Biology subjects

Cabana, A.

Publications and source records attributed to Cabana, A..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

What drives intersubject correlation of EEG during auditory narratives?

When participants are engaged with auditory narratives, physiological and neural signals exhibit temporal correlations between subjects. The intersubject correlation (ISC) increases when attention is directed to the stories, suggesting that shared neural and bodily dynamics arise from a similar processing of the narratives. Identifying the factors that drive these common responses is clinically relevant for interpreting EEG ISC exhibited in unresponsive patients. In this study, we investigated whether the ISC of the EEG elicited by auditory narratives is driven by low-level acoustic (envelope, spectrogram) and/or higher-level linguistic information (word onset, word surprisal) in two groups of healthy participants during passive, attentive and distracted listening. We use temporal response functions (TRFs) for acoustic, and linguistic features to assess the contribution of each feature to the ISC, measured using correlated component analysis (CorrCA). TRFs derived for acoustic features explained a larger fraction of variance in the EEG than linguistic features and were the main contributors to the ISC. The attention-related increase in ISC was driven by all features. Importantly, word surprisal had an effect on ISC only during active story engagement, with timing and scalp distribution consistent with language processing. Notably, the linear responses captured by TRFs only explained a small amount of the overall ISC, suggesting that ISC is largely driven by nonlinear responses to the narratives. We propose that the combined use of ISC and TRFs has the potential to provide meaningful markers of language processing in patients with disorders of consciousness, and we suggest practical recommendations for their implementation.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Environmental Drivers of Calling Activity in a Southern Subtropical Anuran Assemblage: Insights from Passive Acoustic Monitoring

In anurans, acoustic communication is a crucial reproductive behavior shaped by individual traits, social interactions, and environmental cues. External factors such as temperature, rainfall, and photoperiod can elicit physiological responses that drive behavioral rhythms at individual and population scales. While temperature and rainfall effects on anuran calling activity are well-established, photoperiodic influences remain comparatively understudied, particularly within southern subtropical assemblages. We assessed hourly calling activity of Boana pulchella in Uruguay over a 12-month period using Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) and validated semi-automated data processing methods to examine environmental drivers in a subtropical permanent pond. Calling behavior increased during the warmer months, showing a clear seasonal pattern. Peak activity timing remained consistent across seasons, but the temporal window of vocalizations expanded during winter (long nights) and contracted during summer (long days), reflecting photoperiodic variation. Linear regression analyses showed significant effects of photoperiod, temperature and their interaction on calling activity, while rainfall and atmospheric pressure showed no effect. These findings underscore the regulatory role of photoperiod in shaping reproductive acoustic behavior and highlight the need to further explore its physiological and adaptive significance, especially within underrepresented subtropical assemblages.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2023

Heartbeat-evoked potential and ongoing brain dynamics during interoceptive and exteroceptive information processing predict attentional focus

Attention shapes our consciousness content and perception by increasing the probability of becoming aware and, or, better encode a selection of the incoming inner or outer sensory world. We designed a task to engage interoceptive and exteroceptive attention by orienting healthy participants to their heartbeats or auditory stimuli and investigated whether brain dynamics (Kolmogorov complexity - KC, permutation entropy - PE, weighted symbolic mutual information - wSMI, power spectrum density - PSD) and the heartbeat-evoked potential (HEP) distinguished interoceptive from exteroceptive covert attention. Exteroceptive attention yielded an overall flattening of the PSD, whereas during interoceptive attention there was a decrease in complexity, an increase in frontal connectivity and oscillations in the theta range, and a modulation of the HEP. Subject-level classifiers based on HEP features classified the attentional state of 17/20 participants. KC, PE, and wSMI showed comparable accuracy in classifying exteroceptive-interoceptive attention and exhibited a synergic behavior with the HEP features. PSD features demonstrated exceptional performance (20/20). Command-following was assessed in 5 brain-injured patients with a modified version of the task. An Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome/Vegetative State patient and a locked-in syndrome patient demonstrated a willful modulation of the HEP and the patient-level classifiers suggest that patients were complying with task instructions. Our findings show that directing attention to bodily rhythms or external stimuli elicits distinct neural responses that can be employed to track covert attention at the individual level. Importantly, the brain markers studied in this work provide multiple layers to explore information processing in disorders of conscious patients. Significance statementWe show that directing attention to bodily rhythms or external stimuli induces specific neural responses, allowing for individual-level tracking of covert attention in healthy participants. The time-locked and dynamical brain markers identified as relevant to distinguish between interoceptive-exteroceptive attention were further assessed in a small cohort of brain-injured patients as an EEG proxy of command-following. We show for the first time the willful modulation of the HEP in an UWS/VS patient and a locked-in syndrome patient, along with significant classification accuracies when combining the explored features. Importantly, the brain markers studied in this work provide multiple layers to explore information processing in disorders of conscious patients, and expand the framework of heart-brain interactions employed for diagnostic purposes.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

Neural signals relating future cooperation from prisoner’s dilemma feedback are outcome-contingent

Electing whether to cooperate with someone else is well typified in the iterated prisoners dilemma (iPD) game, although the neural processes that unfold after its distinct outcomes have been only partly described. Recent theoretical models emphasize the ubiquity of intuitive cooperation, raising questions on the neural timelines involved. We studied the outcome stage of an iPD with electroencephalography (EEG) methods. Results showed that neural signals that are modulated by the iPD outcomes can also be indicative of future choice, in an outcome-dependent manner: (i) after zero-gain suckers payoffs (unreciprocated cooperation), a participants decision thereafter may be indicated by changes to the feedback-related negativity (FRN); (ii) after one-sided non-cooperation (participant gain), by the P3; (iii) after mutual cooperation, by late frontal delta-band modulations. Critically, faster choices to reciprocate cooperation were predicted, on a single-trial basis, by P3 and frontal delta modulations at the immediately preceding trial. Delta band signaling is considered in relation to homeostatic regulation processing in the literature. The findings relate feedback to decisional processes in the iPD, providing a first neural account of the brief timelines implied in heuristic modes of cooperation.

neuroscience↗