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

Experience-based auditory predictions modulate brain activity to silence as do real sounds

Chouiter, Leila ; Tzovara, Athina ; Dieguez, Sebastian ; Annoni, Jean-Marie ; Magezi, David ; De Lucia, Marzia ; Spierer, Lucas

In: Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2015, vol. 27, no. 10, p. 1968–1980

Interactions between stimuli's acoustic features and experience-based internal models of the environment enable listeners to compensate for the disruptions in auditory streams that are regularly encountered in noisy environments. However, whether auditory gaps are filled in predictively or restored a posteriori remains unclear. The current lack of positive statistical evidence that internal...

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

Progression of auditory discrimination based on neural decoding predicts awakening from coma

Tzovara, Athina ; Rossetti, Andrea O. ; Spierer, Lucas ; Grivel, Jeremy ; Murray, Micah M. ; Oddo, Mauro ; De Lucia, Marzia

In: Brain, 2013, vol. 136, no. 1, p. 81-89

Auditory evoked potentials are informative of intact cortical functions of comatose patients. The integrity of auditory functions evaluated using mismatch negativity paradigms has been associated with their chances of survival. However, because auditory discrimination is assessed at various delays after coma onset, it is still unclear whether this impairment depends on the time of the...