Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (JoCN) (@jocn) Bsky

2026 @jocn.bsky.social Travel Fellowship
@jocn.bsky.social and Cog. Neurosci. Soc. to offer a stipend of $3000, plus waived conf. reg. and waived poster submission fee to attend www.cogneurosociety.org/annual-meeti... , to one trainee based at an institution located in each of five regions:

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Task-dependent Modulation Masking of 4 Hz Envelope Following Responses Abstract The perception and recognition of natural sounds, like speech, rely on the processing of slow amplitude modulations. Perception can be hindered by interfering modulations at similar rates, a phenomenon known as modulation masking. Cortical envelope following responses (EFRs) are highly sensitive to these slow modulations, but it is unclear how modulation masking impacts these cortical envelope responses. To dissociate stimulus-driven and attention-driven effects, we recorded EEG responses to 4 Hz modulated noise in a two-way factorial design, varying the level of modulation masking and intermodal attention. Auditory stimuli contained one of three random masking bands in the stimulus envelope, at various proximities in modulation frequency to the 4 Hz target, or an unmasked reference condition. During EEG recordings, the same stimuli were presented while participants performed either an auditory or a visual change detection task. Attention to the auditory modality resulted in a general enhancement of sustained EFR responses to the 4 Hz target. In the visual task condition only, EFR 4 Hz power systematically decreased with increasing modulation masking, consistent with psychophysical masking patterns. However, during the auditory task, the 4 Hz EFRs were unaffected by masking and remained strong even with the highest degrees of masking. Rather than indicating a general bottom–up modulation selective process, these results indicate that the masking of cortical envelope responses interacts with attention. We propose that auditory attention allows robust tracking of masked envelopes, possibly through a form of glimpsing of the target, whereas envelope responses to task-irrelevant auditory stimuli reflect stimulus salience. © 2025 Massachusetts Institute of Technology You do not currently have access to this content.

11 months ago 2 0 0 0

Enhanced Delta Band Neural Tracking of Degraded Fundamental Frequency Speech in Noisy Environments Abstract Pitch variation of the fundamental frequency (F0) is critical to speech understanding, especially in noisy environments. Degrading the F0 contour reduces behaviorally measured speech intelligibility, posing greater challenges for tonal languages like Mandarin Chinese where the F0 pattern determines semantic meaning. However, neural tracking of Mandarin speech with degraded F0 information in noisy environments remains unclear. This study investigated neural envelope tracking of continuous Mandarin speech with three F0-flattening levels (original, flat-tone, and flat-all) under various signal-to-noise ratios (0, −9, and −12 dB). F0 contours were flattened at the word level for flat-tone and at the sentence level for flat-all Mandarin speech. Electroencephalography responses were indexed by the temporal response function in the delta (<4 Hz) and theta (4–8 Hz) frequency bands. Results show that delta-band envelope tracking is modulated by the degree of F0 flattening in a nonmonotonic manner. Notably, flat-tone Mandarin speech elicited the strongest envelope tracking compared with both original and flat-all speech, despite reduced F0 information. In contrast, the theta band, which primarily encodes speech signal-to-noise level, was not affected by F0 changes. In addition, listeners with better pitch-related music skills exhibited more efficient neural envelope speech tracking, despite being musically naive. These findings indicate that neural envelope tracking in the delta (but not theta) band is highly specific to F0 pitch variation and highlight the role of intrinsic musical skills for speech-in-noise benefits. © 2025 Massachusetts Institute of Technology You do not currently have access to this content.

11 months ago 0 0 0 0

Bilingualism Is Associated with Significant Structural and Connectivity Alterations in the Thalamus in Adulthood Abstract Language is a sophisticated cognitive skill that relies on the coordinated activity of cerebral cortex. Acquiring a second language creates intricate modifications in brain connectivity. Although considerable studies have evaluated the impact of second language acquisition on brain networks in adulthood, the results regarding the ultimate form of adaptive plasticity remain inconsistent within the adult population. Furthermore, due to the assumption that subcortical regions are not significantly involved in language-related tasks, the thalamus has rarely been analyzed in relation to other language-relevant cortical regions. Given these limitations, we aimed to evaluate the functional connectivity and volume modifications of thalamic subfields using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) modalities following the acquisition of a second language. Structural MRI and fMRI data from 51 participants were collected from the OpenNeuro database. The participants were divided into three groups: monolingual (ML), early bilingual (EB), and late bilingual (LB). The EB group consisted of individuals proficient in both English and Spanish, with exposure to these languages before the age of 10 years. The LB group consisted of individuals proficient in both English and Spanish, but with exposure to these languages after the age of 14 years. The ML group included participants proficient only in English. Our results revealed that the ML group exhibited increased functional connectivity in all thalamic subfields (anterior, intralaminar-medial, lateral, ventral, and pulvinar) compared with the EB and LB groups. In addition, a significantly decreased volume of the left suprageniculate nucleus was found in the bilingual groups compared with the ML group. This study provides valuable evidence suggesting that acquiring a second language may be protective against dementia, due to its high plasticity potential, which acts synergistically with cognitive functions to slow the degenerative process. © 2025 Massachusetts Institute of Technology You do not currently have access to this content.

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Temporal Unfolding of Spelling-to-Sound Mappings in Visual (Pseudo)word Recognition Abstract Behavioral research has shown that inconsistency in spelling-to-sound mappings slows visual word recognition and word naming. However, the time course of this effect remains underexplored. To address this, we asked skilled adult readers to perform a 1-back repetition detection task that did not explicitly involve phonological coding, in which we manipulated lexicality (high-frequency words vs. pseudowords) and sublexical spelling-to-sound consistency (treated as a dichotomous—consistent vs. inconsistent—and continuous dimension), while recording their brain electrical activity. The ERP results showed that the adult brain distinguishes between real and nonexistent words within 119–172 msec after stimulus onset (early N170), likely reflecting initial, rapid access to a primitive visuo-orthographic representation. The consistency of spelling-to-sound mappings exerted an effect shortly after the lexicality effect (172–270 msec; late N170), which percolated to the 353- to 475-msec range but only for real words. This suggests that, in expert readers, orthographic and phonological codes become available automatically and nearly simultaneously within the first 200 msec of the recognition process. We conclude that the early coupling of orthographic and phonological information plays a core role in visual word recognition by mature readers. Our findings support “quasiparallel” processing rather than strict cognitive seriality in early visual word recognition. © 2025 Massachusetts Institute of Technology You do not currently have access to this content.

11 months ago 1 1 0 0

Distinguishing Neural Correlates of Prediction Errors on Perceptual Content and Detection of Content Abstract Accounting for why discrimination between different perceptual contents is not always accompanied by conscious detection of that content remains a challenge for predictive processing theories of perception. Here, we test a hypothesis that detection is supported by a distinct inference within generative models of perceptual content. We develop a novel visual perception paradigm that probes such inferences by manipulating both expectations about stimulus content (stimulus identity) and detection of content (stimulus presence). In line with model simulations, we show that both content and detection expectations influence RTs on a categorization task. By combining a no-report version of our task with functional neuroimaging, we reveal that violations of expectations (prediction errors [PEs]) about perceptual content and detection are supported by visual cortex and pFC in qualitatively different ways: Within visual cortex, activity patterns diverge only on trials with a content PE, but within these trials, further divergence is seen for detection PEs. In contrast, within pFC, activity patterns diverge only on trials with a detection PE, but within these trials, further divergence is seen for content PEs. These results suggest rich encoding of both content and detection PEs and highlight a distributed neural basis for inference on content and detection of content in the human brain. © 2024 Massachusetts Institute of Technology You do not currently have access to this content.

11 months ago 1 0 0 0

Functional Brain Networks Underlying Autobiographical Event Simulation: An Update AbstractfMRI studies typically explore changes in the BOLD signal underlying discrete cognitive processes that occur over milliseconds to a few seconds. However, autobiographical cognition is a protracted process and requires fMRI tasks with longer trials to capture the temporal dynamics of the underlying brain networks. In the current study, we provided an updated analysis of the fMRI data obtained from a published autobiographical event simulation study, with a slow event-related design (34-sec trials), that involved participants recalling past, imagining past, and imagining future autobiographical events, as well as completing a semantic association control task. Our updated analysis using Constrained Principal Component Analysis for fMRI retrieved two networks reported in the original study: (1) the Default Mode Network, which activated during the autobiographical event simulation conditions but deactivated during the control condition, and (2) the Multiple Demand Network, which activated early in all conditions during the construction of the required representations (i.e., autobiographical events or semantic associates). Two novel networks also emerged: (1) the Response Network, which activated during the scale-rating phase, and (2) the Maintaining Internal Attention Network, which, while active in all conditions during the elaboration of details associated with the simulated events, was more strongly engaged during the imagination and semantic association control conditions. Our findings suggest that the Default Mode Network does not support autobiographical simulation alone, but it co-activates with the Multiple Demand Network and Maintaining Internal Attention Network, with the timing of activations depending on evolving task demands during the simulation process.

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