Publications related to Perceptual learning

Probing and modulating inter-areal coupling in the cortical visual motion processing pathway with non-invasive brain stimulation

In the last few years, stroke ranked as the second most common cause of death and is the third most significant condition affecting disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) worldwide. Being the most prevalent and quality of life impacting post-stroke symptom ...

EPFL2024

The effects of visual distractors on serial dependence

David Pascucci

Attractive serial dependence occurs when perceptual decisions are attracted toward previous stimuli. This effect is mediated by spatial attention and is most likely to occur when similar stimuli are attended at nearby locations. Attention, however, also in ...

Assoc Research Vision Ophthalmology Inc2023

Tuning perception and decisions to temporal context

David Pascucci

Recent work suggests that serial dependence, where perceptual decisions are biased toward previous stimuli, arises from the prior that sensory input is temporally correlated. However, existing studies have mostly used random stimulus sequences that do not ...

Cell Press2023

Saliency prediction in 360° architectural scenes: Performance and impact of daylight variations

Marilyne Andersen, Sabine Süsstrunk, Caroline Karmann, Kynthia Chamilothori, Seungryong Kim, Bahar Aydemir

Saliency models are image-based prediction models that estimate human visual attention. Such models, when applied to architectural spaces, could pave the way for design decisions where visual attention is taken into account. In this study, we tested the pe ...

2023

Pathway and directional specificity of Hebbian plasticity in the cortical visual motion processing network

Friedhelm Christoph Hummel, Estelle Emeline Raffin, Michele Bevilacqua

Cortico-cortical paired associative stimulation (ccPAS), which repeatedly pairs single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) over two distant brain regions, is thought to modulate synaptic plasticity. We explored its spatial selectivity (pathway an ...

2023

Investigating the Serotonergic Modulation of Orientation Tuning of Neurons in Primary Visual Cortex of Anesthetized Mice

Parviz Ghaderi

Introduction: Sensory processing is profoundly regulated by brain neuromodulatory systems. One of the main neuromodulators is serotonin which influences higher cognitive functions, such as different aspects of perceptual processing. Accordingly, malfunctio ...

Iran Univ Medical Sciences2023

Learning V1 Simple Cells with Vector Representation of Local Content and Matrix Representation of Local Motion

Yufan Ren, Siyuan Huang

This paper proposes a representational model for image pairs such as consecutive video frames that are related by local pixel displacements, in the hope that the model may shed light on motion perception in primary visual cortex (V1). The model couples the ...

ASSOC ADVANCEMENT ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE2022

Early motor skill acquisition in healthy older adults: functional MRI and connectome correlates

Manon Chloé Durand-Ruel

decrement have been proposed, such as weakened acquisition of the motor skill. While the processes at play during the initial acquisition phase have been well-characterized in young adults, they were only scarcely investigated in older adults. The goal of ...

EPFL2022

Learning-related congruent and incongruent changes of excitation and inhibition in distinct cortical areas

Carl Petersen, Sylvain Crochet, Romain Guiet, Vahid Esmaeili, Georgios Foustoukos, Yanqi Liu, Keita Tamura, Anastasiia Oryshchuk, Reza Asri

Excitatory and inhibitory neurons in diverse cortical regions are likely to contribute differentially to the transformation of sensory information into goal-directed motor plans. Here, we investigate the relative changes across mouse sensorimotor cortex in ...

2022

Serial dependence does not originate from low-level visual processing

Michael Herzog, David Pascucci, Gizay Ceylan

Perception depends not only on the current sensory input but also on the preceding history of stimuli. In serial dependence (SD), for example, the orientation of a Gabor patch is mistakenly reported as more similar to previous trials than it actually is. T ...

2021

Global and high-level effects in crowding cannot be predicted by either high-dimensional pooling or target cueing

Michael Herzog, Adrien Christophe Doerig, Mauro Manassi, Alban Bornet, Oh-Hyeon Choung

In visual crowding, the perception of a target deteriorates in the presence of nearby flankers. Traditionally, target-flanker interactions have been considered as local, mostly deleterious, low-level, and feature specific, occurring when information is poo ...

2021

Enhancing visual motion discrimination by desynchronizing bifocal oscillatory activity

Friedhelm Christoph Hummel, Estelle Emeline Raffin, Roberto Felipe Salamanca Giron, Sarah Bernardina Zandvliet, Martin Seeber

Visual motion discrimination involves reciprocal interactions in the alpha band between the primary visual cortex (V1) and mediotemporal areas (V5/MT). We investigated whether modulating alpha phase synchronization using individualized multisite transcrani ...

2021

Individual differences in visual (mis)perception: a multivariate statistical approach

Aline Françoise Cretenoud

Common factors are omnipresent in everyday life, e.g., people who do well in one cognitive test are likely to perform well in other cognitive tests as well, and vice versa. In vision, however, there seems to be a multitude of specific factors rather than a ...

EPFL2021

Tactile spatial discrimination on the torso using vibrotactile and force stimulation

Olaf Blanke, Oliver Alan Kannape, Masayuki Hara, Matteo Franza

There is a steadily growing number of mobile communication systems that provide spatially encoded tactile information to the humans’ torso. However, the increased use of such hands-off displays is currently not matched with or supported by systematic perce ...

2021

The role of population receptive field size and recurrent processing in learning to “de-crowd”

Michael Herzog, Bogdan Draganski, Ayberk Ozkirli, Maya Anna Jastrzebowska

In crowding, the perception of a target is impeded by surrounding clutter. While traditional models are feedforward and local, there is increasing behavioral and neural evidence for a critical role of recurrent processing across the visual hierarchy in cro ...

SAGE Publishing2021

Photovoltaic stimulation of retinal microcircuit for vision restoration

Naïg Aurelia Ludmilla Chenais

Sight restoration through retinal prostheses was still a mere dream a century ago. Current challenges are even greater: providing a quantitatively and qualitatively useful artificial vision to late blind patients. Existing approaches all face engineering a ...

EPFL2021

Orchestration of oscillatory activity to improve visual motion discrimination

Roberto Felipe Salamanca Giron

This thesis describes advances in the use of novel configurations of non-invasive brain stimulation over the visual system allowing to modulate of modifying electro-physiological activity, interregional interactions and by it, visual behavior such as motio ...

EPFL2021

Blind as a bat: spatial perception without sight

Frederike Dümbgen

Among our five senses, we rely mostly on audition and vision to perceive an environment. Our ears are able to detect stimuli from all directions, especially from obstructed and far-away objects. Even in smoke, harsh weather conditions, or at night â situ ...

EPFL2021

Cortical circuits for transforming whisker sensation into goal-directed licking

Carl Petersen, Sylvain Crochet, Vahid Esmaeili, Georgios Foustoukos, Keita Tamura, Anastasiia Oryshchuk

Animals can learn to use sensory stimuli to generate motor actions in order to obtain rewards. However, the precise neuronal circuits driving learning and execution of a specific goal-directed sensory-to-motor transformation remain to be elucidated. Here, ...

2020

Somatostatin enhances visual processing and perception by suppressing excitatory inputs to parvalbumin-positive interneurons in V1

Carl Petersen, Graham Knott, Catherine Maclachlan, Seung-Hee Lee

Somatostatin (SST) is a neuropeptide expressed in a major subtype of GABAergic interneurons in the cortex. Despite abundant expression of SST and its receptors, their modulatory function in cortical processing remains unclear. Here, we found that SST appli ...

2020