The tracking umbrella: Diverse interpretations under a common neural term.

Neural tracking, the alignment of brain activity with the temporal dynamics of sensory input, is a crucial mechanism underlying perception, attention, and cognition. While this concept has gained prominence in research on speech, music, and visual processing, its definition and methodological approaches remain heterogeneous. This paper critically examines neural tracking from both theoretical and methodological perspectives, highlighting how its interpretation varies across studies.

TV-BASED DEEP 3D SELF SUPER-RESOLUTION FOR FMRI.

While functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) offers valuable insights into cognitive processes, its inherent spatial limitations pose challenges for detailed analysis of the fine-grained functional architecture of the brain. More specifically, MRI scanner and sequence specifications impose a trade-off between temporal resolution, spatial resolution, signal-to-noise ratio, and scan time. Deep Learning (DL) Super-Resolution (SR) methods have emerged as a promising solution to enhance fMRI resolution, generating high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) images typically acquired with lower scanning times.

From Uncertainty to Performance Optimization: Longitudinal Insights Into Metacognitive Development.

This longitudinal study investigates metacognitive development in children aged four to six (N = 148; 74 girls; 106 White, 21 multiracial, 17 Black, 3 Asian, 1 Latino; collected in 2017-2019) compared to adults (N = 26, 13 women; collected in 2022). We assessed metacognitive monitoring and control using experimenter-elicited and self-generated responses in decision-making tasks. Children demonstrated reliable task monitoring by age five and performance monitoring by age six, only on self-generated measures.

Digital language measures capture episodic memory disruptions in people with human immunodeficiency virus: A machine learning study.

Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) often affects episodic memory. Yet, standard measures of this domain are derived from clinicians' simple counts of recalled and omitted pieces of information, undermining robustness, informativeness, and scalability. Here, we present an automated natural language processing (NLP) approach that tackles such limitations.

Are you talking to me? How the choice of speech register impacts listeners' hierarchical encoding of speech.

Speakers accommodate their speech to meet the needs of their listeners, producing different speech registers. One such register is L2 Accommodation (L2A), which is the way native speakers address non-native listeners, typically characterized by features such as slow speech rate and phonetic exaggeration. Here, we investigated how register impacts the cortical encoding of speech at different levels of language integration.

Cerebrovascular reactivity mapping using breath-hold BOLD-fMRI: Comparison of signal models combined with voxelwise lag optimization.

Cerebrovascular reactivity (CVR) can be mapped noninvasively using blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) fMRI during a breath-hold (BH) task. Previous studies showed that the BH BOLD response is best modeled as the convolution of the partial pressure of end-tidal CO2 (PetCO2) with a canonical hemodynamic response function (HRF). However, previous model comparisons employed a global bulk time lag, which is now well accepted to provide only a rough approximation of the heterogeneous distribution of response latencies across the brain.

Neural correlates of foreign speech imitation: The effects of age and music.

Adult learners of a foreign speech are often marked by having a foreign accent; however, children and adults with singing training tend to have better pronunciations than adults without music training. The assimilation hypothesis proposes that people tend to assimilate foreign speech to native speech during perception and production, which may explain foreign accent. Unfortunately, the neural mechanisms underlying the age and music effects are still unclear.

Fast frequency modulation is encoded according to the listener expectations in the human subcortical auditory pathway.

Expectations aid and bias our perception. For instance, expected words are easier to recognise than unexpected words, particularly in noisy environments, and incorrect expectations can make us misunderstand our conversational partner. Expectations are combined with the output from the sensory pathways to form representations of auditory objects in the cerebral cortex.

Cognitive Phenotyping of Parkinson's Disease Patients Via Digital Analysis of Spoken Word Properties.

Background: Cognitive symptoms are highly prevalent in Parkinson's disease (PD), often manifesting as mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Yet, their detection and characterization remain suboptimal because standard approaches rely on subjective impressions derived from lengthy, univariate tests.

Objective: We examined whether digital analysis of verbal fluency predicts cognitive status in PD.

Precision functional mapping reveals less inter-individual variability in the child vs. adult human brain.

Human brain organization shares a common underlying structure, though recent studies have shown that features of this organization also differ significantly across individual adults. Understanding the developmental pathways that lead to individually unique brains is important for advancing models of cognitive development and neurodevelopmental disorders. Here we use highly personalized precision neuroimaging methods to map brain networks within 12 individual children, ages 8-12 years.

Surrogate Molecular Biomarkers for Poststroke Cognitive Impairment: A Narrative Review.

Cognitive impairment is a clinical condition that frequently occurs after stroke, interfering with patients' functional status and increasing their risk of death. Multiple cognitive domains can be affected, including language, memory, attention, and executive functions. Current research highlights the clinical value of tools for early assessment of cognitive decline risk, enabling implementation of efficient and personalized treatment interventions.

An efficient approach for mathematical modeling and parameter estimation of PEM fuel based on Young's double-slit experiment algorithm.

This paper introduces a novel optimization algorithm, Young's double-slit experiment algorithm (YSDE), for accurately estimating the unknown parameters of Proton Exchange Membrane Fuel Cell (PEMFC) models. The proposed method integrates the YDSE algorithm with five other metaheuristic techniques: the sine cosine Algorithm (SCA), moth flame optimization (MFO), Harris Hawk optimization (HHO), gray wolf optimization (GWO) and chimp optimization Algorithm (ChOA) to estimate six critical parameters of PEMFC. Comparative analysis demonstrates that the YDSE algorithm outperforms competing methods by achieving the lowest Sum of Square Error (SSE) with a minimum value of approximately 1.

Revealing rhythm categorization in human brain activity.

Humans across cultures show an outstanding capacity to perceive, learn, and produce musical rhythms. These skills rely on mapping the infinite space of possible rhythmic sensory inputs onto a finite set of internal rhythm categories. What is the nature of the brain processes underlying rhythm categorization? We used electroencephalography to measure brain activity as human participants listened to a continuum of rhythmic sequences characterized by repeating patterns of two interonset intervals.

Recurrent neural networks as neuro-computational models of human speech recognition.

Human speech recognition transforms a continuous acoustic signal into categorical linguistic units, by aggregating information that is distributed in time. It has been suggested that this kind of information processing may be understood through the computations of a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) that receives input frame by frame, linearly in time, but builds an incremental representation of this input through a continually evolving internal state. While RNNs can simulate several key behavioral observations about human speech and language processing, it is unknown whether RNNs also develop computational dynamics that resemble human neural speech processing.

Studying unconscious processing: Contention and consensus.

The scope of unconscious processing has long been, and still remains, a hotly debated issue. This is driven in part by the current diversity of methods to manipulate and measure perceptual consciousness. Here, we provide ten recommendations and nine outstanding issues about designing experimental paradigms, analyzing data, and reporting the results of studies on unconscious processing.

Wave 2 of the Multilingual Eye-Movement Corpus (MECO): New text reading data across languages.

This paper reports the Wave 2 expansion of the Multilingual Eye-Movement Corpus (MECO), a collaborative multi-lab project collecting eye-tracking data on text reading in a variety of languages. The present expansion comes with new eye-tracking data of N = 654 from 13 languages, collected in 16 labs over 15 countries, including in several languages that have little to no representation in current eye-tracking studies on reading. MECO also contains demographic, language use, and other individual differences data.

Performance feedback triggers liberal detection and perceptual confidence biases in early childhood: Implications for metacognitive training.

Metacognition allows us to monitor our own mental processes and the quality of our decisions in order to promote adaptive behavior and learning across different domains. Despite its potential, the role of metacognition in children - who often exhibit confidence biases that hinder learning - has yet to be systematically evaluated. This study aimed to improve confidence judgments in 7-year-old children by means of performance feedback.

Lettuce entertain you: Assessing Sandwich Builder as a measure of auditory short-term memory.

Numerous language models propose a critical role of auditory short-term memory in spoken language processing, making reliable estimations of individual listeners' memory capacities essential in linguistic research. Although a variety of cognitive tasks exist for assessing both visual and auditory short-term capacities in a laboratory environment (e.g.

How attention and working memory married and divorced, with Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance as the witness.

How do we find stuff that we are looking for? This question has been central to many a study in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. We describe how seminal studies in the journal eventually led to the hypothesis that top-down attentional guidance and visual working memory activation might be regarded as one and the same process. However, crucial tests revealed a more complex picture, raising important new questions about potential functional divisions within working memory, and how these should be characterized.

Brain Representation in Conscious and Unconscious Vision.

The development of robust frameworks to understand how the human brain represents conscious and unconscious perceptual contents is paramount to make progress in the neuroscience of consciousness. Recent functional MRI studies using multi-voxel pattern classification analyses showed that unconscious contents could be decoded from brain activity patterns. However, decoding does not imply a full understanding of neural representations.

Improving delay and strength maps derived from resting-state fMRI using PCA-based denoising and group data from the HCP dataset.

Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) analyses use correlations in low-frequency "noise" to infer neuronal connectivity. A significant fraction of this oscillatory signal is non-neuronal, and is therefore a confound for rs-fMRI; however, we have shown that these signals carry valuable information, which can aid in clinical diagnosis and tracking recovery in stroke and moyamoya patients. Specifically, we have developed a method (RIPTiDe) that extracts blood arrival time delay (blood flow) and signal strength maps (perfusion) from BOLD data, yielding critical insight into vascular structure and function.

Spoken words affect visual object recognition via the modulation of alpha and beta oscillations.

Hearing spoken words can enhance the recognition of visual object categories. Yet, the mechanisms that underpin this facilitation are incompletely understood. Recent proposals suggest that words can alter visual processes by activating category-specific representations in sensory regions.

Go Figure: Transparency in neuroscience images preserves context and clarifies interpretation.

Visualizations are vital for communicating scientific results. Historically, neuroimaging figures have only depicted regions that surpass a given statistical threshold. This practice substantially biases interpretation of the results and subsequent meta-analyses, particularly towards non-reproducibility.

Mnemonic factors associated with the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.

The tip-of-the-tongue (ToT) phenomenon is a transient semantic memory retrieval failure. Here we examined to what extent different mnemonic factors (i.e.

Disuse-driven plasticity in the human thalamus and putamen.

Subcortical plasticity has mainly been studied using invasive electrophysiology in animals. Here, we leverage precision functional mapping (PFM) to study motor plasticity in the human subcortex during 2 weeks of upper-extremity immobilization with daily resting-state and motor task fMRI. We found previously that, in the cortex, limb disuse drastically impacts disused primary motor cortex functional connectivity (FC) and is associated with spontaneous fMRI pulses.