People often remain "blind" to visual changes occurring during a brief interruption of the display. The processing stages responsible for such failure remain unresolved. We used event-related potentials to determine the time course of brain activity during conscious change detection versus change blindness. Participants saw two successive visual displays, each with two faces, and reported whether one of the faces changed between the first and second displays. Relative to blindness, change detection was associated with a distinct pattern of neural activity at several successive processing stages, including an enhanced occipital P1 response and a sustained frontal activity (CNV-like potential) after the first display, before the change itself. The amplitude of the N170 and P3 responses after the second visual display were also modulated by awareness of the face change. Furthermore, a unique topography of event-related potential activity was observed during correct change and correct no-change reports, but not during blindness, with a recurrent time course in the stimulus sequence and simultaneous sources in the parietal and temporo-occipital cortex. These results indicate that awareness of visual changes may depend on the attentional state subserved by coordinated neural activity in a distributed network, before the onset of the change itself.

Disability decreased and HRQoL improved after TBI between 3-12 months. In geriatric patients this improvement was relevant for HRQoL only.

While cognitive interventions aiming at reinforcing intentional executive control of unwanted response showed only modest effects on impulse control disorders, the establishment of fast automatic, stimulus-driven inhibition of responses to specific events with implementation intention self-regulation strategies has proven to be an effective remediation approach. However, the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying implementation intentions remain largely unresolved. We addressed this question by comparing electrical neuroimaging analyses of event-related potentials recorded during a Go/NoGo task between groups of healthy participants receiving either standard or implementation intentions instructions on the inhibition stimuli. Inhibition performance improvements with implementation intentions were associated with a Group by Stimulus interaction 200–250 ms post-stimulus onset driven by a selective decrease in response to the inhibition stimuli within the left superior temporal gyrus, the right precuneus and the right temporo-parietal junction. We further observed that the implementation intentions group showed already at the beginning of the task the pattern of task-related functional activity reached after practice in the group having received standard instructions. We interpret our results in terms of an immediate establishment of an automatic, bottom-up form of inhibitory control by implementation intentions, supported by stimulus-driven retrieval of verbally encoded stimulus-response mapping rules, which in turn triggered inhibitory processes.

This study investigated functional MRI (fMRI) cerebral correlates of beat- and duration-based sensorimotor synchronization (SMS). We developed an original paradigm to compare SMS in beat-based versus duration-based contexts. In the beat-based conditions, participants synchronized finger taps with a regular beat. The condition had either metrical or nonmetrical subdivisions (2:1 vs. 2.4:1 ratio). In the duration-based conditions, participants synchronized by referring to a cue tone appearing 300 ms ahead of an irregularly occurring target tone. The behavioral results suggest the use of different strategies for beat-based and duration-based conditions. Synchronization accuracy was similar in both types of tasks. However, participants reported higher attentional demands in duration-based conditions. ICA analysis of the fMRI data isolated 2 underlying cerebral networks for all tasks, both more strongly involved in duration-based conditions. The first brain network involved the bilateral superior temporal gyrus, supplementary motor area, and inferior frontal gyrus; the left dorsal premotor cortex and primary motor cortex; and the right posterior cerebellum. The second brain network involved the bilateral basal ganglia, thalamus, inferior parietal lobules, and cerebellum. We suggest that the first network managed temporal information processing and execution of motor commands, and that the second controlled error correction processing. The involvement of the same pool of cerebral resources with different strengths according to the level of regularity of the input may represent a principle of parsimony: as beat-based SMS allows better anticipation, it requires less cerebral resources than duration-based SMS.

This original research focused on the effect of musical training intensity on cerebral and behavioral processing of complex music using high-density event-related potential (ERP) approaches. Recently we have been able to show progressive changes with training in gray and white matter, and higher order brain functioning using (f)MRI [(functional) Magnetic Resonance Imaging], as well as changes in musical and general cognitive functioning. The current study investigated the same population of non-musicians, amateur pianists and expert pianists using spatio-temporal ERP analysis, by means of microstate analysis, and ERP source imaging. The stimuli consisted of complex musical compositions containing three levels of transgression of musical syntax at closure that participants appraised. ERP waveforms, microstates and underlying brain sources revealed gradual differences according to musical expertise in a 300–500 ms window after the onset of the terminal chords of the pieces. Within this time-window, processing seemed to concern context-based memory updating, indicated by a P3b-like component or microstate for which underlying sources were localized in the right middle temporal gyrus, anterior cingulate and right parahippocampal areas. Given that the 3 expertise groups were carefully matched for demographic factors, these results provide evidence of the progressive impact of training on brain and behavior.