Biology subjects

Avancini, C.

Publications and source records attributed to Avancini, C..

6 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Neural dynamics track the approach to physical exhaustion

Physical exhaustion has long been described through its cardiorespiratory and metabolic cost, while the neural dynamics of its approach remain largely unexplored. Here we recorded high-density electroencephalography in 28 trained cyclists during a maximal incremental test to characterise how neural dynamics change towards exhaustion. As physiological strain rose, oscillatory power shifted to lower frequencies, neural activity became more regular and predictable, and functional coupling extended to longer timescales. Participant-specific models built on neural dynamics tracked proximity to exhaustion with accuracy comparable to cardiorespiratory measures. Over the final minutes, neural features remained informative while cardiorespiratory measures lost accuracy. Models trained across participants still tracked proximity to exhaustion, but less precisely. The approach to exhaustion thus follows a common neural path, tuned to each individual.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2026

Drowsiness alters the neural dynamics but not the core computations of multisensory integration

Fluctuations in alertness shape perception and behaviour, yet how they affect the brains ability to integrate information across senses remains poorly understood. Here we investigated whether multisensory integration is preserved as humans transition from wakefulness to sleep. Participants (18 females, 8 males) performed an audio-tactile detection task while electroencephalography tracked spontaneous declines in alertness. Behaviourally, multisensory stimulation continued to facilitate responses during drowsiness, despite slowing and increased omissions. Although race-model predictions were consistent with preserved evidence for multisensory integration, event-related signatures of multisensory interactions were attenuated or no longer detectable during drowsiness. Crucially, multivariate decoding showed that multisensory neural representations remained detectable, although less temporally stable, and early cross-state generalization revealed shared representational structure across alertness levels, indicating preserved core multisensory computations. These findings show that multisensory integration remains functional but dynamically altered as alertness declines, revealing how the brain maintains adaptive behaviour during the wake-to-sleep transition. Significance StatementMultisensory integration has often been described as a stable and automatic perceptual process. However, growing evidence indicates that it can be modulated by ongoing brain states and cognitive demands. Here, we ask whether this computation remains invariant as alertness declines. We show that multisensory integration is neither abolished nor fully invariant during drowsiness. Instead, behavioural benefits are maintained despite less stable neural dynamics. Although event-related responses are attenuated, core multisensory representations remain shared across levels of alertness. These findings indicate that multisensory integration is preserved across fluctuations in alertness, while their neural dynamics are flexibly altered as alertness decreases.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

Proactive selective attention across competition contexts

Selective attention is a cognitive function that helps filter out unwanted information. Theories such as the biased competition model (Desimone & Duncan, 1995) explain how attentional templates bias processing towards targets in contexts where multiple stimuli compete for resources. However, it is unclear how the anticipation of different levels of competition influences the nature of attentional templates, in a proactive fashion. In this study, we used EEG to investigate how the anticipated demands of attentional selection (either high or low stimuli competition contexts) modulate target-specific preparatory brain activity and its relationship with task performance. To do so, participants performed a sex judgement task in a cue-target paradigm where, depending on the block, target and distractor stimuli appeared simultaneously (high competition) or sequentially (low competition). Multivariate Pattern Analysis (MVPA) showed that, in both competition contexts, there was a preactivation of the target category to select with a ramping-up profile at the end of the preparatory interval. However, cross-classification showed no generalization across competition conditions, suggesting different preparatory formats. Notably, time-frequency analyses showed differences between anticipated competition demands, reflecting higher theta band power for high than low competition, which mediated the impact of subsequent stimuli competition on behavioral performance. Overall, our results show that, whereas preactivation of the internal templates associated with the category to select are engaged in advance in both competition contexts, their underlying neural patterns differ. In addition, these codes could not be associated with theta power, suggesting different preparatory processes. The implications of these findings are crucial to increase our understanding of the nature of top-down processes across different contexts.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

High arousal disrupts the neural signatures of conflict processing but not behavioural performance

Physical activation fluctuates throughout the day. Previous studies have shown that during periods of reduced activation, cognitive control remains resilient due to neural compensatory mechanisms. In this study, we in-vestigated the effects of high physical activation on both behavioural and neural markers of cognitive control. We hypothesized that while behavioural measures of cognitive control would remain intact during periods of high activation, there would be observable changes in neural correlates. In our electroencephalography study, we manipulated levels of physical activation through physical exercise. Although we observed no significant impact on behavioural measures of cognitive conflict, both univariate and multivariate time-frequency markers proved unreliable under conditions of high activation. Moreover, there was no modulation of whole-brain connectivity measures by physical activation. We suggest that this dissociation between behavioural and neural measures indicates that the human cognitive control system remains resilient even at high activation, possibly due to underlying neural compensatory mechanisms.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

Staying in control: characterising the mechanisms underlying cognitive control in high and low arousal states

Throughout the day, humans show natural fluctuations in arousal that impact cognitive function. To study the behavioural dynamics of cognitive control during high and low arousal states, healthy participants performed an auditory conflict task during high-intensity physical exercise (N = 39) or drowsiness (N = 33). In line with the pre-registered hypotheses, conflict and conflict adaptation effects were preserved during both altered arousal states. Overall task performance was markedly poorer during low arousal, but not for high arousal. Modelling behavioural dynamics with drift-diffusion analysis revealed evidence accumulation and non-decision time decelerated, and decisional boundaries became wider during low arousal, whereas high arousal was unexpectedly associated with a decrease in the interference of task-irrelevant information processing. These findings show how arousal differentially modulates cognitive control at both sides of normal alertness, and further validates drowsiness and physical exercise as key experimental models to disentangle the interaction between physiological fluctuations on cognitive dynamics.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

Auditory and semantic cues facilitate decoding of visual object category in MEG

Sounds (e.g., barking) help us to visually identify objects (e.g., a dog) that are distant or ambiguous. While neuroimaging studies have revealed neuroanatomical sites of audiovisual interactions, little is known about the time-course by which sounds facilitate visual object processing. Here we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to reveal the time-course of the facilitatory influence of natural sounds (e.g., barking) on visual object processing, and compared this to the facilitatory influence of spoken words (e.g., \"dog\"). Participants viewed images of blurred objects preceded by a task-irrelevant natural sound, a spoken word, or uninformative noise. A classifier was trained to discriminate multivariate sensor patterns evoked by animate and inanimate intact objects with no sounds, presented in a separate experiment, and tested on sensor patterns evoked by the blurred objects in the three auditory conditions. Results revealed that both sounds and words, relative to uninformative noise, significantly facilitated visual object category decoding between 300-500 ms after visual onset. We found no evidence for earlier facilitation by sounds than by words. These findings provide evidence for a semantic route of facilitation by both natural sounds and spoken words, whereby the auditory input first activates semantic object representations, which then modulate the visual processing of objects.

neuroscience↗