Eye position modulates retinotopic responses in early visual areas: a bias for the straight-ahead direction

Even though the eyes constantly change position, the location of a stimulus can be accurately represented by a population of neurons with retinotopic receptive fields modulated by eye position gain fields. Recent electrophysiological studies, however, indicate that eye position gain fields may serve an additional function since they have a non-uniform spatial distribution that increases the neural response to stimuli in the straight-ahead direction. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging and a wide-field stimulus display to determine whether gaze modulations in early human visual cortex enhance the blood-oxygenation-level dependent (BOLD) response to stimuli that are straight-ahead. Subjects viewed rotating polar angle wedge stimuli centered straight-ahead or vertically displaced by ±20° eccentricity. Gaze position did not affect the topography of polar phase-angle maps, confirming that coding was retinotopic, but did affect the amplitude of the BOLD response, consistent with a gain field. In agreement with recent electrophysiological studies, BOLD responses in V1 and V2 to a wedge stimulus at a fixed retinal locus decreased when the wedge location in head-centered coordinates was farther from the straight-ahead direction. We conclude that stimulus-evoked BOLD signals are modulated by a systematic, non-uniform distribution of eye-position gain fields

Behavioural clusters and predictors of performance during recovery from stroke

We examined the patterns and variability of recovery post-stroke in multiple behavioral domains. A large cohort of first time stroke patients with heterogeneous lesions was studied prospectively and longitudinally at 1-2 weeks, 3 months and one year post-injury with structural MRI to measure lesion anatomy and in-depth neuropsychological assessment. Impairment was described at all timepoints by a few clusters of correlated deficits. The time course and magnitude of recovery was similar across domains, with change scores largely proportional to the initial deficit and most recovery occurring within the first three months. Damage to specific white matter tracts produced poorer recovery over several domains: attention and superior longitudinal fasciculus II/III, language and posterior arcuate fasciculus, motor and corticospinal tract. Finally, after accounting for the severity of the initial deficit, language and visual memory recovery/outcome was worse with lower education, while the occurrence of multiple deficits negatively impacted attention recovery

The role of the right temporoparietal junction in perceptual conflict: detection or resolution?

The right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) is a polysensory cortical area that plays a key role in perception and awareness. Neuroimaging evidence shows activation of rTPJ in intersensory and sensorimotor conflict situations, but it remains unclear whether this activity reflects detection or resolution of such conflicts. To address this question, we manipulated the relationship between touch and vision using the so-called mirror-box illusion. Participants' hands lay on either side of a mirror, which occluded their left hand and reflected their right hand, but created the illusion that they were looking directly at their left hand. The experimenter simultaneously touched either the middle (D3) or the ring finger (D4) of each hand. Participants judged, which finger was touched on their occluded left hand. The visual stimulus corresponding to the touch on the right hand was therefore either congruent (same finger as touch) or incongruent (different finger from touch) with the task-relevant touch on the left hand. Single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) was delivered to the rTPJ immediately after touch. Accuracy in localizing the left touch was worse for D4 than for D3, particularly when visual stimulation was incongruent. However, following TMS, accuracy improved selectively for D4 in incongruent trials, suggesting that the effects of the conflicting visual information were reduced. These findings suggest a role of rTPJ in detecting, rather than resolving, intersensory conflict

Studying oven technology towards the energy consumption optimisation for the baking process

A recent guideline from the European Commission declared that several highly energy consuming domestic equipment should be better regulated or avoided at all in the near future. Together with this, several EU nations are abandoning the gas ovens in favour of the electric ones, also due to the home energy rating regulations, that make impossible to get the highest rating with gas ovens. Due to this fact, the study of the technologies related to the energy efficiency in cooking is increasingly developing. The combination of several energy sources (e.g. forced convection, irradiation, microwave, etc.), as well as optimisation of each of them, is an emerging target for oven manufacturers, in matter of oven design and better use of the oven capabilities. Within this context, an energy consumption analysis and optimisation is targeted in this work, by the application of a bread baking model, validated on experimental data. Each source of energy is given the due importance and the practically applicable process solutions are compared. A basic quality standard is guaranteed by taking into account some quality markers, which are relevant on the basis of a consumer point of view. This work is a part of a more comprehensive study on oven cooking and energy integration, and could lead to practical applications in the design of energy efficient cooking programs

Microstructural damage of the posterior corpus callosum contributes to the clinical severity of neglect

One theory to account for neglect symptoms in patients with right focal damage invokes a release of inhibition of the right parietal cortex over the left parieto-frontal circuits, by disconnection mechanism. This theory is supported by transcranial magnetic stimulation studies showing the existence of asymmetric inhibitory interactions between the left and right posterior parietal cortex, with a right hemispheric advantage. These inhibitory mechanisms are mediated by direct transcallosal projections located in the posterior portions of the corpus callosum. The current study, using diffusion imaging and tract-based spatial statistics (TBSS), aims at assessing, in a data-driven fashion, the contribution of structural disconnection between hemispheres in determining the presence and severity of neglect. Eleven patients with right acute stroke and 11 healthy matched controls underwent MRI at 3T, including diffusion imaging, and T1-weighted volumes. TBSS was modified to account for the presence of the lesion and used to assess the presence and extension of changes in diffusion indices of microscopic white matter integrity in the left hemisphere of patients compared to controls, and to investigate, by correlation analysis, whether this damage might account for the presence and severity of patients' neglect, as assessed by the Behavioural Inattention Test (BIT). None of the patients had any macroscopic abnormality in the left hemisphere; however, 3 cases were discarded due to image artefacts in the MRI data. Conversely, TBSS analysis revealed widespread changes in diffusion indices in most of their left hemisphere tracts, with a predominant involvement of the corpus callosum and its projections on the parietal white matter. A region of association between patients' scores at BIT and brain FA values was found in the posterior part of the corpus callosum. This study strongly supports the hypothesis of a major role of structural disconnection between the right and left parietal cortex in determining 'neglect'

IEA Wind 2013 Annual Report

Contribution to this annual report of the IEA Wind Implementing Agreement, Chapter 20 .Here the JRC, as representative of the Commission, exposes the achievements in wind R&D supported by the Commission programmes (FP7, IEE), after coordinating with our colleagues from ENER, RTD, the REU (JRC/IET) and EACI. Subchapter 2 of the European Commission/EWEA chapter is the Commission's responsibility whereas subchapters 1 and 3 are EWEA's responsibilityJRC.F.6 - Energy Technology Policy Outloo

Beliefs about the Minds of Others Influence How We Process Sensory Information

Attending where others gaze is one of the most fundamental mechanisms of social cognition. The present study is the first to examine the impact of the attribution of mind to others on gaze-guided attentional orienting and its ERP correlates. Using a paradigm in which attention was guided to a location by the gaze of a centrally presented face, we manipulated participants' beliefs about the gazer: gaze behavior was believed to result either from operations of a mind or from a machine. In Experiment 1, beliefs were manipulated by cue identity (human or robot), while in Experiment 2, cue identity (robot) remained identical across conditions and beliefs were manipulated solely via instruction, which was irrelevant to the task. ERP results and behavior showed that participants' attention was guided by gaze only when gaze was believed to be controlled by a human. Specifically, the P1 was more enhanced for validly, relative to invalidly, cued targets only when participants believed the gaze behavior was the result of a mind, rather than of a machine. This shows that sensory gain control can be influenced by higher-order (task-irrelevant) beliefs about the observed scene. We propose a new interdisciplinary model of social attention, which integrates ideas from cognitive and social neuroscience, as well as philosophy in order to provide a framework for understanding a crucial aspect of how humans' beliefs about the observed scene influence sensory processing

Effects of Multimodal Load on Spatial Monitoring as Revealed by ERPs

While the role of selective attention in filtering out irrelevant information has been extensively studied, its characteristics and neural underpinnings when multiple environmental stimuli have to be processed in parallel are much less known. Building upon a dual-task paradigm that induced spatial awareness deficits for contralesional hemispace in right hemisphere-damaged patients, we investigated the electrophysiological correlates of multimodal load during spatial monitoring in healthy participants. The position of appearance of briefly presented, lateralized targets had to be reported either in isolation (single task) or together with a concurrent task, visual or auditory, which recruited additional attentional resources (dual-task). This top-down manipulation of attentional load, without any change of the sensory stimulation, modulated the amplitude of the first positive ERP response (P1) and shifted its neural generators, with a suppression of the signal in the early visual areas during both visual and auditory dual tasks. Furthermore, later N2 contralateral components elicited by left targets were particularly influenced by the concurrent visual task and were related to increased activation of the supramarginal gyrus. These results suggest that the right hemisphere is particularly affected by load manipulations, and confirm its crucial role in subtending automatic orienting of spatial attention and in monitoring both hemispaces