Biology subjects

Staib, M.

Publications and source records attributed to Staib, M..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2021

Transcranial theta-burst stimulation of primary sensory cortex attenuates somatosensory threat memory in humans

Sensory cortices are required for learning to discriminate complex stimuli that predict threat from those that predict safety in rodents. Yet, sensory cortices may not be needed to learn threat associations to simple stimuli. It is unknown whether these findings apply in humans. Here, we investigated the role of primary sensory cortex in discriminative threat conditioning with simple and complex somatosensory conditioned stimuli (CS) in healthy humans. Immediately before conditioning, participants received continuous theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation (cTBS) to primary somatosensory cortex either in the CS-contralateral or CS-ipsilateral hemisphere. After overnight consolidation, threat memory was attenuated in the contralateral compared to the ipsilateral group, as indicated by reduced startle eye-blink potentiation. There was no evidence for a difference between simple and complex stimuli, or that CS identification or conditioning was affected, suggesting a stronger effect of cTBS on consolidation than on initial stimulus processing. We propose that non-invasive stimulation of sensory cortex may provide a new avenue for interfering with threat memories in humans.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2020

Neurocognitive processing efficiency for non-alarm rather than alarm signaling in human scream calls

Across many species, scream calls signal the affective significance of events to other agents. Scream calls were often supposed to be of generic alarming and fearful nature to signal potential threats including their instantaneous, involuntary, and accurate recognition by perceivers. However, scream calls are more diverse in their affective signaling nature than being limited to fearfully alarm a threat, and thus the broader sociobiological relevance of various scream types is unclear. Here we used four different psychoacoustic, perceptual decision-making, and neuroimaging experiments in humans to demonstrate, first, the existence of at least six generic and psycho-acoustically distinctive types of scream calls of both an alarming and a non-alarming nature, rather than being limited to only screams caused by fear or aggression. Second, based on perceptual and processing sensitivity measures for decision-making during scream recognition, we found that alarming screams (with some exceptions) were overall discriminated the worst, were responded to the slowest and were associated with the lower perceptual sensitivity for their recognition compared with non-alarm screams. Third, the neural processing of alarm compared with non-alarm screams during an implicit processing task elicited only minimal neural signal and connectivity in perceivers, contrary to the frequent assumption of a threat processing bias of the primate neural system. These findings show that scream calls are more diverse in their signaling and communicative nature in humans and that especially non-alarming screams, and positive screams in particular, seem to have higher efficiency in the cognitive, neural, and communicative processing in humans.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

Language beyond the language system: dorsal visuospatial pathways support processing of demonstratives and spatial language during naturalistic fast fMRI

Spatial demonstratives are powerful linguistic tools used to establish joint attention. Identifying the meaning of semantically underspecified expressions like \"this one\" hinges on the integration of linguistic and visual cues, attentional orienting and pragmatic inference. This synergy between language and extralinguistic cognition is pivotal to language comprehension in general, but especially prominent in demonstratives.\n\nIn this study, we aimed to elucidate which neural architectures enable this intertwining between language and extralinguistic cognition using a naturalistic fMRI paradigm. In our experiment, 28 participants listened to a specially crafted dialogical narrative with a controlled number of spatial demonstratives. A fast multiband-EPI acquisition sequence (TR = 388ms) combined with finite impulse response (FIR) modelling of the hemodynamic response was used to capture signal changes at word-level resolution.\n\nWe found that spatial demonstratives bilaterally engage a network of parietal areas, including the supramarginal gyrus, the angular gyrus, and precuneus, implicated in information integration and visuospatial processing. Moreover, demonstratives recruit frontal regions, including the right FEF, implicated in attentional orienting and reference frames shifts. Finally, using multivariate similarity analyses, we provide evidence for a general involvement of the dorsal (\"where\") stream in the processing of spatial expressions, as opposed to ventral pathways encoding object semantics.\n\nOverall, our results suggest that language processing relies on a distributed architecture, recruiting neural resources for perception, attention, and extra-linguistic aspects of cognition in a dynamic and context-dependent fashion.

neuroscience↗