Fascinating and terrifying.
If, on that occasion, only the southern part of the Cascadia subduction zone gives way—your first two fingers, say—the magnitude of the resulting quake will be somewhere between 8.0 and 8.6. That’s the big one. If the entire zone gives way at once, an event that seismologists call a full-margin rupture, the magnitude will be somewhere between 8.7 and 9.2. That’s the very big one.
The temporal structure of behavior provides information that allows the tracking of temporal regularity in the sensory and sensorimotor domains. In turn, temporal regularity allows the generation of predictions about upcoming events and to adjust behavior accordingly. These mechanisms are essential to ensure behavior beyond the level of mere reaction. However, efficient temporal processing is required to establish adequate internal representations of temporal structure. The current study used two simple paradigms, namely, finger-tapping at a regular self-chosen rate (spontaneous motor tempo) and ERPs of the EEG (EEG/ERP) recorded during attentive listening to temporally regular and irregular “oddball” sequences to explore the capacity to encode and use temporal regularity in production and perception. The results show that specific aspects of the ability to time a regular sequence of events in production covary with the ability to time a regular sequence in perception, probably pointing toward the engagement of domain-general mechanisms.
Nice combination of DCM and Bayesian model selection here.
Magnetoencephalography of healthy human participants during an auditory paradigm identified prediction error responses in bilateral primary auditory cortex, superior temporal gyrus, and lateral prefrontal cortex for deviation by frequency, intensity, location, duration, and silent gap. We examined the connectivity between cortical sources using a set of 21 generative models that embedded alternate hypotheses of frontotemporal network dynamics. Bayesian model selection provided evidence for two new features of functional network organization. First, an expectancy signal provided input to the prefrontal cortex bilaterally, related to the temporal structure of stimuli. Second, there are functionally significant lateral connections between superior temporal and/or prefrontal cortex. The results support a predictive coding hypothesis but go beyond previous work in demonstrating the generalization to multiple concurrent stimulus dimensions and the evidence for a temporal expectancy input at the higher level of the frontotemporal hierarchy.
PPI with seeds in BA44/45 shows angular gyrus (among other regions) differs in activity when pictures match a narrative or not.
Rogers & Wingfield in JASA:
Older adults' normally adaptive use of semantic context to aid in word recognition can have a negative consequence of causing misrecognitions, especially when the word actually spoken sounds similar to a word that more closely fits the context. Word-pairs were presented to young and older adults, with the second word of the pair masked by multi-talker babble varying in signal-to-noise ratio. Results confirmed older adults' greater tendency to misidentify words based on their semantic context compared to the young adults, and to do so with a higher level of confidence. This age difference was unaffected by differences in the relative level of acoustic masking.
The last point is perhaps the most important. Publishing pre-prints is a feasible step. I have started to do it myself in the past year (partly motivated by deals offered by PeerJ) and it is a practice that I intend to continue.
Looks great.
Between now and Labor Day weekend (September 4), I plan to have a cram session that covers approximately 3 weeks of a semester-long fMRI data analysis course I previously taught at UT. I’ve chosen these specific topics, because they relate to the questions I’m most frequently asked. The main topics include: linear regression overview, setting up group level design matrices (works for more imaging modalities than just fMRI), mixed models, collinearity, orthogonalization, mean centering regressors, parametrically modulated regressor set up and more!
Every MWF I’ll post a 10-20 minute video and I’ve split them up such that if you hit a topic you already know (e.g. you’re a matrix algebra expert), you can skip to the next video. Instead of zoning out during boring parts of a class, you can just skip ahead to the next part.
And also, good to see that Mumford is on twitter as @mumbrainstats.
Using meta-analysis to derive functional parcellations.
Estimating the contribution of network nodes and connections to behavior.
In this paper, we introduce a novel, robust and efficient framework to align bundles of streamlines directly in the space of streamlines. We call this framework Streamline-based Linear Registration. We first show that this method can be used successfully to align individual bundles as well as whole brain streamlines. Additionally, if used as a piecewise linear registration across many bundles, we show that our novel method systematically provides higher overlap (Jaccard indices) than state-of-the-art nonlinear image-based registration in the white matter.
Using classical DCM (cDCM) in SPM5, we found that the test-retest reliability of DCM results was high, both concerning the model evidence (ICC = 0.94) and the model parameter estimates (median ICC = 0.47). However, when using a more recent DCM version (DCM10 in SPM8), test-retest reliability was reduced notably.
We focus our analyses on the effects of common preprocessing steps, such as global signal regression (GS) (Weissenbacher et al., 2009 and Shirer et al., 2012); removal of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and white matter (WM) confounds (Shirer et al., 2012); noise regression of motion parameters estimated during motion correction (Friston et al., 1996, Power et al., 2012, Power et al., 2013, Satterthwaite et al., 2013 and Yan et al., 2013a); and temporal filtering at various frequency bands reported in the literature (Achard et al., 2006, Ko et al., 2011 and Guo et al., 2012).
If we say derogatory comments are acceptable in the context of a joke, this basically allows anything, because anything can be construed as a joke post hoc. Suppose someone said: “Let me tell you about my trouble with blacks. Three things happen when they’re in the lab: (stereotype 1), (stereotype 2), (stereotype 3).” I think most educated people would regard this as unacceptable, even if the speaker subsequently argues that they were being ironic. However, substitute “girls” for “blacks” and for many people it becomes OK.
I do think, however, that undergoing adversity during academic training has left me better prepared for a career as a grant funded PI. I have said it before on these pages that I think my sole actual talent for this NIH grant game business is my ability to take a punch. That, I go on to argue, has much to do with my life experiences, most specifically the ones that occurred from graduate school through postdoctoral training.
Nice.
Ennico says it never dawned on her, until New Horizons, that she might someday be on a mission where women would outnumber the men. “From personal experience, this will be my fourth space mission, and by far this mission has the most women on it,” she said. “To be in a room full of more women than men or equal number of women and men? First of all, it feels normal, which is wonderful. Whenever it was only one woman in the room or two it always felt awkward.”
I don't have much experience, but tend to agree with DM on this one:
First: If you have excellent standardized scores, I suggest you continue to put those in the pre-doc NRSA biosketch somewhere people.
Second: If you don't put them in there, the reviewer who is fond of such measures of your aptitude is going to assume your scores are really bad. Right?
Third: I think this is more evidence of NIH changes that will throw chaos into the system rather than really improving much.
Very cool: (postmortem) dolphin DTI.
Using thalamic parcellation based on traditionally defined regions for the primary visual (V1) and auditory cortex (A1), we found distinct regions of the thalamus connected to V1 and A1. But in addition to suprasylvian-A1, we report here, for the first time, the auditory cortex also exists in the temporal lobe, in a region near cetacean-A2 and possibly analogous to the primary auditory cortex in related terrestrial mammals (Artiodactyla). Using probabilistic tract tracing, we found a direct pathway from the inferior colliculus to the medial geniculate nucleus to the temporal lobe near the sylvian fissure.
To examine whether the cellular properties could recover from HL, earplugs were removed prior to (P17) or after (P23), the closure of these CPs. The earlier age of hearing restoration led to greater recovery of cellular function, but firing rate remained disrupted. When earplugs were removed after the closure of these CPs, several changes persisted into adulthood.
Here, we tested this prediction by recording cells in the dACC and lateral prefrontal cortex (latPFC) of macaques performing an attention task that dissociated 3 processing stages. We found that, across prefrontal subareas, the dACC contained the largest cell populations encoding errors indicating (1) failures of inhibitory control of the attentional focus, (2) failures to prevent bottom-up distraction, and (3) lapses when implementing a choice. Error-locked firing in the dACC showed the earliest latencies across the PFC, emerged earlier than reward omission signals, and involved a significant proportion of putative inhibitory interneurons. Moreover, early onset error-locked response enhancement in the dACC was followed by transient prefrontal-cingulate inhibition, possibly reflecting active disengagement from task processing.
Good stuff here.
Q. What counts as making a good-faith effort? A. We have adapted 6 good suggestions from http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2011/03/26/how-to-avoid-a-gendered-conference/ In brief:
- Set yourself the task of thinking of female names
- Since women are overrepresented at lower prestige institutions, don't stop searching once you have exhausted the people at high-prestige * institutions
- Do a search for women's names in the relevant areas
- Plan ahead, so that women, who might have more non-work responsibilities, have adequate time to make arrangements
- Don't automatically structure your conference – or part of it – around an eminent man but consider building it around a woman
- Provide adequate funding so that women, who may have fewer resources, will be able to afford to come Inquire about child care needs (for both men and women).
Jonathan Peelle, PhD
CV: PeelleCV.pdf | Google Scholar profile
Lab: peellelab.org
Office: ISEC 320
E-mail: j.peelle123@northeastern.edu(without the 123)
Mastodon: @jpeelle@neuromatch.social
("Peelle" sounds like "peel". I blame my ancestors for the extra letters.)