Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

Attention prioritizes relevant information from the environment, but does not do so consistently over time. Instead, we sometimes experience poor attentional states which are characterized by a higher degree of performance failures, or "lapses." The source of these lapses--whether they arise from attentional disengagement, failures of attentional selection, or simply failures of response control--is not clear. This study tests whether the strength of neural representations differs as a function of both attentional selection and modulation over time. We recorded electroencephalography (EEG) data while participants performed a sustained attention task requiring the selection of task-relevant items and withholding of responses to rare targets. Results show that relevant items receive prioritized processing in brain signals, as measured with EEG decoding. Yet, their neural representational fidelity weakens under poor sustained attentional states, foreshadowing upcoming behavioral failures. These findings support a neural basis of disengagement during poor attentional states, suggesting that lapses may arise from a decoupling of brain activity from task processing. Finally, pre-item representational strength predicted memory success for targets, suggesting that neural fidelity indexes an encoding-ready state. Results suggest that the quality of neural representations is affected by ongoing attention and plays a key role in processing and memory.

Visual orthographic knowledge plays a critical role in early literacy development and may provide a shared foundation for reading and spelling, yet the nature of its underlying representations remains debated. Behavioral measures offer indirect evidence and may be influenced by other metalinguistic processes. It remains unclear whether beginning readers encode larger orthographic structures, such as onset-rime units, beyond individual letters and smaller letter combinations but below the whole-word level. It is also unknown whether neural sensitivity to these structures helps explain the relationship between spelling and reading. To address these questions, we used a fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) paradigm in first- and second-grade children to contrast pseudowords constructed with the typical ordering of onset followed by rime elements (i.e., onset-rime) against matched strings in which the same elements appeared in the reverse order (i.e., rime-onset). Neural sensitivity to onset-rime orthographic structure was associated with both spelling ability and word-reading efficiency and, critically, statistically mediated the relationship between these two literacy skills. These relationships remained significant after controlling for age and removing influential observations, and sensitivity to onset-rime orthographic structure explained additional variance in word-reading efficiency beyond spelling ability and age. Together, these findings provide neurophysiological evidence for onset-rime structure as an important sublexical orthographic unit in beginning readers, highlighting its potential role in linking spelling with efficient word recognition during early reading development.

Reading behaviour is sensitive to contextual demands. For example, when reading to study or answer questions, readers strategically allocate more attention to goal-relevant sections, read slower, and regress more frequently to extract specific information based on task demands. This suggests that readers flexibly adapt their strategies according to goals and situational constraints. However, the neurocognitive mechanisms supporting this flexibility remain unclear. To test this, we combined eye-tracking with EEG during naturalistic reading and examined how short-term reading goals modulated the neural tracking of hierarchical linguistic features at the orthographic (orthographic neighbourhood size), lexical (word frequency), and contextual-semantic (Surprisal) levels. Forty native English speakers read narratives in three goal conditions: Baseline (no goal), Proofreading (detect spelling errors), and Comprehension (attend to content). Fixation-aligned word-level EEG activity was modelled using multivariate temporal response function to estimate the strength of feature-specific neural tracking. Orthographic tracking was significantly enhanced during Proofreading relative to Baseline, and predicted better Proofreading accuracy. Conversely, stronger frequency tracking predicted better Comprehension accuracy. Contextual-semantic tracking was not modulated by task goal. These findings suggest that reading goals selectively bias neural processing towards linguistic features (sublexical vs. lexical) that support successful task performance, providing evidence for short-term functional plasticity in linguistic processing and supporting a flexible predictive processing account of goal-directed reading.

Mistakes make up our daily lives. Once a mistake has been committed, it is common to pause before you continue. This slowing is called post-error slowing (PES). Although several theories have been proposed to account for PES in humans, findings across cognitive tasks show variation in how PES occurs, and it is unclear how this phenomenon may translate across modalities to a key model organism of human cognition, macaque monkeys. To determine whether monkeys exhibit PES, we tested three rhesus macaque monkeys in components of cognitive sequential decision-making tasks that used either eye tracking or touch screens to report responses. Here we show that monkeys exhibit non-adaptive, error type-dependent PES across modalities. Task structure and context also modulated PES in the eye tracking task, and no modality improved task performance following PES. These results suggest that monkey PES is a combination of cognitive and non-cognitive related responses to error that are modulated by task structures such as error type and task context. Overall, the flexibility in monkey PES is comparable to that of humans, further supporting the importance of monkeys as a translational model in investigating the mechanisms of PES.

Naming pictures from the same semantic category can interfere with subsequent word retrieval. Although the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) has been implicated in resolving this semantic interference, its causal role in this process remains unclear. Across three experiments, we investigated the contribution of the LIFG to interference resolution during blocked-cyclic naming. Experiment 1 tested whether continuous theta-burst stimulation over the LIFG increased semantic interference relative to vertex stimulation. Although the overall interference effect did not differ significantly between stimulation sites, exploratory analyses revealed an unexpected pattern based on the initial context (related vs. unrelated) with which items were named, suggesting that LIFG disruption affected retrieval of previously related items even when they were subsequently named in unrelated contexts. This observation motivated two further experiments examining the consequences of prior naming context more directly. Experiment 2 established that, without stimulation, interference observed in related blocks was no longer evident after the items were redistributed into unrelated blocks. Experiment 3 combined this design with cathodal or sham transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the LIFG. Planned comparisons showed that cathodal stimulation slowed naming of initially related items both within related blocks and after redistribution into unrelated blocks; corresponding comparisons for items named consistently in unrelated blocks were not significant. The similar patterns across two stimulation methods suggest that LIFG-mediated control may influence both selection under current competition and subsequent retrieval of previously competing words. These findings could be accommodated within a hybrid account in which working memory supports context-guided selection and selection-related control helps recalibrate lexical accessibility, limiting the carryover of interference into subsequent naming.

Spontaneous eye blinks have long been linked to cognitive processing, yet how task demands shape blink timing and its relationship to behavioral performance remains unclear. We examined spontaneous blink behavior in 576 adults performing two variants of the Continuous Performance Task (CPT). Blink occurrence and timing were most strongly modulated by the experimental condition in the more demanding CPT-AX task, whereas their association with response time was stronger in the CPT-X task, where more consistent blink timing predicted faster responses. This dissociation suggests that task structure changes not only blink behavior but also the behavioral relevance of blink timing. These findings are consistent with an adaptive scheduling account of spontaneous blinking and provide a conceptual framework for understanding when and why blink timing contains chronometric information about ongoing cognition.

The duration of visual stimuli can be altered by stimulus features, such as size, brightness, and motion. Recently, we observed that motion-induced changes in perceived duration also shift confidence judgments, but do not track awareness of the illusion. How these two effects differ and are instantiated neurally are unknown. We investigated this question by replicating our previous finding, in which human subjects (n=27) performed a temporal bisection task where they were asked to classify the duration (1-3.5s) of a walking stickman figure with different velocities and provide confidence judgments while 64-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) activity was recorded. Behavioral findings replicated the previous time dilation effect where progressively faster walking speeds led to longer perceived durations. A similar shift was observed for confidence ratings, yet with lowest confidence for the medium walking speed, indicating a metacognitive inability to monitor dilation. Furthermore, common EEG signatures of time perception, such as the late positive component of timing (LPCt) and contingent negative variation (CNV) did not vary with walking speed. Instead, onset-locked responses over occipital electrodes covaried with walking speed and correlated with subject-level shifts in psychometric functions, but not with confidence; conversely, frontocentral responses covaried with confidence judgments, but not walking speed. These findings suggest that temporal illusions are engaged by sensory processes that fail to reach the metacognitive level and that confidence judgments, in turn, are driven by motor estimates read out from frontocentral regions

Understanding how the brain represents meaning at different levels of specificity, from general categories (bird) through combined phrases (nocturnal bird) to specific exemplars (owl), is a central question in semantic cognition and its disorders. The anterior temporal lobes (ATL) have been implicated in both activating stored conceptual representations and combining them, yet whether these two routes to conceptual content engage the ATL in the same way remains an open question. We recorded concurrent MEG-EEG from 36 participants reading 100 conceptual triads varying parametrically in specificity: general words (bird), adjective-noun phrases (nocturnal bird), and specific words (owl). Source analyses revealed a non-linear pattern in bilateral ATL (400-520ms): high-specificity concepts elicited greater activity than both low-specificity words and mid-specificity phrases. Bilateral inferior frontal cortex showed this effect with similar timing (430-630ms). N400 amplitude and ATL source activity showed a functional dissociation in their sensitivity to word frequency, ruling out a purely frequency account of the ATL and IFC effects. Results imply that accessing high-specificity concepts requires individuating stored representations among competitors, whereas phrases construct meaning through a different route. These findings extend the unified semantic hub account by revealing that computational operations within the ATL vary depending on task and stimulus demands.

Comprehending a narrative requires continuously updating a model of the discourse, and beta-band activity is thought to signal when that model should be held versus changed. Whether beta also grades how much to update, and whether that index is carried by discrete bursts beyond sustained power, is unknown for naturalistic comprehension. We recorded MEG from 61 human participants (22 men, 39 women) while they listened to naturalistic Hebrew narratives, detected beta bursts in the continuous signal, and quantified the semantic shift between successive sentences from sentence embeddings. Beta burst rate decreased after sentence boundaries, and regression-based deconvolution separated a pre-onset maintenance phase from a graded post-onset response whose magnitude scaled with semantic shift (peak ~0.9 s). This response was independent of lexical surprisal, the acoustic envelope, and referent introduction, largely robust to dependency structure, though it shared variance with propositional quantity. Burst occurrence carried a component of the effect beyond the accompanying amplitude change: applying that change as a pure gain to each participant's envelope and re-running the identical detection predicts only 75% of the observed burst-rate reduction (excess p = .038), the effect survived an amplitude-invariant threshold, and a Poisson model reproduced it as a graded reduction in burst-initiation rate. The effect held in both participant groups, which heard differently framed narratives, and was decisively supported (BF10 > 250). Beta bursts thus provide a graded signal of semantic updating during continuous comprehension, expressed in the rate of burst occurrence over and above the accompanying change in sustained power.

Humans routinely encounter speech in languages they have never heard, yet how the brain responds to such input and whether bilingual experience shapes this response remains unknown. Here, we used electroencephalography (EEG) and temporal response function (TRF) modeling to examine cortical tracking of the speech envelope in 24 English-monolingual and 24 English-Mandarin bilingual adults. Participants listened to naturally produced continuous speech in three languages: English (familiar to all), Mandarin (familiar to bilinguals only), and Vietnamese (unfamiliar to all). We report two main findings. First, both monolinguals and bilinguals showed enhanced cortical tracking for unfamiliar relative to familiar languages, evidenced by higher EEG prediction accuracy (PA). Monolinguals showed enhanced tracking for both Mandarin and Vietnamese, whereas bilinguals showed enhancement only for Vietnamese, consistent with Mandarin being a familiar language for this group. This finding suggests that enhanced cortical encoding of unfamiliar speech is a general property of the listening brain, not a signature of listening to a non-native language or reduced language proficiency. Second, bilinguals strikingly showed stronger cortical tracking than monolinguals overall, in both PA and TRF peak weights, with the TRF peak weight advantage present across all three languages, suggesting a difference in how bilingual experience shapes the neural encoding of speech. These findings have implications for understanding how the brain navigates the linguistic diversity of everyday life in an increasingly global, multilingual world.

Recalling scenes and events depends on how information is relationally organised in memory, but it is unclear whether the organisation of eye movements during encoding, rather than simply how much is explored, shapes what is remembered. Using a scene-viewing paradigm and drawing-based free recall task to capture the content and structure of remembered scenes, we examined whether scene memory was better explained by 'lower-order' measures reflecting the magnitude and spatial extent of sampling, or 'higher-order' measures capturing gaze organisation and temporal dynamics. Relative to lower-order measures (number of fixations and scanpath length), memory precision was better predicted by repeated sampling of viewed regions (refixations) and gaze distributions (stationary gaze entropy) during encoding. Thus, the organisation of visual attention, rather than sampling quantity, contributed to scene representations that preserved relationships between elements. These findings highlight a role for spatial gaze dynamics in optimally encoding organised, relational scene representations for episodic memory.

How do we come to "see" the same thing differently after hearing someone else's perspective? Revising an interpretation could reflect changes in how the brain represents the meaning of what we see, changes in how we visually sample the input, or both. To disentangle these mechanisms, we developed MindLibs, an adaptive fMRI and eye-tracking paradigm in which participants generate interpretations of ambiguous photographs and then view alternative interpretations chosen in real time to vary in semantic content from their own. Exposure to semantically distant alternatives revealed a strong link between reinterpretation as reported behaviorally and representational shifts in association cortex, but no systematic relationship between reinterpretation and changes in gaze. In particular, representational shifts in lateral default-mode network regions (DMN-B) predicted reinterpretation independently of shifts in frontoparietal, attention, and visual networks, and independently of whether gaze changed. In contrast, shifts in visual cortex tracked reinterpretation only when gaze also shifted, and contributed no unique variance beyond DMN-B. These findings identify higher-order conceptual reconfiguration, rather than perceptual resampling, as the primary account of how people revise the meaning of an ambiguous scene.

Understanding how native speakers and second language (L2) learners process language differently is fundamental to theories of language acquisition, comprehension, and use. A central debate in this literature concerns the inconsistent findings in emotional prosody processing between native speakers and L2 learners, partly attributable to stimulus lexicality: some studies use real words, whereas others use pseudowords. To resolve this discrepancy, we measured fMRI responses in 15 native speakers and 15 L2 learners while they listened to Mandarin real-word and pseudoword stimuli. Both groups engaged in overlapping auditory, cognitive, and affective regions, including the auditory cortex, inferior frontal cortex, superior temporal cortex, and the temporoparietal junction. However, the two groups showed distinct responses depending on lexicality: native speakers showed stronger recruitment of temporal regions for pseudowords, whereas L2 learners showed greater frontoparietal activation for real words. These patterns were consistent across positive and negative prosody conditions. Furthermore, among L2 learners, higher proficiency was associated with greater frontal activation for real words, but not pseudowords. Together, these findings demonstrate that the differences between native speakers and L2 learners depend critically on stimulus lexicality, highlighting the role of lexicality in bilingual emotion processing.

Working memory (WM) and decision-making (DM) are closely linked cognitive processes that rely on frontoparietal regions, yet their distinct and shared neural dynamics remain unclear. Using intracranial EEG recordings from 24 human subjects performing a delayed match-to-sample task, we examined high-frequency broadband (HFB) activity to dissociate WM- and DM-related processes with high spatiotemporal resolution. Principal component analysis of frontoparietal HFB activity revealed multiple temporally distinct patterns spanning stimulus presentation and delay phases. The most dominant component reflected sustained WM-related activity across task phases, consistent with persistent maintenance of internal representations. Additional components captured transient WM encoding across trial phases, as well as both stimulus-linked and ramping DM-related activity suggesting dual early and late stages of evaluative processing. These processes were distributed across frontoparietal regions but showed systematic differences in anatomical focus, with WM-related activity concentrated in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) and DM-related activity concentrated in ventrolateral PFC, while inferior parietal cortex preferentially tracked the behavioral significance of incoming stimuli and superior parietal cortex tracked the appearance of new information that may require updating ongoing processing. Together, these findings demonstrate that WM and DM processes are separable yet interleaved over time within distributed cortical networks, revealing coordinated but functionally distinct contributions to goal-directed behavior.

Dance is increasingly delivered as an intervention for social and affective functioning, but a live dyadic encounter confounds several distinct ingredients - social attention, verbal engagement, coordinated movement, and in-the-moment generation - so its neural effects cannot be assigned to any one of them. We recorded dual-brain mobile EEG from adult human participants of both sexes (16 female, 2 male) and a dance instructor across six five-minute conditions that vary these ingredients independently: solitary rest, direct eye gaze, conversation, teacher-led and participant-led mirroring, and free improvisation, with concurrent head-mounted accelerometry. Referencing each condition to eye gaze - socially engaging but nearly motionless - rather than to solitary rest partitioned the response. The components proved dissociable. Nonverbal social attention alone reorganized the power spectrum, flattening the aperiodic exponent (g = -0.97) and desynchronizing alpha-band oscillations (g = -0.90), while leaving inter-regional connectivity unchanged (amplitude g = +0.15; phase g = +0.11). Verbal engagement added high-frequency amplitude coupling (g = +2.61) without further spectral change. Coordinated movement added a decrease in theta/alpha coupling involving the frontoparietal-control network (g = -0.59), the signature of an externally directed state, alongside a further spectral shift (g = -0.61). Movement-vigor covariates, corticokinematic coherence, and aperiodic-adjusted power indicated that the spectral effects were cortical rather than myogenic. Four weeks of improvisational dance training increased empathic responsiveness to others' distress relative to a movie control (g = 0.82). Coordinated social movement thus acts on the brain componentially, with mutual attention rather than motor load establishing the engaged state.

We investigated how auditory and visual presentation of small numerical magnitudes and non- numerical magnitudes are passively processed at the neural level. Earlier research suggests automatic processing of quantities occurs rapidly in the brain. However, there are no studies on passive, pre-attentive change detection of magnitudes utilizing mismatch negativity (MMN) across sensory modalities in same participants, important to understand amodal processing of magnitudes. We recorded EEG in passive auditory and visual multi-feature oddball and control paradigms from the same adult individuals (N=104/105, respectively). In the auditory paradigm, the standard stimulus was a 2-part sound, while the deviant stimuli varied in frequency, intensity, gap length, and number of sounds (1-part and 3-part stimuli). In the visual paradigm, the standard stimulus was a dot array containing two medium-sized dots, while the deviant stimuli varied in numerosity (1 or 3 dots) and dot size (small or large). The results for the auditory paradigm showed significant MMN across all features, including comparisons with deviant-alone control stimuli, except for the 2-part vs. 1-part contrast. The results for the visual paradigm suggested differences in processing across all features apart from large and medium-size stimuli. These results replicate earlier MMN findings that the brain distinguishes pre-attentively changes in sound frequency, amplitude and gap. Auditorily presented small numerical magnitudes also showed pre-attentive processing but less robustly to the contrast 2 vs. 1. Visual pre-attentive processing of small numerical magnitudes was also observed. Together these findings could be interpreted to support the existence of abstract, pre- attentive processing of numerical magnitudes. Highlights* Auditory and visual processing of numerical and non-numerical magnitudes was examined with EEG * Auditory non-numerical magnitudes and medium vs. small dots replicated earlier MMN studies * aMMN and vMMN showed pre-attentive processing of changes in small numerosities 2 vs. 3 and 2 vs. 1 * 2 vs. 1 tone processing was less robust than 2 vs. 3 or the processing of the visual contrasts * The brain processes changes in small non-symbolic magnitudes pre-attentively

Some participants are consistently easier to decode than others. We asked whether this difference belongs to the person or to the conditions under which the brain is measured. We compared visual decoding in EEG, MEG, intracranial EEG, and fMRI, testing classifiers on runs and stimulus identities excluded from training. Within-instrument decoding was reproducible. Attention, behavior, and peripheral signals affected recording quality but did not explain most of the stable differences between participants. Anatomy provided one explanation. Source-to-sensor distance strongly predicted modeled signal gain, and its effect was steepest in planar gradiometers. Intracranial recordings provided another: participants with sharper local category selectivity were easier to decode. This association chiefly reflected a smaller response to the nonpreferred category relative to overall visual responsivity. Cross-site prediction was uneven. EEG and MEG expressed the preferred and nonpreferred responses differently. MEG category separation and task-aligned variance described the information available to the decoder. Simultaneous EEG-MEG recordings contained a shared participant component, but external paired cohorts did not yield a common ordering across instruments. Correspondence depended on the measure, the instrument pair and, in one cohort, participant-linked stimulus sets. Repeated observations improved performance in participants with weak single-observation decoding. Stable decoding differences therefore reflect the relation between the individual, the represented distinction, and the instrument. They chiefly determine how much information a recording supplies per observation.

Attentional selection not only increases behavioural performance and neural information for attended stimuli but, in some instances, induces changes in stimulus appearance. While reported appearance changes have mostly concerned the effects of attending to a particular spatial location, here we report a shift in appearance that occurs when attention is directed to one component of a stimulus rapidly alternating at a single spatial location. Our stimuli included two frames of different colors, which alternated at 3.75Hz or 7.5Hz. Participants reported the perceived dominance of one frame's color in the reference stimulus, by comparison with a target stimulus. We found that when one stimulus frame was more salient than the other, with a greater likelihood of capturing exogenous attention, there was an illusory perception that the frame was physically present for a greater proportion of time. When the frames were matched in salience, a task encouraging participants to endogenously direct their attention to one frame produced a smaller shift in appearance. Our results add to the body of literature demonstrating that attention can change appearance, in this case altering the appearance of attended versus unattended stimuli that are presented at the same spatial location. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that at the 'temporal transparent' alternation rate of 7.5Hz, where rapidly alternating stimuli are perceived as two translucent surfaces, attentional selection of one surface can account for the apparent paradox that feature conjunctions are perceived at stimulus alternation rates higher than predicted by the temporal limits of feature binding for other stimuli.

Motivational incentives are known to improve working memory (WM) when items differ in value, but whether they enhance performance when all items are equally valued, and if so, by what mechanism, remains unclear. Improvements could reflect enhanced memory-based representations or speed-accuracy trade-offs, whereby incentives promote slower, more cautious responding without improving memory itself. Here, we tested these alternatives across two experiments using an auditory WM task in which incentives varied across trials, but all items on a trial were equally incentivised. In Experiment 1,we allowed participants to resubmit their responses if desired. Reward-related improvements in WM performance were selectively observed when memory load was high, and only at serial positions associated with greater interference. These improvements were also dissociated from systematic response slowing and resubmission behaviour. This indicated that the benefits of incentives were unlikely to be attributable to response caution. Critically, in Experiment 2, motivational benefits persisted under strict response deadlines, where speed cannot be traded for accuracy. Computational modelling showed that reward selectively improved the precision of memory-based responses without reducing guessing. Together, these findings indicate that motivational incentives improve WM by enhancing the quality of memory-based representations, rather than by strategic slowing or altering response strategies.

Cognitive control processes enable us to use recent contextual information to flexibly adapt to current task demands. This ability to adapt control processes is exhibited in response conflict tasks. In these tasks, participants must respond to a relevant piece of information while overcoming the tendency to respond to task-irrelevant information that cues an automatic or habitual response. Control demands can be updated in these tasks via two separate routes. Both errors and conflict between task-irrelevant and task-relevant information affect performance on subsequent trials. A body of work has implicated dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in implementing these control adjustments. However, this work has primarily relied on correlational techniques or focused on a single index of control adaptation. Here, we combine inhibitory transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) over DLPFC with computational modeling of behavior to test the causal role of DLPFC in control adaptation. We show that inhibitory TMS to DLPFC reduces the effect of previous trial conflict, and committing an error on the previous trial further reduces adaptive effects. This result provides causal evidence for DLPFC playing a general role in implementing trial-to-trial control adjustments.