Open Access Publications

@article{weise_involuntary_2023,

title = {Involuntary shifts of spatial attention contribute to distraction—Evidence from oscillatory alpha power and reaction time data},

author = {Annekathrin Weise and Thomas Hartmann and Fabrice Parmentier and Nathan Weisz and Philipp Ruhnau},

url = {https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/psyp.14353},

doi = {10.1111/psyp.14353},

issn = {1469-8986},

year  = {2023},

date = {2023-01-01},

urldate = {2023-12-21},

journal = {Psychophysiology},

volume = {60},

number = {10},

pages = {e14353},

abstract = {Imagine you are focusing on the traffic on a busy street to ride your bike safely when suddenly you hear the siren of an ambulance. This unexpected sound involuntarily captures your attention and interferes with ongoing performance. We tested whether this type of distraction involves a spatial shift of attention. We measured behavioral data and magnetoencephalographic alpha power during a cross-modal paradigm that combined an exogenous cueing task and a distraction task. In each trial, a task-irrelevant sound preceded a visual target (left or right). The sound was usually the same animal sound (i.e., standard sound). Rarely, it was replaced by an unexpected environmental sound (i.e., deviant sound). Fifty percent of the deviants occurred on the same side as the target, and 50% occurred on the opposite side. Participants responded to the location of the target. As expected, responses were slower to targets that followed a deviant compared to a standard. Crucially, this distraction effect was mitigated by the spatial relationship between the targets and the deviants: responses were faster when targets followed deviants on the same versus different side, indexing a spatial shift of attention. This was further corroborated by a posterior alpha power modulation that was higher in the hemisphere ipsilateral (vs. contralateral) to the location of the attention-capturing deviant. We suggest that this alpha power lateralization reflects a spatial attention bias. Overall, our data support the contention that spatial shifts of attention contribute to deviant distraction.},

note = {_eprint: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/psyp.14353},

keywords = {DATAPixx2, PROPixx, RESPONSEPixxMRI, SOUNDPixx},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{hauswald_degradation_2022,

title = {Degradation levels of continuous speech affect neural speech tracking and alpha power differently},

author = {Anne Hauswald and Anne Keitel and Ya-Ping Chen and Sebastian Rösch and Nathan Weisz},

url = {https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ejn.14912},

doi = {10.1111/ejn.14912},

issn = {1460-9568},

year  = {2022},

date = {2022-01-01},

urldate = {2023-12-21},

journal = {European Journal of Neuroscience},

volume = {55},

number = {11-12},

pages = {3288–3302},

abstract = {Making sense of a poor auditory signal can pose a challenge. Previous attempts to quantify speech intelligibility in neural terms have usually focused on one of two measures, namely low-frequency speech-brain synchronization or alpha power modulations. However, reports have been mixed concerning the modulation of these measures, an issue aggravated by the fact that they have normally been studied separately. We present two MEG studies analyzing both measures. In study 1, participants listened to unimodal auditory speech with three different levels of degradation (original, 7-channel and 3-channel vocoding). Intelligibility declined with declining clarity, but speech was still intelligible to some extent even for the lowest clarity level (3-channel vocoding). Low-frequency (1–7 Hz) speech tracking suggested a U-shaped relationship with strongest effects for the medium-degraded speech (7-channel) in bilateral auditory and left frontal regions. To follow up on this finding, we implemented three additional vocoding levels (5-channel, 2-channel and 1-channel) in a second MEG study. Using this wider range of degradation, the speech-brain synchronization showed a similar pattern as in study 1, but further showed that when speech becomes unintelligible, synchronization declines again. The relationship differed for alpha power, which continued to decrease across vocoding levels reaching a floor effect for 5-channel vocoding. Predicting subjective intelligibility based on models either combining both measures or each measure alone showed superiority of the combined model. Our findings underline that speech tracking and alpha power are modified differently by the degree of degradation of continuous speech but together contribute to the subjective speech understanding.},

note = {_eprint: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/ejn.14912},

keywords = {RESPONSEPixxMRI, SOUNDPixx, VPixxProgram},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{suess_differential_2021,

title = {Differential attention-dependent adjustment of frequency, power and phase in primary sensory and frontoparietal areas},

author = {Nina Suess and Thomas Hartmann and Nathan Weisz},

url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010945221000320},

doi = {10.1016/j.cortex.2021.01.008},

issn = {0010-9452},

year  = {2021},

date = {2021-04-01},

urldate = {2023-12-21},

journal = {Cortex},

volume = {137},

pages = {179–193},

abstract = {Continuously prioritizing behaviourally relevant information from the environment for improved stimulus processing is a crucial function of attention. In the current MEG study, we investigated how ongoing oscillatory activity of both sensory and non-sensory brain regions are differentially impacted by attentional focus. Low-frequency phase alignment of neural activity in primary sensory areas, with respect to attended/ignored features has been suggested to support top-down prioritization. However, phase adjustment in frontoparietal regions has not been widely studied, despite general implication of these in top-down selection of information. To investigate this, we let participants perform an established intermodal selective attention task, where low-frequency auditory (1.6 Hz) and visual (1.8 Hz) stimuli were presented simultaneously. We instructed them to either attend to the auditory or to the visual stimuli and to detect targets while ignoring the other stimulus stream. As expected, the strongest phase adjustment was observed in primary sensory regions for auditory and for visual stimulation, independent of attentional focus. We found greater differences in phase locking between attended and ignored stimulation for the visual modality. Interestingly, auditory temporal regions show small but significant attention-dependent neural entrainment even for visual stimulation. Extending findings from invasive recordings in non-human primates, we demonstrate an effect of attentional focus on the phase of the entrained oscillations in auditory and visual cortex which may be driven by phase locked increases of induced power. While sensory areas adjusted the phase of the respective stimulation frequencies, attentional focus adjusted the peak frequencies in nonsensory areas. Spatially these areas show a striking overlap with core regions of the dorsal attention network and the frontoparietal network. This suggests that these areas prioritize the attended modality by optimally exploiting the temporal structure of stimulation. Overall, our study complements and extends previous work by showing a differential effect of attentional focus on entrained oscillations (or phase adjustment) in primary sensory areas and frontoparietal areas.},

keywords = {PROPixx, RESPONSEPixxMRI, SOUNDPixx},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{sanchez_decoding_2020,

title = {Decoding across sensory modalities reveals common supramodal signatures of conscious perception},

author = {Gaëtan Sanchez and Thomas Hartmann and Marco Fuscà and Gianpaolo Demarchi and Nathan Weisz},

url = {https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1912584117},

doi = {10.1073/pnas.1912584117},

year  = {2020},

date = {2020-03-01},

urldate = {2024-01-02},

journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences},

volume = {117},

number = {13},

pages = {7437–7446},

abstract = {An increasing number of studies highlight common brain regions and processes in mediating conscious sensory experience. While most studies have been performed in the visual modality, it is implicitly assumed that similar processes are involved in other sensory modalities. However, the existence of supramodal neural processes related to conscious perception has not been convincingly shown so far. Here, we aim to directly address this issue by investigating whether neural correlates of conscious perception in one modality can predict conscious perception in a different modality. In two separate experiments, we presented participants with successive blocks of near-threshold tasks involving subjective reports of tactile, visual, or auditory stimuli during the same magnetoencephalography (MEG) acquisition. Using decoding analysis in the poststimulus period between sensory modalities, our first experiment uncovered supramodal spatiotemporal neural activity patterns predicting conscious perception of the feeble stimulation. Strikingly, these supramodal patterns included activity in primary sensory regions not directly relevant to the task (e.g., neural activity in visual cortex predicting conscious perception of auditory near-threshold stimulation). We carefully replicate our results in a control experiment that furthermore show that the relevant patterns are independent of the type of report (i.e., whether conscious perception was reported by pressing or withholding a button press). Using standard paradigms for probing neural correlates of conscious perception, our findings reveal a common signature of conscious access across sensory modalities and illustrate the temporally late and widespread broadcasting of neural representations, even into task-unrelated primary sensory processing regions.},

note = {Publisher: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences},

keywords = {PROPixx, SOUNDPixx},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{demarchi_automatic_2019,

title = {Automatic and feature-specific prediction-related neural activity in the human auditory system},

author = {Gianpaolo Demarchi and Gaëtan Sanchez and Nathan Weisz},

url = {https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-11440-1},

doi = {10.1038/s41467-019-11440-1},

issn = {2041-1723},

year  = {2019},

date = {2019-08-01},

urldate = {2024-02-06},

journal = {Nature Communications},

volume = {10},

number = {1},

pages = {3440},

abstract = {Prior experience enables the formation of expectations of upcoming sensory events. However, in the auditory modality, it is not known whether prediction-related neural signals carry feature-specific information. Here, using magnetoencephalography (MEG), we examined whether predictions of future auditory stimuli carry tonotopic specific information. Participants passively listened to sound sequences of four carrier frequencies (tones) with a fixed presentation rate, ensuring strong temporal expectations of when the next stimulus would occur. Expectation of which frequency would occur was parametrically modulated across the sequences, and sounds were occasionally omitted. We show that increasing the regularity of the sequence boosts carrier-frequency-specific neural activity patterns during both the anticipatory and omission periods, indicating that prediction-related neural activity is indeed feature-specific. Our results illustrate that even without bottom-up input, auditory predictions can activate tonotopically specific templates.},

note = {Number: 1 

Publisher: Nature Publishing Group},

keywords = {SOUNDPixx},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}