Browsing by Author "Perrone-Bertolotti, Marcela"

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    A Visuospatial Planning Task Coupled with Eye-Tracker and Electroencephalogram Systems
    (2023) Domic Siede, Marcos; Irani, Martin; Valdes, Joaquin; Rodriguez, Maria; Follet, Brice; Perrone-Bertolotti, Marcela; Ossandon, Tomas
    The planning process, characterized by the capability to formulate an organized plan to reach a goal, is essential for human goal-directed behavior. Since planning is compromised in several neuropsychiatric disorders, the implementation of proper clinical and experimental tests to examine planning is critical. Due to the nature of the deployment of planning, in which several cognitive domains participate, the assessment of planning and the design of behavioral paradigms coupled with neuroimaging methods are current challenges in cognitive neuroscience. A planning task was evaluated in combination with an electroencephalogram (EEG) system and eye movement recordings in 27 healthy adult participants. Planning can be separated into two stages: a mental planning stage in which a sequence of steps is internally represented and an execution stage in which motor action is used to achieve a previously planned goal. Our protocol included a planning task and a control task. The planning task involved solving 36 maze trials, each representing a zoo map. The task had four periods: i) planning, where the subjects were instructed to plan a path to visit the locations of four animals according to a set of rules; ii) maintenance, where the subjects had to retain the planned path in their working memory; iii) execution, where the subjects used eye movements to trace the previously planned path as indicated by the eye-tracker system; and iv) response, where the subjects reported the order of the visited animals. The control task had a similar structure, but the cognitive planning component was removed by modifying the task goal. The spatial and temporal patterns of the EEG revealed that planning induces a gradual and lasting rise in frontal-midline theta activity (FM?) over time. The source of this activity was identified within the prefrontal cortex by source analyses. Our results suggested that the experimental paradigm combining EEG and eye-tracker systems was optimal for evaluating cognitive planning.
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    Brain state-dependent recruitment of high-frequency oscillations in the human hippocampus
    (2017) Billeke, Pablo; Ossandón, Tomás; Stockle, Marcelo; Perrone-Bertolotti, Marcela; Kahane, Philippe; Lachaux, Jean-Philippe; Fuentealba, Pablo
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    Functional selectivity in the human occipitotemporal cortex during natural vision: Evidence from combined intracranial EEG and eye-tracking
    (2014) Hamame, Carlos M.; Vidal, Juan R.; Perrone-Bertolotti, Marcela; Ossandon, Tomas; Jerbi, Karim; Kahane, Philippe; Bertrand, Olivier; Lachaux, Jean-Philippe
    Eye movements are a constant and essential component of natural vision, yet, most of our knowledge about the human visual system comes from experiments that restrict them. This experimental constraint is mostly in place to control visual stimuli presentation and to avoid artifacts in non-invasive measures of brain activity, however, this limitation can be overcome with intracranial EEG (iEEG) recorded from epilepsy patients. Moreover, the high-frequency components of the iEEG signal (between about 50 and 150 Hz) can provide a proxy of population-level spiking activity in any cortical area during free-viewing. We combined iEEG with high precision eye-tracking to study fine temporal dynamics and functional specificity in the fusiform face (FFA) and visual word form area (VWFA) while patients inspected natural pictures containing faces and text. We defined the first local measure of visual (electrophysiological) responsiveness adapted to free-viewing in humans: amplitude modulations in the high-frequency activity range (50-150 Hz) following fixations (fixation-related high-frequency response). We showed that despite the large size of receptive fields in the ventral occipito-temporal cortex, neural activity during natural vision of realistic cluttered scenes is mostly dependent upon the category of the foveated stimulus - suggesting that category-specificity is preserved during free-viewing and that attention mechanisms might filter out the influence of objects surrounding the fovea. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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    How Silent Is Silent Reading? Intracerebral Evidence for Top-Down Activation of Temporal Voice Areas during Reading
    (2012) Perrone-Bertolotti, Marcela; Kujala, Jan; Vidal, Juan R.; Hamame, Carlos M.; Ossandon, Tomas; Bertrand, Olivier; Minotti, Lorella; Kahane, Philippe; Jerbi, Karim; Lachaux, Jean-Philippe
    As you might experience it while reading this sentence, silent reading often involves an imagery speech component: we can hear our own "inner voice" pronouncing words mentally. Recent functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have associated that component with increased metabolic activity in the auditory cortex, including voice-selective areas. It remains to be determined, however, whether this activation arises automatically from early bottom-up visual inputs or whether it depends on late top-down control processes modulated by task demands. To answer this question, we collaborated with four epileptic human patients recorded with intracranial electrodes in the auditory cortex for therapeutic purposes, and measured high-frequency (50 - 150 Hz) "gamma" activity as a proxy of population level spiking activity. Temporal voice-selective areas (TVAs) were identified with an auditory localizer task and monitored as participants viewed words flashed on screen. We compared neural responses depending on whether words were attended or ignored and found a significant increase of neural activity in response to words, strongly enhanced by attention. In one of the patients, we could record that response at 800 ms in TVAs, but also at 700 ms in the primary auditory cortex and at 300 ms in the ventral occipital temporal cortex. Furthermore, single-trial analysis revealed a considerable jitter between activation peaks in visual and auditory cortices. Altogether, our results demonstrate that the multimodal mental experience of reading is in fact a heterogeneous complex of asynchronous neural responses, and that auditory and visual modalities often process distinct temporal frames of our environment at the same time.
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    Human Anterior Insula Encodes Performance Feedback and Relays Prediction Error to the Medial Prefrontal Cortex
    (2020) Billeke, Pablo; Ossandon, Tomas; Perrone-Bertolotti, Marcela; Kahane, Philippe; Bastin, Julien; Jerbi, Karim; Lachaux, Jean-Philippe; Fuentealba, Pablo
    Adaptive behavior requires the comparison of outcome predictions with actual outcomes (e.g., performance feedback). This process of performance monitoring is computed by a distributed brain network comprising the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the anterior insular cortex (AIC). Despite being consistently co-activated during different tasks, the precise neuronal computations of each region and their interactions remain elusive. In order to assess the neural mechanism by which the AIC processes performance feedback, we recorded AIC electrophysiological activity in humans. We found that the AIC beta oscillations amplitude is modulated by the probability of performance feedback valence (positive or negative) given the context (task and condition difficulty). Furthermore, the valence of feedback was encoded by delta waves phase-modulating the power of beta oscillations. Finally, connectivity and causal analysis showed that beta oscillations relay feedback information signals to the mPFC. These results reveal that structured oscillatory activity in the anterior insula encodes performance feedback information, thus coordinating brain circuits related to reward-based learning.