Horizontal face information is the main gateway to the shape and surface cues to familiar face identity.

Humans preferentially rely on horizontal cues when recognizing face identity. The reasons for this preference are largely elusive. Past research has proposed the existence of two main sources of face identity information: shape and surface reflectance. The access to surface and shape is disrupted by picture-plane inversion while contrast negation selectively impedes access to surface cues. Our objective was to characterize the shape versus surface nature of the face information conveyed by the horizontal range. To do this, we tracked the effects of inversion and negation in the orientation domain. Participants performed an identity recognition task using orientation-filtered (0° to 150°, 30° steps) pictures of familiar male actors presented either in a natural upright position and contrast polarity, inverted, or negated. We modelled the inversion and negation effects across orientations with a Gaussian function using a Bayesian nonlinear mixed-effects modelling approach. The effects of inversion and negation showed strikingly similar orientation tuning profiles, both peaking in the horizontal range, with a comparable tuning strength. These results suggest that the horizontal preference of human face recognition is due to this range yielding a privileged access to shape and surface cues, i.e. the two main sources of face identity information.

Timbral cues underlie instrument-specific absolute pitch in expert oboists.

While absolute pitch (AP)-the ability to identify musical pitches without external reference-is rare even in professional musicians, anecdotal evidence and case-report data suggest that some musicians without traditional AP can nonetheless better name notes played on their musical instrument of expertise than notes played on instruments less familiar to them. We have called this gain in AP ability "instrument-specific absolute pitch" (ISAP). Here, we report the results of the first two experiments designed to investigate ISAP in professional oboists. In Experiment 1 (n = 40), superiority for identifying the pitch of oboe over piano tones varied along a continuum, with 37.5% of oboists demonstrating significant ISAP. Variance in accuracy across pitches was higher among ISAP-possessors than ISAP-non-possessors, suggestive of internalized timbral idiosyncrasies, and the use of timbral cues was the second-most commonly reported task strategy. For both timbres, both groups performed more accurately for pitches associated with white than black piano keys. In Experiment 2 (n = 12), oboists with ISAP were less accurate in pitch identification when oboe tones were artificially pitch-shifted. The use of timbral idiosyncrasies thus may constitute a widespread mechanism of ISAP. Motor interference, conversely, did not significantly reduce accuracy. This study offers the first evidence of ISAP among highly trained musicians and that reliance on subtle timbral (or intonational) idiosyncrasies may constitute an underlying mechanism of this ability in expert oboists. This provides a path forward for future studies extending the scientific understanding of ISAP to other instrument types, expertise levels, and musical contexts. More generally, this may deepen knowledge of specialized expertise, representing a range of implicit abilities that are not addressed directly in training, but which may develop through practice of a related skill set.

Differences in Attentional Bias Toward e-Cigarette Cues Between e-Cigarette Users and Nonusers.

ABSTRACT: The use of electronic nicotine delivery systems (ENDS) has increased rapidly in recent years, particularly among young adults. There is a dearth of research on the cognitive factors that contribute to ENDS use. One of the possible cognitive mechanisms involved with addictive behavior is attentional bias (AB). AB can manifest as either facilitated attention engagement toward or delayed attention disengagement from a relevant stimulus. The purpose of this study was to examine the difference in AB toward ENDS-related cues between ENDS users and non-ENDS users. ENDS users (n = 29) and nonusers (n = 24) between the ages of 18 and 29 years participated in the dot-probe and eye-tracking picture-viewing tasks. The results showed that there was a significant difference in the variance of AB between the two groups. In the eye-tracking task, ENDS users displayed significantly greater net dwell time and fixation time at time frames of 6-9, 9-12, and 12-15 seconds, compared to nonusers. It is noteworthy that ENDS users exhibited attentional fluctuation toward ENDS cues as well as difficulties disengaging attention from ENDS cues. The current findings offer insight into the nature of attentional processes associated with ENDS cues and provide useful data to guide the development of a nurse-led cognitive intervention focusing on biased attentional processing related to ENDS cues.

Mentalistic attention orienting triggered by android eyes.

The eyes play a special role in human communications. Previous psychological studies have reported reflexive attention orienting in response to another individual's eyes during live interactions. Although robots are expected to collaborate with humans in various social situations, it remains unclear whether robot eyes have the potential to trigger attention orienting similarly to human eyes, specifically based on mental attribution. We investigated this issue in a series of experiments using a live gaze-cueing paradigm with an android. In Experiment 1, the non-predictive cue was the eyes and head of an android placed in front of human participants. Light-emitting diodes in the periphery served as target signals. The reaction times (RTs) required to localize the valid cued targets were faster than those for invalid cued targets for both types of cues. In Experiment 2, the gaze direction of the android eyes changed before the peripheral target lights appeared with or without barriers that made the targets non-visible, such that the android did not attend to them. The RTs were faster for validly cued targets only when there were no barriers. In Experiment 3, the targets were changed from lights to sounds, which the android could attend to even in the presence of barriers. The RTs to the target sounds were faster with valid cues, irrespective of the presence of barriers. These results suggest that android eyes may automatically induce attention orienting in humans based on mental state attribution.

Vocal usage learning and vocal comprehension learning in harbor seals.

BACKGROUND: Which mammals show vocal learning abilities, e.g., can learn new sounds, or learn to use sounds in new contexts? Vocal usage and comprehension learning are submodules of vocal learning. Specifically, vocal usage learning is the ability to learn to use a vocalization in a new context; vocal comprehension learning is the ability to comprehend a vocalization in a new context. Among mammals, harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) are good candidates to investigate vocal learning. Here, we test whether harbor seals are capable of vocal usage and comprehension learning. RESULTS: We trained two harbor seals to (i) switch contexts from a visual to an auditory cue. In particular, the seals first produced two vocalization types in response to two hand signs; they then transitioned to producing these two vocalization types upon the presentation of two distinct sets of playbacks of their own vocalizations. We then (ii) exposed the seals to a combination of trained and novel vocalization stimuli. In a final experiment, (iii) we broadcasted only novel vocalizations of the two vocalization types to test whether seals could generalize from the trained set of stimuli to only novel items of a given vocal category. Both seals learned all tasks and took ≤ 16 sessions to succeed across all experiments. In particular, the seals showed contextual learning through switching the context from former visual to novel auditory cues, vocal matching and generalization. Finally, by responding to the played-back vocalizations with distinct vocalizations, the animals showed vocal comprehension learning. CONCLUSIONS: It has been suggested that harbor seals are vocal learners; however, to date, these observations had not been confirmed in controlled experiments. Here, through three experiments, we could show that harbor seals are capable of both vocal usage and comprehension learning.

Optimality of multisensory integration while compensating for uncertain visual target information with artificial vibrotactile cues during reach planning.

BACKGROUND: Planning and executing movements requires the integration of different sensory modalities, such as vision and proprioception. However, neurological diseases like stroke can lead to full or partial loss of proprioception, resulting in impaired movements. Recent advances focused on providing additional sensory feedback to patients to compensate for the sensory loss, proving vibrotactile stimulation to be a viable option as it is inexpensive and easy to implement. Here, we test how such vibrotactile information can be integrated with visual signals to estimate the spatial location of a reach target. METHODS: We used a center-out reach paradigm with 31 healthy human participants to investigate how artificial vibrotactile stimulation can be integrated with visual-spatial cues indicating target location. Specifically, we provided multisite vibrotactile stimulation to the moving dominant arm using eccentric rotating mass (ERM) motors. As the integration of inputs across multiple sensory modalities becomes especially relevant when one of them is uncertain, we additionally modulated the reliability of visual cues. We then compared the weighing of vibrotactile and visual inputs as a function of visual uncertainty to predictions from the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) framework to decide if participants achieve quasi-optimal integration. RESULTS: Our results show that participants could estimate target locations based on vibrotactile instructions. After short training, combined visual and vibrotactile cues led to higher hit rates and reduced reach errors when visual cues were uncertain. Additionally, we observed lower reaction times in trials with low visual uncertainty when vibrotactile stimulation was present. Using MLE predictions, we found that integration of vibrotactile and visual cues followed optimal integration when vibrotactile cues required the detection of one or two active motors. However, if estimating the location of a target required discriminating the intensities of two cues, integration violated MLE predictions. CONCLUSION: We conclude that participants can quickly learn to integrate visual and artificial vibrotactile information. Therefore, using additional vibrotactile stimulation may serve as a promising way to improve rehabilitation or the control of prosthetic devices by patients suffering loss of proprioception.

The message matters: changes to binary Computer Aided Detection recommendations affect cancer detection in low prevalence search.

Computer Aided Detection (CAD) has been used to help readers find cancers in mammograms. Although these automated systems have been shown to help cancer detection when accurate, the presence of CAD also leads to an over-reliance effect where miss errors and false alarms increase when the CAD system fails. Previous research investigated CAD systems which overlayed salient exogenous cues onto the image to highlight suspicious areas. These salient cues capture attention which may exacerbate the over-reliance effect. Furthermore, overlaying CAD cues directly on the mammogram occludes sections of breast tissue which may disrupt global statistics useful for cancer detection. In this study we investigated whether an over-reliance effect occurred with a binary CAD system, which instead of overlaying a CAD cue onto the mammogram, reported a message alongside the mammogram indicating the possible presence of a cancer. We manipulated the certainty of the message and whether it was presented only to indicate the presence of a cancer, or whether a message was displayed on every mammogram to state whether a cancer was present or absent. The results showed that although an over-reliance effect still occurred with binary CAD systems miss errors were reduced when the CAD message was more definitive and only presented to alert readers of a possible cancer.

Temporal fine structure sensitivity measured with pulse-spreading harmonic complexes.

Two experiments investigated sensitivity to temporal fine structure (TFS) in a group of normal hearing participants. The stimuli were bandpass filtered pulse-spreading harmonic complexes (PSHCs) with a regular envelope repetition rate and a phase adjusted so that the TFS peaks were progressively shifted across envelope periods. For up-PSHCs, the TFS peaks were advanced, yielding a rising pitch percept, while for down-PSHCs, the peaks were delayed, yielding a falling pitch percept. Experiment 1 showed that in a fixed frequency region, there was a range of rates for which the direction of the pitch change could be identified. Cochlear model simulations suggested that participants may use either place-of-excitation and/or temporal cues to perform this task. Experiment 2 showed that there was an envelope rate below which down-PSHCs and up-PSHCs could not be discriminated. This lower envelope rate limit of TFS sensitivity significantly increased with increases in frequency region and was similar to the lower rate limit of melodic pitch. The results in high frequency regions suggest that TFS cues are available up to 10 kHz when the rank of the lowest component present in the passband is 18, and all harmonics are presumably unresolved.

Dissociable dorsal medial prefrontal cortex ensembles are necessary for cocaine seeking and fear conditioning in mice.

The dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) plays a dual role in modulating drug seeking and fear-related behaviors. Learned associations between cues and drug seeking are encoded by a specific ensemble of neurons. This study explored the stability of a dmPFC cocaine seeking ensemble over 2 weeks and its influence on persistent cocaine seeking and fear memory retrieval. In the first series of experiments, we trained TetTag c-fos-driven-EGFP mice in cocaine self-administration and tagged strongly activated neurons with EGFP during the initial day 7 cocaine seeking session. Subsequently, a follow-up seeking test was conducted 2 weeks later to examine ensemble reactivation between two seeking sessions via c-Fos immunostaining. In the second series of experiments, we co-injected viruses expressing TRE-cre and a cre-dependent inhibitory PSAM-GlyR into the dmPFC of male and female c-fos-tTA mice to enable "tagging" of cocaine seeking ensemble or cued fear ensemble neurons with inhibitory chemogenetic receptors. These c-fos-tTA mice have the c-fos promoter that drives expression of the tetracycline transactivator (tTA). The tTA can bind to the tetracycline response element (TRE) site on the viral construct, resulting in the expression of cre-recombinase, which enables the expression of cre-dependent inhibitory chemogenetic receptors and fluorescent reporters. Then we investigated ensemble contribution to subsequent cocaine seeking and fear recall during inhibition of the tagged ensemble by administering uPSEM792s (0.3 mg/kg), a selective ligand for PSAM-GlyR. In both sexes, there was a positive association between the persistence of cocaine seeking and the proportion of reactivated EGFP+ neurons within the dmPFC. More importantly, inhibition of the cocaine seeking ensemble suppressed cocaine seeking, but not recall of fear memory, while inhibition of the fear ensemble reduced conditioned freezing but not cocaine seeking. The results demonstrate that cocaine and fear recall ensembles in the dmPFC are stable, but largely exclusive from one another.

Sex and the facilitation of cued fear by prior contextual fear conditioning in rats.

Previous studies have shown that the formation of new memories can be influenced by prior experience. This includes work using Pavlovian fear conditioning in rodents that has shown that an initial fear conditioning experience can become associated with and facilitate the acquisition of new fear memories, especially when they occur close together in time. However, most of the prior studies used only males as subjects, resulting in questions about the generalizability of the findings from this work. Here we tested whether prior contextual fear conditioning would facilitate later learning of cued fear conditioning in both male and female rats, and if there were differences based on the interval between the two conditioning episodes. Our results showed that levels of cued fear were not influenced by prior contextual fear conditioning or by the interval between training; however, females showed lower levels of cued fear. Freezing behavior in the initial training context differed by sex, with females showing lower levels of contextual fear, and by the type of initial training, with rats given delayed shock showing higher levels of fear than rats given immediate shock during contextual fear conditioning. These results indicate that contextual fear conditioning does not prime subsequent cued fear conditioning and that female rats express lower levels of cued and contextual fear conditioning than males.

Single-trial detection of auditory cues from the rat brain using memristors.

Implantable devices hold the potential to address conditions currently lacking effective treatments, such as drug-resistant neural impairments and prosthetic control. Medical devices need to be biologically compatible while providing enhanced performance metrics of low-power consumption, high accuracy, small size, and minimal latency to enable ongoing intervention in brain function. Here, we demonstrate a memristor-based processing system for single-trial detection of behaviorally meaningful brain signals within a timeframe that supports real-time closed-loop intervention. We record neural activity from the reward center of the brain, the ventral tegmental area, in rats trained to associate a musical tone with a reward, and we use the memristors built-in thresholding properties to detect nontrivial biomarkers in local field potentials. This approach yields consistent and accurate detection of biomarkers >98% while maintaining power consumption as low as 4.14 nanowatt per channel. The efficacy of our system's capabilities to process real-time in vivo neural data paves the way for low-power chronic neural activity monitoring and biomedical implants.

Learning depends on the information conveyed by temporal relationships between events and is reflected in the dopamine response to cues.

Contemporary theories guiding the search for neural mechanisms of learning and memory assume that associative learning results from the temporal pairing of cues and reinforcers resulting in coincident activation of associated neurons, strengthening their synaptic connection. While enduring, this framework has limitations: Temporal pairing-based models of learning do not fit with many experimental observations and cannot be used to make quantitative predictions about behavior. Here, we present behavioral data that support an alternative, information-theoretic conception: The amount of information that cues provide about the timing of reward delivery predicts behavior. Furthermore, this approach accounts for the rate and depth of both inhibitory and excitatory learning across paradigms and species. We also show that dopamine release in the ventral striatum reflects cue-predicted changes in reinforcement rates consistent with subjects understanding temporal relationships between task events. Our results reshape the conceptual and biological framework for understanding associative learning.

Associating sensory cues with incoming seizures: developing an animal model of auras.

For patients with epilepsy, one of the biggest problems is the unpredictability of the time when the next seizure will occur. Interestingly, some epileptic patients experience a sensory sensation preceding seizures, called aura, which helps them move to safety before a seizure. Here, we describe the development of the first animal model of auras, which could allow for a more detailed study of this phenomenon. Specifically, in mice, we presented sensory stimuli (sound and light cues) a few seconds before kindling an animal to induce seizures. Animals were kindled by electrical stimulation in the basolateral amygdalar nucleus. Over the course of stimulation sessions, animals started showing progressively stronger freezing behavior to sensory cues preceding kindling. Interestingly, seizures are known to cause retrograde amnesia, thus it was surprising that the association between seizures and preceding sensory cues developed in all experimental animals. In summary, our experiments show that similarly to auras, a sensory sensation can be associated with incoming generalized seizures and is not erased by retrograde amnesia.

Relating monaural and binaural measures of modulation sensitivity in listeners with and without hearing loss.

Listeners are sensitive to interaural time differences carried in the envelope of high-frequency sounds (ITDENV), but the salience of this cue depends on certain properties of the envelope and, in particular, on the presence/depth of amplitude modulation (AM) in the envelope. This study tested the hypothesis that individuals with sensorineural hearing loss, who show enhanced sensitivity to AM under certain conditions, would also show superior ITDENV sensitivity under those conditions. The second hypothesis was that variations in ITDENV sensitivity across individuals can be related to variations in sensitivity to AM. To enable a direct comparison, a standard adaptive AM detection task was used along with a modified version of it designed to measure ITDENV sensitivity. The stimulus was a 4-kHz tone modulated at rates of 32, 64, or 128 Hz and presented at a 30 dB sensation level. Both tasks were attempted by 16 listeners with normal hearing and 16 listeners with hearing loss. Consistent with the hypotheses, AM and ITDENV thresholds were correlated and tended to be better in listeners with hearing loss. A control experiment emphasized that absolute level may be a consideration when interpreting the group effects.

Agonistic behaviors of boxer shrimps (Stenopus Species): Insights into the importance of antennae, antennules and tactile contact.

Agonistic behaviors are crucial and ubiquitous among animals for the competition of limited resources. Although the study of aggression has been a popular topic, plenty of studies focused on model organisms, and typically on crayfish and lobsters for crustaceans. Variations of the agonistic behaviors and the underpinning eliciting cues of other crustaceans therefore have not been fully explored. In the present study, we targeted Stenopus, a genus of shrimp-like crustaceans that displays prominent agonistic behaviors when encountering conspecifics of the same sex owing to their monogamous social structure. Using S. hispidus (Olivier, 1811) and S. cyanoscelis (Goy, 1984) as representatives, we characterized their agonistic behaviors and fighting pattern, conducted experiments to investigate the contribution of visual, olfactory and tactile cues to inducing aggression, and examined the effects of antennal and antennular ablation on their agonistic interactions. A total of seven agonistic behaviors were documented, where antennal entwining and tactile contact is the major driver and seemingly important cue, respectively, in inducing agonistic behaviors in Stenopus. Although ablation of antennae and antennules did not inhibit fighting, behavioral changes, such as the prolonged agonistic interactions and the delayed establishment of dominance were observed, suggesting a reduction of aggressiveness. A comparison of agonistic behaviors with other crustaceans showed that certain features appeared to be unique or distinct in Stenopus, including the potential functional overlap of antennae and antennules, a higher aggressiveness of the fighting behaviors, and the exhibition of crouching behavior by submissive individuals. The present study provides a crucial background understanding for subsequent research on Stenopus and paves the way for its establishment as another crustacean model for studying aggression.

An expanded odorant-binding protein mediates host cue detection in the parasitic wasp Baryscapus dioryctriae basis of the chromosome-level genome assembly analysis.

BACKGROUND: Baryscapus dioryctriae (Chalcidodea: Eulophidae) is a parasitic wasp that parasitizes the pupae of many Pyralidae members and has been used as a biological control agent against Dioryctria pests of pinecones. RESULTS: This B. dioryctriae assembly has a genome size of 485.5 Mb with a contig N50 of 2.17 Mb, and scaffolds were assembled onto six chromosomes using Hi-C analysis, significantly increasing the scaffold N50 to 91.17 Mb, with more than 96.13% of the assembled bases located on chromosomes, and an analysis revealed that 94.73% of the BUSCO gene set. A total of 54.82% (279.27 Mb) of the assembly was composed of repetitive sequences and 24,778 protein-coding genes were identified. Comparative genomic analysis demonstrated that the chemosensory perception, genetic material synthesis, and immune response pathways were primarily enriched in the expanded genes. Moreover, the functional characteristics of an odorant-binding protein (BdioOBP45) with ovipositor-biased expression identified from the expanded olfactory gene families were investigated by the fluorescence competitive binding and RNAi assays, revealing that BdioOBP45 primarily binds to the D. abietella-induced volatile compounds, suggesting that this expanded OBP is likely involved in locating female wasp hosts and highlighting a direction for future research. CONCLUSIONS: Taken together, this work not only provides new genomic sequences for the Hymenoptera systematics, but also the high-quality chromosome-level genome of B. dioryctriae offers a valuable foundation for studying the molecular, evolutionary, and parasitic processes of parasitic wasps.

A computational mechanism of cue-stimulus integration for pain in the brain.

The brain integrates information from pain-predictive cues and noxious inputs to construct the pain experience. Although previous studies have identified neural encodings of individual pain components, how they are integrated remains elusive. Here, using a cue-induced pain task, we examined temporal functional magnetic resonance imaging activities within the state space, where axes represent individual voxel activities. By analyzing the features of these activities at the large-scale network level, we demonstrated that overall brain networks preserve both cue and stimulus information in their respective subspaces within the state space. However, only higher-order brain networks, including limbic and default mode networks, could reconstruct the pattern of participants' reported pain by linear summation of subspace activities, providing evidence for the integration of cue and stimulus information. These results suggest a hierarchical organization of the brain for processing pain components and elucidate the mechanism for their integration underlying our pain perception.

Visual event boundaries trigger forgetting despite active maintenance in visual working memory.

The contents of visual perception are inherently dynamic-just as we experience objects in space, so too events in time. The boundaries between these events have downstream consequences. For example, memory for incidentally encountered items is impaired when walking through a doorway, perhaps because event boundaries serve as cues to clear obsolete information from previous events. Although this kind of "memory flushing" can be adaptive, work on visual working memory (VWM) has focused on the opposite function of active maintenance in the face of distraction. How do these two cognitive operations interact? In this study, observers watched animations in which they walked through three-dimensionally rendered rooms with picture frames on the walls. Within the frames, observers either saw images that they had to remember ("encoding") or recalled images they had seen in the immediately preceding frame ("test"). Half of the time, a doorway was crossed during the delay between encoding and test. Across experiments, there was a consistent memory decrement for the first image encoded in the doorway compared to the no-doorway condition while equating time elapsed, distance traveled, and distractibility of the doorway. This decrement despite top-down VWM efforts highlights the power of event boundaries to structure what and when we forget.

Distinct codes for environment structure and symmetry in postrhinal and retrosplenial cortices.

Complex sensory information arrives in the brain from an animal's first-person ('egocentric') perspective. However, animals can efficiently navigate as if referencing map-like ('allocentric') representations. The postrhinal (POR) and retrosplenial (RSC) cortices are thought to mediate between sensory input and internal maps, combining egocentric representations of physical cues with allocentric head direction (HD) information. Here we show that neurons in the POR and RSC of female Long-Evans rats are tuned to distinct but complementary aspects of local space. Egocentric bearing (EB) cells recorded in square and L-shaped environments reveal that RSC cells encode local geometric features, while POR cells encode a more global account of boundary geometry. Additionally, POR HD cells can incorporate egocentric information to fire in two opposite directions with two oppositely placed identical visual landmarks, while only a subset of RSC HD cells possess this property. Entorhinal grid and HD cells exhibit consistently allocentric spatial firing properties. These results reveal significant regional differences in the neural encoding of spatial reference frames.

The neural basis of attentional selection in goal-directed memory retrieval.

Goal-directed memory reactivation involves retrieving the most relevant information for the current behavioral goal. Previous research has linked this process to activations in the fronto-parietal network, but the underlying neurocognitive mechanism remains poorly understood. The current electroencephalogram (EEG) study explores attentional selection as a possible mechanism supporting goal-directed retrieval. We designed a long-term memory experiment containing three phases. First, participants learned associations between objects and two screen locations. In a following phase, we changed the relevance of some locations (selective cue condition) to simulate goal-directed retrieval. We also introduced a control condition, in which the original associations remained unchanged (neutral cue condition). Behavior performance measured during the final retrieval phase revealed faster and more confident responses in the selective vs. neutral condition. At the EEG level, we found significant differences in decoding accuracy, with above-chance effects in the selective cue condition but not in the neutral cue condition. Additionally, we observed a stronger posterior contralateral negativity and lateralized alpha power in the selective cue condition. Overall, these results suggest that attentional selection enhances task-relevant information accessibility, emphasizing its role in goal-directed memory retrieval.