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Emanuela Bricolo
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Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2011) 23 (8): 1987–1997.
Published: 01 August 2011
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The Müller-Lyer illusion occurs both in vision and in touch, and transfers cross-modally from vision to haptics [Mancini, F., Bricolo, E., & Vallar, G. Multisensory integration in the Müller-Lyer illusion: From vision to haptics. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63, 818–830, 2010]. Recent evidence suggests that the neural underpinnings of the Müller-Lyer illusion in the visual modality involve the bilateral lateral occipital complex (LOC) and right superior parietal cortex (SPC). Conversely, the neural correlates of the haptic and cross-modal illusions have never been investigated previously. Here we used repetitive TMS (rTMS) to address the causal role of the regions activated by the visual illusion in the generation of the visual, haptic, and cross-modal visuo-haptic illusory effects, investigating putative modality-specific versus cross-modal underlying processes. rTMS was administered to the right and the left hemisphere, over occipito-temporal cortex or SPC. rTMS over left and right occipito-temporal cortex impaired both unisensory (visual, haptic) and cross-modal processing of the illusion in a similar fashion. Conversely, rTMS interference over left and right SPC did not affect the illusion in any modality. These results demonstrate the causal involvement of bilateral occipito-temporal cortex in the representation of the visual, haptic, and cross-modal Müller-Lyer illusion, in favor of the hypothesis of shared underlying processes. This indicates that occipito-temporal cortex plays a cross-modal role in perception both of illusory and nonillusory shapes.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2003) 15 (4): 523–536.
Published: 15 May 2003
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Unilateral and bilateral electrotactile stimuli were delivered to both hands of 11 right-brain-damaged (RBD) patients with left tactile extinction and 20 healthy subjects. Bimanual stimuli could be presented simultaneously or with varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). Subjects indicated their detection of unilateral or bilateral stimuli, their judgements of whether stimuli were simultaneous or successive, and, in the latter case, which side came first. In RBD patients, extinction was maximal with simultaneous presentations and decreased as SOA increased. With short SOAs, omissions of left-sided stimuli occurred with both right-side and left-side stimulus precedence, suggesting a forward and backward interference of the right stimulus on the processing of the left stimulus within a time window of at least 100 msec. In contrast, there was no interference of the left stimulus on the detection of the right stimulus. Unlike controls, extinction patients rarely expressed simultaneity judgements, but those that were produced tended to be veridical or nearly so, like in normal controls. Whereas controls expressed generally accurate judgements of right or left precedence, patients showed a bias toward a right precedence and a maximal uncertainty between left-first and right-first choices when the left stimulus had a lead between 100 and 200 msec. The results are consistent with the hypothesis that, as in other sensory modalities, tactile extinction is associated with an abnormal persistent bias of attention toward the ipsilesional side that delays the processing of contralesional stimuli. However, the finding that both extinction and explicit judgements of simultaneity tended to occur with simultaneous bilateral stimuli suggest the presence of some residual neural capacity to detect precise temporal coincidence.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2002) 14 (7): 980–993.
Published: 01 October 2002
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In visual search, inefficient performance of human observers is typically characterized by a steady increase in reaction time with the number of array elements—the so-called set-size effect. In general, set-size effects are taken to indicate that processing of the array elements depends on limited-capacity resources, that is, it involves attention. Contrasting theories have been proposed to account for this attentional involvement, however. While some theories have attributed set-size effects to the intervention of serial attention mechanisms, others have explained set-size effects in terms of parallel, competitive architectures. Conclusive evidence in favor of one or the other notion is still lacking. Especially in view of the wide use of visual search paradigms to explore the functional neuroanatomy of attentional mechanisms in the primate brain, it becomes essential that the nature of the attentional involvement in these paradigms be clearly defined at the behavioral level. Here we report a series of experiments showing that highly inefficient search indeed recruits serial attention deployment to the individual array elements. In addition, we describe a number of behavioral signatures of serial attention in visual search that can be used in future investigations to attest a similar involvement of serial attention in other search paradigms. We claim that only after having recognized these signatures can one be confident that truly serial mechanisms are engaged in a given visual search task, thus making it amenable for exploring the functional neuro-anatomy underlying its performance.