Effects of Visual Context upon Functional Connectivity during Observation of Biological Motions

Hars, Mélany; Stam, Cornelis J.; Calmels, Claire

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0025903

Cited by 6 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 77 publications

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“…A recent study by Hars et al (2011) provided corroborative neuroimaging evidence for the modulating effects of attention on neural activity in brain regions subserving biological motion perception and action understanding. They had participants who were trained gymnasts watch either naturalistic videos of an expert perform acrobatic gymnastic movements or relatively impoverished point-light displays of the same movements, recorded with a motion capture system and from the same expert.…”

Section: Neuroimaging Studiesmentioning

confidence: 86%

Sensing, assessing, and augmenting threat detection: behavioral, neuroimaging, and brain stimulation evidence for the critical role of attention

Parasuraman¹,

Galster²

2013

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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Rapidly identifying the potentially threatening movements of other people and objects—biological motion perception and action understanding—is critical to maintaining security in many civilian and military settings. A key approach to improving threat detection in these environments is to sense when less than ideal conditions exist for the human observer, assess that condition relative to an expected standard, and if necessary use tools to augment human performance. Action perception is typically viewed as a relatively “primitive,” automatic function immune to top-down effects. However, recent research shows that attention is a top-down factor that has a critical influence on the identification of threat-related targets. In this paper we show that detection of motion-based threats is attention sensitive when surveillance images are obscured by other movements, when they are visually degraded, when other stimuli or tasks compete for attention, or when low-probability threats must be watched for over long periods of time—all features typical of operational security settings. Neuroimaging studies reveal that action understanding recruits a distributed network of brain regions, including the superior temporal cortex, intraparietal cortex, and inferior frontal cortex. Within this network, attention modulates activation of the superior temporal sulcus (STS) and middle temporal gyrus. The dorsal frontoparietal network may provide the source of attention-modulation signals to action representation areas. Stimulation of this attention network should therefore enhance threat detection. We show that transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) at 2 mA accelerates perceptual learning of participants performing a challenging threat-detection task. Together, cognitive, neuroimaging, and brain stimulation studies provide converging evidence for the critical role of attention in the detection and understanding of threat-related intentional actions.

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Section: Neuroimaging Studiesmentioning

confidence: 86%

Sensing, assessing, and augmenting threat detection: behavioral, neuroimaging, and brain stimulation evidence for the critical role of attention

Parasuraman¹,

Galster²

2013

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

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“…The present results point to an element specifically contributing to facial expression processing within this social brain system. Moreover, the unfolding of affect expression in a face is inseparably linked to biological motion (hand, face, or body), detection of which has been found to activate superior temporal sulcus (STS; e.g., Hars et al, 2011;Thompson, Hardee, Panayiotou, Crewther, & Puce, 2007), even in tasks requiring emotion processing like theory of mind (Frith & Frith, 1999;Krakowki, Ross, Snyder, Sehatpour, Kelly, & Foxe, 2011;Sugranyes et al, 2011). No study seems to have examined biological motion and its cortical correlates specifically in SZ.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Singh et al (2011) found that stimuli showing moving hands or nomovement social interaction prompted less 8-to 13-Hz suppression (ERD) over sensorimotor cortex in first-episode schizophrenia patients than in controls. In healthy volunteers, Hars, Hars, Stam, and Calmets (2011) found greater 8-and 10-Hz connectivity for sensorimotor cortex during the observation of biological motion. In addition, electroencephalographic (EEG) and magnetoencephalographic (MEG) findings of deviantly increased or decreased baseline alpha (Ikezawa et al, 2011;Nikulin, Jönsson, & Brismar, 2012;Uhlhaas, Haenschel, Nikolic, & Sincer, 2008;Uhlhaas & Singer, 2010) suggest dysfunctional regulation of alpha oscillations in schizophrenia.…”

mentioning

confidence: 85%

Dynamics of alpha oscillations elucidate facial affect recognition in schizophrenia

Popov

Rockstroh

Popova

et al. 2013

Cogn Affect Behav Neurosci

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Impaired facial affect recognition is characteristic of schizophrenia and has been related to impaired social function, but the relevant neural mechanisms have not been fully identified. The present study sought to identify the role of oscillatory alpha activity in that deficit during the process of facial emotion recognition. Neuromagnetic brain activity was monitored while 44 schizophrenia patients and 44 healthy controls viewed 5-s videos showing human faces gradually changing from neutral to fearful or happy expressions or from the neutral face of one poser to the neutral face of another. Recognition performance was determined separately by self-report. Relative to prestimulus baseline, controls exhibited a 10- to 15-Hz power increase prior to full recognition and a 10- to 15-Hz power decrease during the postrecognition phase. These results support recent proposals about the function of alpha-band oscillations in normal stimulus evaluation. The patients failed to show this sequence of alpha power increase and decrease and also showed low 10- to 15-Hz power and high 10- to 15-Hz connectivity during the prestimulus baseline. In light of the proposal that a combination of alpha power increase and functional disconnection facilitates information intake and processing, the finding of an abnormal association of low baseline alpha power and high connectivity in schizophrenia suggests a state of impaired readiness that fosters abnormal dynamics during facial affect recognition.

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“…The experimental procedure comprised two parts: an EEG recording and an interview. The first part of the experimental procedure in the present study has been described in a previous paper (Hars et al, 2011). More accurately, the current paper reports additional analysis of EEG data collected previously.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Beta functional connectivity modulation during the maintenance of motion information in working memory: Importance of the familiarity of the visual context

2012

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The purpose of this study was to examine whether mechanisms, involved during the maintenance of familiar movement information in memory, were influenced by the degree of familiarity of the display in which the movements were embedded. Twelve gymnasts who possessed high visual and motor familiarity with the movements employed in this study, were recruited. They were invited to retain for a short period of time familiar movements viewed previously and presented under different displays with the aim of recognizing them at a later stage. The first display was a realistic, familiar display which presented videos of movements. The second display was an unfamiliar impoverished display never experienced in every day life which showed point-light movements. Activity during the maintenance period was considered in five frequency bands (4-8 Hz, 8-10 Hz, 10-13 Hz, 13-20 Hz, 20-30 Hz) using a non-linear measure of functional connectivity. The results in the 13-20 Hz frequency band showed that functional connectivity was greater within the frontal and right temporal areas during the unfamiliar display (i.e., point-light maintenance condition) compared to the familiar display (i.e., video maintenance condition). Differences in functional connectivity between the two maintenance conditions in the beta frequency band are mainly discussed in the light of the process of anticipation. Subjects' perception of the expected difficulty of the upcoming recognition task is discussed.

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Effects of Visual Context upon Functional Connectivity during Observation of Biological Motions

Cited by 6 publications

References 77 publications

Sensing, assessing, and augmenting threat detection: behavioral, neuroimaging, and brain stimulation evidence for the critical role of attention

Sensing, assessing, and augmenting threat detection: behavioral, neuroimaging, and brain stimulation evidence for the critical role of attention

Dynamics of alpha oscillations elucidate facial affect recognition in schizophrenia

Beta functional connectivity modulation during the maintenance of motion information in working memory: Importance of the familiarity of the visual context

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