Rhodri Cusack

TL;DR: The Cam-CAN Stage 2 repository contains multi-modal (MRI, MEG, and cognitive-behavioural) data from a large, cross-sectional adult lifespan (18–87 years old) population-based sample, providing a depth of neurocognitive phenotyping that is currently unparalleled, enabling integrative analyses of age-related changes in brain structure, brain function, and cognition.

TL;DR: Because this project focuses on normal age-related changes, the results may contribute to changing views about the ageing process, lead to targeted interventions, and reveal how normal ageing relates to frail ageing in clinicopathological conditions such as Alzheimer's disease.

TL;DR: Both the generation and the perception of bodily responses are identified as pivotal sources of variability in emotion experience and intuition, and offer strong supporting evidence for bodily feedback theories, suggesting that cognitive-affective processing does in significant part relate to “following the heart.”

Abstract: Two pairs of experiments studied the effects of attention and of unilateral neglect on auditory streaming. The first pair showed that the build up of auditory streaming in normal participants is greatly reduced or absent when they attend to a competing task in the contralateral ear. It was concluded that the effective build up of streaming depends on attention. The second pair showed that patients with an attentional deficit toward the left side of space (unilateral neglect) show less stream segregation of tone sequences presented to their left than to their right ears. Streaming in their right ears was similar to that for stimuli presented to either ear of healthy and of brain-damaged controls, who showed no across-ear asymmetry. This result is consistent with an effect of attention on streaming, constrains the neural sites involved, and reveals a qualitative difference between the perception of left- and right-sided sounds by neglect patients.

TL;DR: This work explored the precision of top-down activation of perceptual representations using neural pattern classification to identify activation patterns associated with imagery of distinct letter stimuli, and concluded that visual imagery is mediated via top- down activation of functionally distinct, yet spatially overlapping population codes for high-level visual representations.