"The study compared electrical brain activity of subjects in five different conditions: eyes-closed at rest, eyes-open at rest, looking at a flashing object, looking at apparent movement, and looking at real movement. Absolute theta and alpha power in the frontal and occipital areas were analyzed. Significant differences were found in the frontal area. Results suggest that perceived movement requires higher order cognitive processes outside the occipital area. Implications for education and cognitive research are discussed." --

Motion processing is an essential piece of the complex brain machinery that allows us to reconstruct the 3D layout of objects in the environment, to break camouflage, to perform scene segmentation, to estimate the ego movement, and to control our action. Although motion perception and its neural basis have been a topic of intensive research and modeling the last two decades, recent experimental evidences have stressed the dynamical aspects of motion integration and segmentation. This book presents the most recent approaches that have changed our view of biological motion processing. These new experimental evidences call for new models emphasizing the collective dynamics of large population of neurons rather than the properties of separate individual filters. Chapters will stress how the dynamics of motion processing can be used as a general approach to understand the brain dynamics itself.

It had been difficult to find appropriate teaching material for students and newcomers to this field of brain electromagnetic topography. In part, this is due to the many disciplines involved, requiring some knowledge of the physical sciences, mathematics, neurophysiology and anatomy. It is my hope that this book will be found suitable for introducing interested workers to this exciting field. Advanced topics will not be covered, as there are many excellent texts available. Peter K.H. Wong vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT My co-authors, Hal Weinberg and Roberto Bencivenga, for their support; Richard Hamer, for all his early advice; Ernst Rodin and Gene Ramsay, for their encouragement; Wendy Cummings for her assistance; Technologists from the Department of Diagnostic Neurophysiology for collecting such excellent data; Bio-Logic Systems Corp. for permission to use some data as illustration; and all my friends and colleagues. My wife Elke, for putting up with me throughout this presumptuous endeavour. The manuscript was delivered in camera-ready form to the Publisher. Illustrations were created using Harvard Graphics and CorelDraw software. ix CONTENTS Part 1: Fundamentals. 1 1.1 Introduction . . . 1 1.2 Data Aquisition. . 3 Map Construction. 8 Interpolation . . . 12 1.3 Spatial Sampling . . 16 1.4 Reference and Reference-Dependence 20 1.5 Map Display Methods ..... . 27 Scaling and Floating Voltage Scales. 37 Summary Maps .......... . 37 1.6 Identification of Topographic Features 41 1.7 Spike Mapping .. . 51 1.8 Post-Processing 61 Analog Front-end. 62 Digital Filtering . 63 Reference Manipulation .. 65 Statistical Mapping .

The neuroscientist Alain Berthoz experimented on Russian astronauts in space to answer these questions: How does weightlessness affect motion? How are motion and three-dimensional space perceived? In this erudite and witty book, Berthoz describes how human beings on earth perceive and control bodily movement. Reviewing a wealth of research in neurophysiology and experimental psychology, he argues for a rethinking of the traditional separation between action and perception, and for the division of perception into five senses. In Berthoz’s view, perception and cognition are inherently predictive, functioning to allow us to anticipate the consequences of current or potential actions. The brain acts like a simulator that is constantly inventing models to project onto the changing world, models that are corrected by steady, minute feedback from the world. We move in the direction we are looking, anticipate the trajectory of a falling ball, recover when we stumble, and continually update our own physical position, all thanks to this sense of movement. This interpretation of perception and action allows Berthoz, in The Brain’s Sense of Movement, to focus on psychological phenomena largely ignored in standard texts: proprioception and kinaesthesis, the mechanisms that maintain balance and coordinate actions, and basic perceptual and memory processes involved in navigation.

The general purpose of this research was to relate topographical mapping of brain electrical activity to performance on several tasks with different cognitive demands. A total of 35 subjects were studied. Fifteen subjects participated in a linguistic cognitive task. Eight subjects participated in exploratory studies of the Sternberg memory task. Based on these exploratory studies, twelve subjects participated in an experiment in which event related cortical potentials were recorded while they performed the Sternberg task. The overall results indicate that brain topography is a potentially powerful technique for relating brain functions to performance on tasks with varying cognitive demands. The present results with the Sternberg task, for example, not only confirmed past research results but also clearly indicated relationships between brain functions and performance on this task that had not previously been shown. One example was that a negative event related potential component (ERP) at 200 ms after the presentation of the stimulus was related to response set performance (positive vs. negative responses) primarily in the left hemisphere and more specifically in areas of the left temporal lobe often involved in memory and/or speech reception and articulation. These and other results are discussed in the report. Keywords: Electroencephalography psychophysiology. (aw).

Vols. for 1963- include as pt. 2 of the Jan. issue: Medical subject headings.

This important book includes research derived from non-invasive brain imaging modalities used to explore the spatial and temporal organisation of the neural systems supporting human behaviour. Imaging modalities of interest include positron emission tomography, event-related potentials, electro-and magnetoencephalography, magnetic resonance imaging, and single-photon emission tomography. Coverage includes novel brain imaging methods, analyses for detecting or localising neural activity, synergistic uses of multiple imaging modalities, and strategies for the design of behavioural paradigms and neural-systems modelling.