Tag: sensory processing

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Study Reveals a Deep Brain Region that Links the Senses

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While scientists have long known that different senses activate different parts of the brain, a new Yale-led study indicates that multiple senses all stimulate a critical region deep in the brain that controls consciousness.

The study, published in the journal NeuroImage, sheds new light on how sensory perception works in the brain and may fuel the development of therapies to treat disorders involving attention, arousal, and consciousness. 

In the study, a research team led by Yale’s Aya Khalaf focused on the workings of subcortical arousal systems, brain structure networks that play a crucial role in regulating sleep-wake states. Previous studies on patients with disorders of consciousness, such as coma or epilepsy, have confirmed the influence of these systems on states of consciousness.

But prior research has been largely limited to tracking individual senses. For the new study, researchers asked if stimuli from multiple senses share the same subcortical arousal networks. They also looked at how shifts in a subject’s attention might affect these networks. 

For the study, researchers analysed fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) datasets collected from 1,561 healthy adult participants as they performed 11 different tasks using four senses: vision, audition, taste, and touch. 

They made two important discoveries: that sensory input does make use of shared subcortical systems and, more surprisingly, that all input, regardless of which sense delivered the signal, stimulates activity in two deep brain regions, the midbrain reticular formation and the central thalamus, when a subject is sharply focused on the senses. 

The key to stimulating the critical central brain regions, they found, were the sudden shifts in attention demanded by the tasks.

“We were expecting to find activity on shared networks, but when we saw all the senses light up the same central brain regions while a test subject was focusing, it was really astonishing,” said Khalaf, a postdoctoral associate in neurology at Yale School of Medicine and lead author of the study.

The discovery highlighted how key these central brain regions are in regulating not only disorders of consciousness, but also conditions that impact attention and focus, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. This finding could lead to better targeted medications and brain stimulation techniques for patients. 

“This has also given us insights into how things work normally in the brain,” said senior author Hal Blumenfeld, the Mark Loughridge and Michele Williams Professor of Neurology who is also a professor in neuroscience and neurosurgery and director of the Yale Clinical Neuroscience Imaging Center. “It’s really a step forward in our understanding of awareness and consciousness.”

Looking across senses, this is the first time researchers have seen a result like this, said Khalaf, who is also part of Blumenfeld’s lab.

“It tells us how important this brain region is and what it could mean in efforts to restore consciousness,” she said. 

Source: Yale University

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Language Shapes how Sensory Experiences are Stored in the Brain

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A study in stroke patients shows the brain’s vision-language connection shapes object knowledge

A schematic view of the main findings, adapted from a brain figure in the study. Image credit: Adapted from Liu Bet al., 2025, PLOS Biology, CC-BY 4.0

Our ability to store information about familiar objects depends on the connection between visual and language processing regions in the brain, according to a study published May 20th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Bo Liu from Beijing Normal University, China, and colleagues.

Seeing an object and knowing visual information about it, like its usual colour, activate the same parts of the brain. Seeing a yellow banana, for example, and knowing that the object represented by the word “banana” is usually yellow, both excite the ventral occipitotemporal cortex (VOTC). However, there’s evidence that parts of the brain involved in language, like the dorsal anterior temporal lobe (ATL), are also involved in this process – dementia patients with ATL damage, for example, struggle with object colour knowledge, despite having relatively normal visual processing areas. To understand whether communication between the brain’s language and sensory association systems is necessary for representing information about objects, the authors tested whether stroke-induced damage to the neural pathways connecting these two systems impacted patients’ ability to match objects to their typical colour. They compared colour-identification behaviour in 33 stroke patients to 35 demographically-matched controls, using fMRI to record brain activity and diffusion imaging to map the white matter connections between language regions and the VOTC.

The researchers found that stronger connections between language and visual processing regions correlated with stronger object color representations in the VOTC, and supported better performance on object color knowledge tasks. These effects couldn’t be explained by variations in patients’ stroke lesions, related cognitive processes (like simply recognizing a patch of color), or problems with earlier stages of visual processing. The authors suggest that these results highlight the sophisticated connection between vision and language in the human brain.

The authors add, “Our findings reveal that the brain’s ability to store and retrieve object perceptual knowledge – like the colour of a banana – relies on critical connections between visual and language systems. Damage to these connections disrupts both brain activity and behaviour, showing that language isn’t just for communication – it fundamentally shapes how sensory experiences are neurally structured into knowledge.”

Provided by PLOS

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Goalies Really are Wired Differently to Other Soccer Players

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In soccer, goalkeepers have a unique role: they must be ready to make split-second decisions based on incomplete information to stop their opponents from scoring a goal. Now researchers reporting in Current Biology on have some of the first solid scientific evidence that goalkeepers show fundamental differences in the way they perceive the world and process multi-sensory information.

“Unlike other football players, goalkeepers are required to make thousands of very fast decisions based on limited or incomplete sensory information,” says Michael Quinn, the study’s first author at Dublin City University who is also a retired professional goalkeeper and son of former Irish international Niall Quinn. “This led us to predict that goalkeepers would possess an enhanced capacity to combine information from the different senses, and this hypothesis was confirmed by our results.”

“While many football players and fans worldwide will be familiar with the idea that goalkeepers are just ‘different’ from the rest of us, this study may actually be the first time that we have proven scientific evidence to back up this claim,” says David McGovern, the study’s lead investigator also from Dublin City University.

Based on his own history as a professional goalkeeper, Quinn already had a feeling that goalkeepers experience the world in a distinctive way. In his final year working on a psychology degree, he wanted to put this notion to the test.

To do it, the researchers enlisted 60 volunteers, including professional goalkeepers, professional outfield players, and age-matched controls who don’t play soccer. They decided to look for differences among the three groups in what’s known as temporal binding windows – that is, the time window within which signals from the different senses are likely to be perceptually fused or integrated.

In each trial, participants were presented with one or two images (visual stimuli) on a screen. Those images could be presented along with one, two, or no beeps (auditory stimuli). Those stimuli were presented with different amounts of time in between.

In these tests, trials with one flash and two beeps generally led to the mistaken perception of two flashes, providing evidence that the auditory and visual stimuli have been integrated. This mistaken perception declines as the amount of time between stimuli increases, allowing researchers to measure the width of a person’s temporal binding window, with a narrower temporal binding window indicating more efficient multisensory processing.

their tests showed that goalkeepers had marked differences in their multisensory processing ability. More specifically, goalkeepers had a narrower temporal binding window relative to outfielders and non-soccer players, indicating a more precise and speedy estimation of the timing of audiovisual cues.

The test results revealed another difference too. Goalkeepers didn’t show as much interaction between the visual and auditory information. The finding suggests that the goalies had a greater tendency to separate sensory signals. In other words, they integrated the flashes and beeps to a lesser degree.

“We propose that these differences stem from the idiosyncratic nature of the goalkeeping position that puts a premium on the ability of goalkeepers to make quick decisions, often based on partial or incomplete sensory information,” the researchers write.

They speculate that the tendency to segregate sensory information stems from goalies need to make quick decisions based on visual and auditory information coming in at different times. For example, goalkeepers watch how a ball is moving in the air and also make use of the sound of the ball being kicked. But the relationship between those cues in time will depend on where the outfielder making the shot is on the field. After repeated exposure to those scenarios, goalkeepers may start to process sensory cues separately rather than combining them.

The researchers say they hope to explore other questions in future studies, including whether players with other highly specialised positions, such as strikers and centre-backs, may also show perceptual differences. They’re also curious to know which comes first. “Could the narrower temporal binding window observed in goalkeepers stem from the rigorous training regimens that goalkeepers engage in from an early age?” McGovern asks. “Or could it be that these differences in multisensory processing reflect an inherent, natural ability that draws young players to the goalkeeping position? Further research that tracks the developmental trajectory of aspiring goalkeepers will be required to tease between these possibilities.”

Source: Cell Press via MedicalXpress