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Florian Waszak
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Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2021) 33 (6): 984–1002.
Published: 01 May 2021
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Humans live in a volatile environment, subject to changes occurring at different timescales. The ability to adjust internal predictions accordingly is critical for perception and action. We studied this ability with two EEG experiments in which participants were presented with sequences of four Gabor patches, simulating a rotation, and instructed to respond to the last stimulus (target) to indicate whether or not it continued the direction of the first three stimuli. Each experiment included a short-term learning phase in which the probabilities of these two options were very different ( p = .2 vs. p = .8, Rules A and B, respectively), followed by a neutral test phase in which both probabilities were equal. In addition, in one of the experiments, prior to the short-term phase, participants performed a much longer long-term learning phase where the relative probabilities of the rules predicting targets were opposite to those of the short-term phase. Analyses of the RTs and P3 amplitudes showed that, in the neutral test phase, participants initially predicted targets according to the probabilities learned in the short-term phase. However, whereas participants not pre-exposed to the long-term learning phase gradually adjusted their predictions to the neutral probabilities, for those who performed the long-term phase, the short-term associations were spontaneously replaced by those learned in that phase. This indicates that the long-term associations remained intact whereas the short-term associations were learned, transiently used, and abandoned when the context changed. The spontaneous recovery suggests independent storage and control of long-term and short-term associations.
Journal Articles
Publisher: Journals Gateway
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (2012) 24 (2): 464–474.
Published: 01 February 2012
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In the absence of visual information, our brain is able to recognize the actions of others by representing their sounds as a motor event. Previous studies have provided evidence for a somatotopic activation of the listener's motor cortex during perception of the sound of highly familiar motor acts. The present experiments studied (a) how the motor system is activated by action-related sounds that are newly acquired and (b) whether these sounds are represented with reference to extrinsic features related to action goals rather than with respect to lower-level intrinsic parameters related to the specific movements. TMS was used to measure the correspondence between auditory and motor codes in the listener's motor system. We compared the corticomotor excitability in response to the presentation of auditory stimuli void of previous motor meaning before and after a short training period in which these stimuli were associated with voluntary actions. Novel cross-modal representations became manifest very rapidly. By disentangling the representation of the muscle from that of the action's goal, we further showed that passive listening to newly learnt action-related sounds activated a precise motor representation that depended on the variable contexts to which the individual was exposed during testing. Our results suggest that the human brain embodies a higher-order audio-visuo-motor representation of perceived actions, which is muscle-independent and corresponds to the goals of the action.