Antònia Siquier Perelló gana la fase local del concurso #HiloTesis2023

Antonia’s Twitter thread explaining her doctoral thesis will represent the University of the Balearic Islands in the national competition.

Antònua Siquier Perelló

Congratulations Anònia!

PhD student Antònia Siquier Perelló, supervised by Prof. Pilar Andrés, is the winner of the local phase of the #HiloTesis2023 competition, a competition in which participants must disseminate their doctoral thesis in a thread of, at most, 20 tweets, taking into account the limitations and possibilities offered by the social network Twitter.

The series of messages about her doctoral thesis has focused on a new approach to understanding Parkinson's disease through an innovative statistical method called the Item Specific Deficit Approach. This method quantifies the cognitive deficits of patients in an episodic memory test and analyzes their sensitivity.

Antònia Siquier Perelló's doctoral thesis is part of the research activity of our research group (Neurocog) and could be clinically relevant. The study implies that there is also neurodegeneration in the hippocampal structures of patients with Parkinson's disease. This method could also contribute to learning more about the cognitive relationship between neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Antonia’s doctoral publication so far:

Siquier, A., & Andrés, P. (in press). Facial emotion recognition in Parkinson’s disease: the role of executive and affective domains. Neuropsychology.
Siquier, A., & Andrés, P. (2022). Face name matching and memory complaints in Parkinson’s disease. Frontiers in Psychology, 13:1051488. doi: 0.3389/fpsyg.2022.1051488
Siquier, A., & Andrés, P. (2021). Episodic memory impairment in Parkinson’s disease: Disentangling the role of encoding and retrieval. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 27(3), 261-269. doi: 10.1017/S1355617720000909
Siquier A, Andrés P. (2021, Jan 15). Cognitive and Behavioral Inhibition Deficits in Parkinson's Disease: The Hayling Test as a Reliable Marker. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscence. doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2020.621603. PMID: 33519424; PMCID: PMC7843521.

Fabrice Parmentier presenter at the Open Sesame workshop at the University of Utrecht (The Netherlands)

Fabrice Parmentier has been invited to present part of the upcoming workshop organized by the University Utrecht. the workshop, entitled “An introduction to experiment building with OpenSesame” will introduce research students to the use of Open Sesame and its OSWeb component to run psychology and socal science experiments in the lab and online. the workshop will take place on May 24-26.

Ipsilateral alpha waves suggest role for spatial shift in cross-modal deviance distraction.

Our latest study, in press in Psychophysiology, was led by Annekathrin Weise (Paris Lodron University of Salzburg, Austria, and Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany) and reports magnetoencephalographic and behaviral data indicating that the distraction yielded by unexpected sounds involves a shift of spatial attention.

Topoplot of the alpha power distribution in the 0.2 - 0.6 s time window following deviant onset. Stars indicate channels on which there was a prominent statistical effect.

Reference: Weise, A., Hartmann, T., Parmentier, F. B. R., Weisz, N., & Ruhnau, P. (2023). Involuntary shifts of spatial attention contribute to behavioral crossmodal distraction: Evidence from oscillatory alpha power and reaction time data. Psychophysiology, 00:e14353. http://doi.org/10.1111/psyp.14353

Abstract: Imagine you are focusing on the traffic on a busy street to ride a bike safely when suddenly you hear the siren of an ambulance. This unexpected sound involuntarily captures your attention and interferes with ongoing performance. We test whether this type of behavioral distraction involves a spatial shift of attention. We measured behavioral distraction and magnetoencephalographic alpha power during a crossmodal paradigm that combined an exogenous cueing task and a distraction task. On each trial, a task-irrelevant sound preceded a visual target (left or right). The sound was usually the same animal sound (i.e., standard sound). Rarely, it was replaced by an unexpected environmental sound (i.e., deviant sound). Fifty percent of the deviants occurred on the same side as the target, and 50% occurred on the opposite side. Participants responded to the location of the target. As expected, responses were slower to targets that followed a deviant compared to a standard, reflecting behavioral distraction. Crucially, this distraction was mitigated by the spatial relationship between the targets and the deviants: responses were faster when targets followed deviants on the same versus different side, indexing a spatial shift of attention. This was further corroborated by a posterior alpha power modulation that was higher in the hemisphere ipsilateral (vs. contralateral) to the location of the attention-capturing deviant. We suggest that this alpha power lateralization reflects a spatial attention bias. Overall, our data support the contention that spatial shifts of attention contribute to behavioral deviant distraction.

Deviance distraction and environmental context

Our new study, published in Nature Scientific Reports, provides the first demonstration of the modulation of deviance distraction by the environmental context. This study was conducted together with our collaborators at the University of Vic (Spain), the University of Bologna (Italy) and at the University of Western Australia.

Reference: Parmentier, F. B. R., Gallego, L., Micucci, A., Leiva, A., Andrés, P., & Maybery, M. T. (2022). Distraction by deviant sounds is modulated by the environmental context. Nature Scientific Reports, 12, 21447. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-25500-y

Abstract: Evidence shows that participants performing a continuous visual categorization task respond slower following the presentation of a task-irrelevant sound deviating from an otherwise repetitive or predictable auditory context (deviant sound among standard sounds). Here, for the first time, we explored the role of the environmental context (instrumentalized as a task-irrelevant background picture) in this effect. In two experiments, participants categorized left/right arrows while ignoring irrelevant sounds and background pictures of forest and city scenes. While equiprobable across the task, sounds A and B were presented with probabilities of .882 and .118 in the forest context, respectively, and with the reversed probabilities in the city context. Hence, neither sound constituted a deviant sound at task-level, but each did within a specific context. In Experiment 1, where each environmental context (forest and city scene) consisted of a single picture each, participants were significantly slower in the visual task following the presentation of the sound that was unexpected within the current context (context-dependent distraction). Further analysis showed that the cognitive system reset its sensory predictions even for the first trial of a change in environmental context. In Experiment 2, the two contexts (forest and city) were implemented using sets of 19 pictures each, with the background picture changing on every trial. Here too, context-dependent deviance distraction was observed. However, participants took a trial to fully reset their sensory predictions upon a change in context. We conclude that irrelevant sounds are incidentally processed in association with the environmental context (even though these stimuli belong to different sensory modalities) and that sensory predictions are context-dependent. 

Mental and auditory load increase safety risks in the cockpit

A new study carried out in collaboration with by scientists at France’s Institute of Aeronautics and Space (ISAE-SUPAERO) and the University of Toulouse, shows that pilots are at significant risk of missing system alerts when undergoing high mental load and high auditory load. The study used a simulated cockpit task and registered behavioral and electrophysiological responses to variations in mental and perceptual loads. The combined effects of these two factors increased the proportion of missed alerts to an alarming 68%.

Reference: Causse, M., Parmentier, F. B. R., Mouratile, D., Thibaut, D., Kisselenko, M., & Fabre, E. (in press). Busy and confused? High risk of missed alerts in the cockpit: an electrophysiological study. Brain Research. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2022.148035

Highlights:

• Efficient perception of auditory alarms is essential in safety-critical contexts.

• Miss rate drastically increased with high mental and auditory loads.

• P3b amplitude indexed mental and auditory loads variations.

• P3b amplitude was anti-correlated with individual alarm miss rate.

• Auditory alarm efficiency could be assessed with P3b measures.

Abstract: The ability to react to unexpected auditory stimuli is critical in complex settings such as aircraft cockpits or air traffic control towers, characterized by high mental load and highly complex auditory environments (i.e., many different auditory alerts). Evidence shows that both factors can negatively impact auditory attention and prevent appropriate reactions. In the present study, 60 participants performed a simulated aviation task varying in terms of mental load (no, low, high) concurrently to a tone detection paradigm in which the complexity of the auditory environment (i.e., auditory load) was manipulated (1, 2 or 3 different tones). We measured both detection performance (miss, false alarm, d’) and brain activity (event-related potentials) associated with the target tone. Our results showed that both mental and auditory loads affected target tone detection performance. Importantly, their combined effects had a large impact on the percentage of missed target tones. While, in the no mental load condition, miss rate was very low with 1 (0.53%) and 2 tones (1.11%), it increased drastically with 3 tones (24.44%), and this effect was accentuated as mental load increased, yielding to the higher miss rate in the 3-tone paradigm under high mental load conditions (68.64%). Increased mental and auditory loads and miss rates were associated with disrupted brain responses to the target tone, as shown by a reduced P3b amplitude. In sum, our results highlight the importance of balancing mental and auditory loads to maintain efficient reactions to alarms in complex working environment.