Université de Fribourg

Auditory perceptual decision-making based on semantic categorization of environmental sounds

Lucia, Marzia De ; Tzovara, Athina ; Bernasconi, Fosco ; Spierer, Lucas ; Murray, Micah M.

In: NeuroImage, 2012, vol. 60, no. 3, p. 1704–1715

Discriminating complex sounds relies on multiple stages of differential brain activity. The specific roles of these stages and their links to perception were the focus of the present study. We presented 250 ms duration sounds of living and man-made objects while recording 160-channel electroencephalography (EEG). Subjects categorized each sound as that of a living, man-made or unknown item. We...

Université de Fribourg

Noise in brain activity engenders perception and influences discrimination sensitivity

Bernasconi, Fosco ; De Lucia, Marzia ; Tzovara, Athina ; Manuel, Aurelie L. ; Murray, Micah M. ; Spierer, Lucas

In: The Journal of Neuroscience, 2011, vol. 31, no. 49, p. 17971-17981

Behavioral and brain responses to identical stimuli can vary with experimental and task parameters, including the context of stimulus presentation or attention. More surprisingly, computational models suggest that noise-related random fluctuations in brain responses to stimuli would alone be sufficient to engender perceptual differences between physically identical stimuli. In two experiments...

Université de Fribourg

Plastic modifications within inhibitory control networks induced by practicing a stop-signal task: an electrical neuroimaging study

Manuel, Aurelie L. ; Bernasconi, Fosco ; Spierer, Lucas

In: Cortex, 2012, p. -

Inhibitory control refers to our ability to suppress ongoing motor, affective or cognitive processes and mostly depends on a fronto–basal brain network. Inhibitory control deficits participate in the emergence of several prominent psychiatric conditions, including attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder or addiction. The rehabilitation of these pathologies might therefore benefit from...