erik Seesjaervi, Linda Henriksson, W. Joseph MacInnes, Minna Mannerkoski, Emiliano Macaluso, Juha Salmi
Summary: This study used eye movement data obtained in virtual reality environments to objectively detect attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The researchers found significant differences in eye movement patterns between different groups, and eye movement data trained on a support vector machine classifier showed excellent discrimination ability, accurately predicting attention deficits.
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
(2022)
Article
Psychology
Einat Rashal, Elisa Santandrea, Suliann Ben-Hamed, Emiliano Macaluso, Leonardo Chelazzi, C. Nico Boehler
Summary: This study examined the effects of top-down and bottom-up attentional control in easy and difficult visual search tasks. The analysis focused on the sustained posterior contralateral negativity (SPCN) and response-locked posterior contralateral negativity (RLpcN) to understand processes following target selection. Results showed modulation of SPCN and late segment of RLpcN by task difficulty and target salience, as well as modulation of early segment of RLpcN by cueing manipulation and presence of a salient distractor.
ATTENTION PERCEPTION & PSYCHOPHYSICS
(2023)
Article
Psychology
Carola Dolci, C. Nico Boehler, Elisa Santandrea, Anneleen Dewulf, Suliann Ben-Hamed, Emiliano Macaluso, Leonardo Chelazzi, Einat Rashal
Summary: The present study investigates how the competition between visual elements is resolved through top-down and/or statistical learning attentional control mechanisms. The results suggest that the winner element is selected either by one prevailing AC mechanism or by the joint activity of both mechanisms. The study provides evidence that top-down control and statistical learning work together during target selection, with the latter being reduced when reliable top-down guidance is present.
ATTENTION PERCEPTION & PSYCHOPHYSICS
(2023)
Article
Anatomy & Morphology
G. Cantarella, S. Mastroberardino, P. Bisiacchi, E. Macaluso
Summary: Prospective memory (PM) involves executive processes associated with frontal and parietal regions. Task load and task focality can affect executive monitoring and PM performance. This imaging study manipulated load and focality of an event-based PM task and found that high-load conditions engage the left intraparietal sulcus, while low-load conditions involve early selection mechanisms in the ventral occipito-temporal cortex. The level of task load determines how cognitive control selects relevant information.
BRAIN STRUCTURE & FUNCTION
(2023)
Meeting Abstract
Ophthalmology
Einat Rashal, Mehdi Senoussi, Elisa Santandrea, Suliann Ben-Hamed, Emiliano Macaluso, Leonardo Chelazzi, Nico Boehler
Meeting Abstract
Ophthalmology
Carola Dolci, Elisa Santandrea, Suliann Ben-Hamed, Emiliano Macaluso, Leonardo Chelazzi, C. Nico Boehler, Einat Rashal
Article
Geriatrics & Gerontology
Francesco Scalici, Giovanni Augusto Carlesimo, Valerio Santangelo, Francesco Barban, Emiliano Macaluso, Carlo Caltagirone, Alberto Costa
Summary: The study suggests that the automatic and strategic processes of prospective memory are affected differently with age. Young individuals show greater activation in certain brain regions compared to older individuals when performing prospective memory tasks, and different types of cues lead to activation in different regions.
EXPERIMENTAL AGING RESEARCH
(2021)
