Perception articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    “Visual performance might vary during natural behaviour such as walking. Here, the authors use wireless virtual reality to show that oscillations in performance on a visual detection task were systematically linked to the phase of the stride cycle.”

    • Matthew J. Davidson
    • , Frans A. J. Verstraten
    •  & David Alais
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The neural substrates of time perception are still unclear. Here, the authors show that as rats judged tactile stimuli, optogenetic manipulation of somatosensory cortex systematically altered perception of stimulus intensity and of duration, unveiling a multiplexed code.

    • Sebastian Reinartz
    • , Arash Fassihi
    •  & Mathew E. Diamond
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Whether visual illusions and mental imagery are similarly represented in visual cortex is not well understood. Here, the authors show that imagery content is mainly detectable in deep layers of V1, whereas illusory content is decodable mainly from superficial layers.

    • Johanna Bergmann
    • , Lucy S. Petro
    •  & Lars Muckli
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The associations between sleep, depression and brain activity are not well understood. Here, the authors show patterns of brain activity associated with insomnia and depression resemble those found in people who sleep less, but only under cognitive load. At rest, these activation patterns are hyperconnected and resemble those found in longer sleepers.

    • Mohamed Abdelhack
    • , Peter Zhukovsky
    •  & Daniel Felsky
  • Article
    | Open Access

    People can have perceptual illusions that they realize are not real. Here, the authors show that this type of reality testing can be explained by a Bayesian inference model that incorporates introspective knowledge.

    • Andra Mihali
    • , Marianne Broeker
    •  & Guillermo Horga
  • Article
    | Open Access

    How salient objects in our environment grab our attention has been a matter of debate for decades. Here, the authors demonstrate that salient objects automatically capture attention, but cognitive effort can affect their potency.

    • Jacob A. Westerberg
    • , Jeffrey D. Schall
    •  & Alexander Maier
  • Article
    | Open Access

    It has been unclear whether human FEF and early visual cortex play a role in the perceptual modulations preceding saccades. Here, the authors show that V1/2 TMS reduces sensitivity at the contralateral target just before saccade onset, and rFEF+TMS enhances sensitivity where presaccadic perception is poor.

    • Nina M. Hanning
    • , Antonio Fernández
    •  & Marisa Carrasco
  • Article
    | Open Access

    How brain networks process dynamic naturalistic stimuli is not well understood. Here, the authors use machine learning algorithms to show that brain states in the default network capture the semantic aspects of an unfolding narrative during movie watching.

    • Enning Yang
    • , Filip Milisav
    •  & Danilo Bzdok
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The neural processes underlying the prediction of unfolding external dynamics are not well understood. Here, the authors combine magnetoencephalography and naturalistic dynamic stimuli and show predictive neural representations of observed actions which are hierarchical in nature.

    • Ingmar E. J. de Vries
    •  & Moritz F. Wurm
  • Article
    | Open Access

    It remains unclear whether autism spectrum disorder is characterized by changes in predictive mechanisms. Here, the authors show that, in both neurotypical and autistic adults, priors influence percepts at the behavioral and neural levels and are hierarchically encoded in the brain.

    • Laurie-Anne Sapey-Triomphe
    • , Lauren Pattyn
    •  & Johan Wagemans
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors examine how the brain processes actions performed by humans and events involving objects. Their findings suggest that a common neural code is used in the brain’s action observation network to represent event information, regardless of animacy.

    • Seda Karakose-Akbiyik
    • , Alfonso Caramazza
    •  & Moritz F. Wurm
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Movies are complex, continuous stimuli that are characterized by visual and semantic novelty. Here, by leveraging intracranial recordings from 23 humans, the authors find that responses to novelty across film cuts and saccades are widespread in the brain.

    • Maximilian Nentwich
    • , Marcin Leszczynski
    •  & Lucas C. Parra
  • Article
    | Open Access

    How the human visual system leverages the rich structure in object motion for perception remains unclear. Here, Bill et al. propose a theory of how the brain could infer motion relations in real time and offer a unifying explanation for various perceptual phenomena.

    • Johannes Bill
    • , Samuel J. Gershman
    •  & Jan Drugowitsch
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Speech unfolds faster than the brain completes processing of speech sounds. Here, the authors show that brain activity moves systematically within neural populations of auditory cortex, allowing accurate representation of a speech sound’s identity and its position in the sound sequence.

    • Laura Gwilliams
    • , Jean-Remi King
    •  & David Poeppel
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The brain adapts dynamically to the statistics of its environment. Here, the authors use psychophysics and model-based representational fMRI and EEG to show that audiovisual recalibration relies on distinct spatial and decisional codes that are expressed with opposite gradients and time courses across the auditory processing hierarchy.

    • Máté Aller
    • , Agoston Mihalik
    •  & Uta Noppeney
  • Article
    | Open Access

    How the thalamus and the cortex interact in the context of perception remains largely unclear. Here, the authors show that rhythmic activity in the human mediodorsal thalamus and prefrontal cortex interact to predict whether a near-threshold visual stimulus will be seen, contradicting the traditional view that the thalamus is a simple relay.

    • Benjamin J. Griffiths
    • , Tino Zaehle
    •  & Tobias Staudigl
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Utilizing spaceflight and its ground-based analog, the authors show how the Earth’s gravity sustains the human brain’s orientation-dependent sensitivity to biological motion signals based on neural computations of visual and vestibular gravitational cues.

    • Ying Wang
    • , Xue Zhang
    •  & Yi Jiang
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Neural mechanisms that arbitrate between integrating and segregating multisensory information are essential for complex scene analysis. Here, the authors show the existence of multisensory correlation detectors in the human brain which explains why and how causal inference is driven by the temporal correlation of multisensory signals.

    • Jacques Pesnot Lerousseau
    • , Cesare V. Parise
    •  & Virginie van Wassenhove
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Hue (e.g. red, blue) and luminance polarity (light/dark) are basic visual features. This paper shows that the brain has both joint and separable representations of these features, and extracts hue approximately 20 milliseconds later, with a more sustained representation.

    • Katherine L. Hermann
    • , Shridhar R. Singh
    •  & Bevil R. Conway
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Waiblinger et al. investigate the role of primary sensory cortex in flexible behaviors. They show that neuronal signals in S1 are part of an adaptive and dynamic framework that facilitates flexible behavior as an individual gains experience, indicating a role for S1 in long-term adaptive strategies.

    • Christian Waiblinger
    • , Megan E. McDonnell
    •  & Garrett B. Stanley
  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is unknown whether object category learning can be formed purely through domain general learning of natural image structure. Here the authors show that human visual brain responses to objects are well-captured by self-supervised deep neural network models trained without labels, supporting a domain-general account.

    • Talia Konkle
    •  & George A. Alvarez
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Face-selective neurons are observed in the primate visual pathway and are considered as the basis of face detection in the brain. Here, using a hierarchical deep neural network model of the ventral visual stream, the authors suggest that face selectivity arises in the complete absence of training.

    • Seungdae Baek
    • , Min Song
    •  & Se-Bum Paik
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Priors learnt from lifetime experiences influence perception. The authors show that when perception is congruent with a long-term prior, there is increased top-down input in the ventral visual stream, whereas bottom-up input is enhanced when perception is incongruent with prior.

    • Richard Hardstone
    • , Michael Zhu
    •  & Biyu J. He
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Identical physical inputs can evoke non-identical percepts. Here, the authors investigate the sources of such variability and find that rats and humans, trained to judge tactile vibration strength, express a robust sequential effect that could be modeled as the trial-by-trial incorporation of sensory history.

    • I. Hachen
    • , S. Reinartz
    •  & M. E. Diamond
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Feedback modulates visual neurons, thought to help achieve flexible task performance. Here, the authors show decision-related feedback is not only relayed to task-relevant neurons, suggesting a broader mechanism and supporting a previously hypothesized link to feature-based attention.

    • Katrina R. Quinn
    • , Lenka Seillier
    •  & Hendrikje Nienborg
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The representation of space in mouse visual cortex was considered to be relatively uniform. The authors show that mice have improved visual resolution in a cortical region representing a location in space directly in front and slightly above them, showing that the representation of space in mouse visual cortex is non-uniform.

    • Enny H. van Beest
    • , Sreedeep Mukherjee
    •  & Matthew W. Self
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Here, the authors show that the brain represents small and large numerosity ranges in a continuous topographic map, in line with the idea that differences in map properties underlie differences in perception.

    • Yuxuan Cai
    • , Shir Hofstetter
    •  & Serge O. Dumoulin
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cortical and subcortical neural activity supporting conscious object recognition has not yet been well defined. Here, the authors describe these networks and show recognition-related category information can be decoded from widespread cortical activity but not subcortical activity.

    • Max Levinson
    • , Ella Podvalny
    •  & Biyu J. He
  • Article
    | Open Access

    How is neural processing adjusted when people experience uncertainty about the relevance of a stimulus feature? Here, the authors provide evidence suggesting that heightened uncertainty shifts cortical networks from a rhythmic to an asynchronous (“excited”) state and that the thalamus is central for such uncertainty-related shifts.

    • Julian Q. Kosciessa
    • , Ulman Lindenberger
    •  & Douglas D. Garrett
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humans process faces using face-selective regions in the ventral and lateral streams which perform different tasks. Here, the authors show via functional and diffusion MRI that the spatial computations in face-selective regions vary across streams, constrained by connections from early visual areas.

    • Dawn Finzi
    • , Jesse Gomez
    •  & Kalanit Grill-Spector
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Neural networks trained using predictive models generate representations that recover the underlying low-dimensional latent structure in the data. Here, the authors demonstrate that a network trained on a spatial navigation task generates place-related neural activations similar to those observed in the hippocampus and show that these are related to the latent structure.

    • Stefano Recanatesi
    • , Matthew Farrell
    •  & Eric Shea-Brown
  • Article
    | Open Access

    Different languages rely on different vocal sounds to convey meaning. Here the authors show that language-general coding of pitch occurs in the non-primary auditory cortex for both tonal (Mandarin Chinese) and non-tonal (English) languages, with some language specificity on the population level.

    • Yuanning Li
    • , Claire Tang
    •  & Edward F. Chang
  • Article
    | Open Access

    The study reports that implicitly learned, statistically defined chunks of abstract visual shapes elicit similar object-based perceptual effects as images of true objects with visual boundaries do. This result links the emergence of object representations to implicit statistical learning mechanisms.

    • Gábor Lengyel
    • , Márton Nagy
    •  & József Fiser