Information processing pathway maps - A scalable framework for mapping cortical processing.

Cortical processing in the human brain is highly complex, and researchers have long faced challenges in describing and sharing formal accounts of it in an intuitive yet rigorous manner. Traditional mathematical representations, while precise, often obscure the underlying concepts, whereas narrative descriptions lack the necessary detail. Information Processing Pathway Maps (IPPMs) bridge this gap by providing a clear and flexible way to represent neural processing that maintains mathematical accuracy.

Consensus guidelines for the use of concurrent TMS-fMRI in cognitive and clinical neuroscience.

Concurrent transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (TMS-fMRI) provides a step-change in the toolkit of neuroscience research. TMS enables the noninvasive perturbation of ongoing human brain activity, and when coupled to fMRI for the simultaneous read-out of its effects across the brain, concurrent TMS-fMRI enables studies aimed at determining the causal inference of human brain-behavior relationships, with implications for both fundamental research and clinical application. Many of the technical barriers to TMS-fMRI implementation, such as hardware design and setups, have now been overcome, and the research community in the field is rapidly growing.

Spatial and feature-selective attention interact to drive selective coding in frontoparietal cortex.

Attention enables the selective processing of relevant information. Two types of selective attention, spatial and feature-selective attention, have separable neural effects but in real life are often used together. Here, we asked how these types of attention interact to affect information coding in a frontoparietal 'multiple-demand' (MD) network, essential for attentional control.

Parietal alpha stimulation causally enhances attentional information coding in evoked and oscillatory activity.

Background: Selective attention is a fundamental cognitive mechanism that allows people to prioritise task-relevant information while ignoring irrelevant information. Previous research has suggested key roles of parietal event-related potentials (ERPs) and alpha oscillatory responses in attention tasks. However, the informational content of these signals is less clear, and their causal effects on the coding of multiple task elements are yet unresolved.

Aperiodic and oscillatory systems underpinning human domain-general cognition.

Domain-general cognitive systems are essential for adaptive human behaviour, supporting various cognitive tasks through flexible neural mechanisms. While fMRI studies link frontoparietal network activation to increasing demands across various tasks, the electrophysiological mechanisms underlying this domain-general response to demand remain unclear. Here, we used MEG/EEG, and separated the aperiodic and oscillatory components of the signals to examine their roles in domain-general cognition across three cognitive tasks using multivariate analysis.

Selective Attention and Decision-Making Have Separable Neural Bases in Space and Time.

Attention and decision-making processes are fundamental to cognition. However, they are usually experimentally confounded, making it difficult to link neural observations to specific processes. Here we separated the effects of selective attention from the effects of decision-making on brain activity obtained from human participants (both sexes), using a two-stage task where the attended stimulus and decision were orthogonal and separated in time.

Auditory change detection and visual selective attention: association between MMN and N2pc.

While the auditory and visual systems each provide distinct information to our brain, they also work together to process and prioritize input to address ever-changing conditions. Previous studies highlighted the trade-off between auditory change detection and visual selective attention; however, the relationship between them is still unclear. Here, we recorded electroencephalography signals from 106 healthy adults in three experiments.

Fractionating distraction: How past- and future-relevant distractors influence integrated decisions.

Many everyday tasks require us to integrate information from multiple steps to make a decision. Dominant accounts of flexible cognition suggest that we are able to navigate such complex tasks by attending to each step in turn, yet few studies measure how we direct our attention to immediate and future task steps. Here, we used a two-step task to test whether participants are sensitive to information that is currently irrelevant but will be relevant in a future task step.

Adaptive coding of stimulus information in human frontoparietal cortex during visual classification.

The neural mechanisms of how frontal and parietal brain regions support flexible adaptation of behavior remain poorly understood. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and representational similarity analysis (RSA) to investigate frontoparietal representations of stimulus information during visual classification under varying task demands. Based on prior research, we predicted that increasing perceptual task difficulty should lead to adaptive changes in stimulus coding: task-relevant category information should be stronger, while task-irrelevant exemplar-level stimulus information should become weaker, reflecting a focus on the behaviorally relevant category information.

Caveats and Nuances of Model-Based and Model-Free Representational Connectivity Analysis.

Brain connectivity analyses have conventionally relied on statistical relationship between one-dimensional summaries of activation in different brain areas. However, summarizing activation patterns within each area to a single dimension ignores the potential statistical dependencies between their multi-dimensional activity patterns. Representational Connectivity Analyses (RCA) is a method that quantifies the relationship between multi-dimensional patterns of activity without reducing the dimensionality of the data.

When the Whole Is Less Than the Sum of Its Parts: Maximum Object Category Information and Behavioral Prediction in Multiscale Activation Patterns.

Neural codes are reflected in complex neural activation patterns. Conventional electroencephalography (EEG) decoding analyses summarize activations by averaging/down-sampling signals within the analysis window. This diminishes informative fine-grained patterns.

Causal Evidence for the Multiple Demand Network in Change Detection: Auditory Mismatch Magnetoencephalography across Focal Neurodegenerative Diseases.

The multiple demand (MD) system is a network of fronto-parietal brain regions active during the organization and control of diverse cognitive operations. It has been argued that this activation may be a nonspecific signal of task difficulty. However, here we provide convergent evidence for a causal role for the MD network in the "simple task" of automatic auditory change detection, through the impairment of top-down control mechanisms.

Neural Coding of Visual Objects Rapidly Reconfigures to Reflect Subtrial Shifts in Attentional Focus.

Every day, we respond to the dynamic world around us by choosing actions to meet our goals. Flexible neural populations are thought to support this process by adapting to prioritize task-relevant information, driving coding in specialized brain regions toward stimuli and actions that are currently most important. Accordingly, human fMRI shows that activity patterns in frontoparietal cortex contain more information about visual features when they are task-relevant.

Linking the Brain with Behavior: The Neural Dynamics of Success and Failure in Goal-directed Behavior.

The human brain is extremely flexible and capable of rapidly selecting relevant information in accordance with task goals. Regions of frontoparietal cortex flexibly represent relevant task information such as task rules and stimulus features when participants perform tasks successfully, but less is known about how information processing breaks down when participants make mistakes. This is important for understanding whether and when information coding recorded with neuroimaging is directly meaningful for behavior.

Spatial and Feature-selective Attention Have Distinct, Interacting Effects on Population-level Tuning.

Attention can be deployed in different ways: When searching for a taxi in New York City, we can decide where to attend (e.g., to the street) and what to attend to (e.

Concurrent neuroimaging and neurostimulation reveals a causal role for dlPFC in coding of task-relevant information.

Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) is proposed to drive brain-wide focus by biasing processing in favour of task-relevant information. A longstanding debate concerns whether this is achieved through enhancing processing of relevant information and/or by inhibiting irrelevant information. To address this, we applied transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) during fMRI, and tested for causal changes in information coding.

Neural signatures of vigilance decrements predict behavioural errors before they occur.

There are many monitoring environments, such as railway control, in which lapses of attention can have tragic consequences. Problematically, sustained monitoring for rare targets is difficult, with more misses and longer reaction times over time. What changes in the brain underpin these 'vigilance decrements'? We designed a multiple-object monitoring (MOM) paradigm to examine how the neural representation of information varied with target frequency and time performing the task.

Word Detection in Individual Subjects Is Difficult to Probe With Fast Periodic Visual Stimulation.

Measuring cognition in single subjects presents unique challenges. On the other hand, individually sensitive measurements offer extraordinary opportunities, from informing theoretical models to enabling truly individualised clinical assessment. Here, we test the robustness of fast, periodic, and visual stimulation (FPVS), an emerging method proposed to elicit detectable responses to written words in the electroencephalogram (EEG) of individual subjects.

Perceptual difficulty modulates the direction of information flow in familiar face recognition.

Humans are fast and accurate when they recognize familiar faces. Previous neurophysiological studies have shown enhanced representations for the dichotomy of familiar vs. unfamiliar faces.

The effect of non-communicative eye movements on joint attention.

Eye movements provide important signals for joint attention. However, those eye movements that indicate bids for joint attention often occur among non-communicative eye movements. This study investigated the influence of these non-communicative eye movements on subsequent joint attention responsivity.

Toward an Individualized Neural Assessment of Receptive Language in Children.

Purpose We aimed to develop a noninvasive neural test of language comprehension to use with nonspeaking children for whom standard behavioral testing is unreliable (e.g., minimally verbal autism).

Unconstrained multivariate EEG decoding can help detect lexical-semantic processing in individual children.

In conditions such as minimally-verbal autism, standard assessments of language comprehension are often unreliable. Given the known heterogeneity within the autistic population, it is crucial to design tests of semantic comprehension that are sensitive in individuals. Recent efforts to develop neural signals of language comprehension have focused on the N400, a robust marker of lexical-semantic violation at the group level.