Reaction times

This study explores the decision-making processes involved in trajectory extrapolation tasks. Vertical paths were disturbed in the horizontal direction by noise generated by Random Walks (RDW) or Independent and Identically Distributed (IID) noise. In the Experiment, participants (n = 28) extrapolated if a moving point would end right or left of the screen’s center. We modeled path extrapolation using a three-parameter Random Sampling Model (RSM), and a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP). Statistically, for RDW paths, the optimal extrapolation strategy is to use the last visible position, whereas fo

Within the last decade, Deep Artificial Neural Networks (DNNs) have emerged as powerful computer vision systems that match or exceed human performance on many benchmark tasks such as image classification. But whether current DNNs are suitable computational models of the human visual system remains an open question: While DNNs have proven to be capable of predicting neural activations in primate visual cortex, psychophysical experiments have shown behavioral differences between DNNs and human subjects, as quantified by error consistency. Error consistency is typically measured by briefly presen

Older adults show deficits in tasks of set-shifting. Yet, many underlying cognitive functions are required during such tasks and it is currently unknown which of these mechanisms may be deficient in older age. Here, we investigated this question in a preliminary dataset of 45 young participants (age: 25.2 ± 4.3) and 26 older participants (age: 68.1 ± 5.0) in an EEG-compatible set-shifting paradigm. We were particularly interested in two posterior components: 1) The P300 is a positive component that appears approximately 300 ms to 500 ms after the cue and has a lower amplitude during set-shifti

Habits and goal-directed behaviour are often viewed as opposite extremes in the spectrum of human behaviour. However, some theoretical accounts hypothesize that the initiation of habits may underlie goal-directed control, as habits often contribute to the achievement of specific goals. Here, we test this hypothesis by using a task that concurrently measures habitual and goal-directed behaviour (Frölich et al., Frontiers in Neuroscience, 16 (2023)), see Figure. In this task, participants implicitly learn a hidden repeating action sequence over two days while instructed to maximize their perform

In the Rutgers Acquired Equivalence Test (RAET), participants are taught to associate pairs of visual stimuli (faces and fish) during the acquisition phase. Subsequently, in the test phase, they are required to recall and generalize these learned associations. We introduced a novel test (Polygon) that employs simpler visual stimuli with less semantic content, mirroring RAET's structure. This study was conducted to examine how the complexity and semantic content of visual stimuli impact the performance of migraine sufferers.The psychophysical responses of 41 migraine patients were evaluated acr

First, a new measure of MI for reaction times is proposed that takes the entire RT distribution into account. Second, we present some recent developments in TWIN modeling, including a new proposal for the sound-induced flash illusion (SIFI).

A central problem in neuroscience is to understand how areas in the brain communicate. Inputs to brain areas largely influence the intrinsic dynamics of each region, which shapes ongoing computations. Hence, characterizing how inputs drive different population responses is key to understanding how brain circuits are controlled to generate different behaviors. To this end, we developed an inter-areal patterned microstimulation (uStim) protocol that allowed us to finely manipulate the activity of a neural population in one brain area while simultaneously recording the activity of a second popula

…the existence of a hierarchy of timescales ranging from hundreds of milliseconds to minutes. How do multiple timescales emerge from neural circuit dynamics? How do circuits modulate temporal responses to flexibly adapt to changing demands? In this talk, we will present recent results from experiments and theory suggesting a new computational mechanism generating