EyeLink fMRI / MEG Publications
All EyeLink fMRI and MEG research publications (with concurrent eye tracking) up until 2020 (with some early 2021s) are listed below by year. You can search the publications using keywords such as Visual Cortex, Neural Plasticity, MEG, etc. You can also search for individual author names. If we missed any EyeLink fMRI or MEG article, please email us!
2012 |
Nathan Faivre; Sylvain Charron; Paul Roux; Stephane Lehericy; Sid Kouider Nonconscious emotional processing involves distinct neural pathways for pictures and videos Journal Article In: Neuropsychologia, 50 , pp. 3736–3744, 2012. @article{Faivre2012a,Facial expressions are known to impact observers' behavior, even when they are not consciously identifiable. Relying on visual crowding, a perceptual phenomenon whereby peripheral faces become undiscriminable, we show that participants exposed to happy vs. neutral crowded faces rated the pleasantness of subsequent neutral targets accordingly to the facial expression's valence. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) along with psychophysiological interaction analysis, we investigated the neural determinants of this nonconscious preference bias, either induced by static (i.e., pictures) or dynamic (i.e., videos) facial expressions. We found that while static expressions activated primarily the ventral visual pathway (including task-related functional connectivity between the fusiform face area and the amygdala), dynamic expressions triggered the dorsal visual pathway (i.e., posterior partietal cortex) and the substantia innominata, a structure that is contiguous with the dorsal amygdala. As temporal cues are known to improve the processing of visible facial expressions, the absence of ventral activation we observed with crowded videos questions the capacity to integrate facial features and facial motions without awareness. Nevertheless, both static and dynamic facial expressions activated the hippocampus and the orbitofrontal cortex, suggesting that nonconscious preference judgments may arise from the evaluation of emotional context and the computation of aesthetic evaluation. |
Scott A Guerin; Clifford A Robbins; Adrian W Gilmore; Daniel L Schacter Retrieval failure contributes to gist-based false recognition Journal Article In: Journal of Memory and Language, 66 (1), pp. 68–78, 2012. @article{Guerin2012,People often falsely recognize items that are similar to previously encountered items. This robust memory error is referred to as gist-based false recognition. A widely held view is that this error occurs because the details fade rapidly from our memory. Contrary to this view, an initial experiment revealed that, following the same encoding conditions that produce high rates of gist-based false recognition, participants overwhelmingly chose the correct target rather than its related foil when given the option to do so. A second experiment showed that this result is due to increased access to stored details provided by reinstatement of the originally encoded photograph, rather than to increased attention to the details. Collectively, these results suggest that details needed for accurate recognition are, to a large extent, still stored in memory and that a critical factor determining whether false recognition will occur is whether these details can be accessed during retrieval. |
Fei Guo; Tim J Preston; Koel Das; Barry Giesbrecht; Miguel P Eckstein Feature-independent neural coding of target detection during search of natural scenes Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, 32 (28), pp. 9499–9510, 2012. @article{Guo2012,Visual search requires humans to detect a great variety of target objects in scenes cluttered by other objects or the natural environment. It is unknown whether there is a general purpose neural detection mechanism in the brain that codes the presence of a wide variety of categories of objects embedded in natural scenes. We provide evidence for a feature-independent coding mechanism for detecting behaviorally relevant targets in natural scenes in the dorsal frontoparietal network. Pattern classifiers using single-trial fMRI responses in the dorsal frontoparietal network reliably predicted the presence of 368 different target objects and also the observer's choices. Other vision-related areas such as the primary visual cortex, lateral occipital complex, the parahippocampal, and the fusiform gyri did not predict target presence, while high-level association areas related to general purpose decision making, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate, did. Activity in the intraparietal sulcus, a main area in the dorsal frontoparietal network, correlated with observers' decision confidence and with the task difficulty of individual images. These results cannot be explained by physical differences across images or eye movements. Thus, the dorsal frontoparietal network detects behaviorally relevant targets in natural scenes independent of their defining visual features and may be the human analog of the priority map in monkey lateral intraparietal cortex. |
2011 |
Jeremy Freeman; G J Brouwer; David J Heeger; Elisha P Merriam Orientation decoding depends on maps, not columns Journal Article In: Journal of Neuroscience, 31 (13), pp. 4792–4804, 2011. @article{Freeman2011a,The representation of orientation in primary visual cortex (V1) has been examined at a fine spatial scale corresponding to the columnar architecture. We present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measurements providing evidence for a topographic map of orientation preference in human V1 at a much coarser scale, in register with the angular-position component of the retinotopic map of V1. This coarse-scale orientation map provides a parsimonious explanation for why multivariate pattern analysis methods succeed in decoding stimulus orientation from fMRI measurements, challenging the widely held assumption that decoding results reflect sampling of spatial irregularities in the fine-scale columnar architecture. Decoding stimulus attributes and cognitive states from fMRI measurements has proven useful for a number of applications, but our results demonstrate that the interpretation cannot assume decoding reflects or exploits columnar organization. |
Christian Kluge; Markus Bauer; Alexander P Leff; Hans-Jochen Heinze; Raymond J Dolan; Jon Driver; Alexander Paul Plasticity of human auditory-evoked fields induced by shock conditioning and contingency reversal Journal Article In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108 (30), pp. 12545–12550, 2011. @article{Kluge2011,We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to assess plasticity of human auditory cortex induced by classical conditioning and contingency reversal. Participants listened to random sequences of high or low tones. A first baseline phase presented these without further associations. In phase 2, one of the frequencies (CS(+)) was paired with shock on half its occurrences, whereas the other frequency (CS(-)) was not. In phase 3, the contingency assigning CS(+) and CS(-) was reversed. Conditioned pupil dilation was observed in phase 2 but extinguished in phase 3. MEG revealed that, during phase-2 initial conditioning, the P1m, N1m, and P2m auditory components, measured from sensors over auditory temporal cortex, came to distinguish between CS(+) and CS(-). After contingency reversal in phase 3, the later P2m component rapidly reversed its selectivity (unlike the pupil response) but the earlier P1m did not, whereas N1m showed some new learning but not reversal. These results confirm plasticity of human auditory responses due to classical conditioning, but go further in revealing distinct constraints on different levels of the auditory hierarchy. The later P2m component can reverse affiliation immediately in accord with an updated expectancy after contingency reversal, whereas the earlier auditory components cannot. These findings indicate distinct cognitive and emotional influences on auditory processing. |
2010 |
Katrin Herrmann; Leila Montaser-Kouhsari; Marisa Carrasco; David J Heeger When size matters: Attention affects performance by contrast or response gain Journal Article In: Nature Neuroscience, 13 (12), pp. 1554–1561, 2010. @article{Herrmann2010,Covert attention, the selective processing of visual information in the absence of eye movements, improves behavioral performance. Here, we show that attention, both exogenous (involuntary) and endogenous (voluntary), can affect performance by contrast or response gain changes, depending on the stimulus size and the relative size of the attention field. These two variables were manipulated in a cueing task while varying stimulus contrast. We observed a change in behavioral performance consonant with a change in contrast gain for small stimuli paired with spatial uncertainty, but a change in response gain for large stimuli presented at one location (no uncertainty) and surrounded by irrelevant flanking distracters. A complementary neuroimaging experiment revealed that observers' attention field was wider with than without spatial uncertainty. Our results support key predictions of the normalization model of attention, and reconcile previous, seemingly contradictory, findings on the effects of visual attention. Introduction |
2005 |
Zoe Kourtzi; Lisa R Betts; Pegah Sarkheil; Andrew E Welchman Distributed neural plasticity for shape learning in the human visual cortex Journal Article In: PLoS Biology, 3 (7), pp. 1317–1327, 2005. @article{Kourtzi2005,Expertise in recognizing objects in cluttered scenes is a critical skill for our interactions in complex environments and is thought to develop with learning. However, the neural implementation of object learning across stages of visual analysis in the human brain remains largely unknown. Using combined psychophysics and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we show a link between shape-specific learning in cluttered scenes and distributed neuronal plasticity in the human visual cortex. We report stronger fMRI responses for trained than untrained shapes across early and higher visual areas when observers learned to detect low-salience shapes in noisy backgrounds. However, training with high-salience pop-out targets resulted in lower fMRI responses for trained than untrained shapes in higher occipitotemporal areas. These findings suggest that learning of camouflaged shapes is mediated by increasing neural sensitivity across visual areas to bolster target segmentation and feature integration. In contrast, learning of prominent pop-out shapes is mediated by associations at higher occipitotemporal areas that support sparser coding of the critical features for target recognition. We propose that the human brain learns novel objects in complex scenes by reorganizing shape processing across visual areas, while taking advantage of natural image correlations that determine the distinctiveness of target shapes. |