PubMed Health⌕ Search

Biomedical subjects

Mark W Greenlee

Publications and source records attributed to Mark W Greenlee.

8 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2003

Relationship between motion VEP and perceived velocity of gratings: effects of stimulus speed and motion adaptation.

The N200 amplitude of the motion-onset VEP evoked by a parafoveal grating of variable speed (0.25-13.5 degrees/s), constant spatial frequency (2 cpd), contrast (4%), and direction (horizontally rightward) was studied before and after adaptation to a stationary or drifting grating (1 or 4 degrees/s). Psychophysical measurements were made simultaneously of the perceived speed. In the unadapted condition the slope of the N200 amplitude versus speed function is positive, but lower for high compared to low speeds. The N200 amplitude increases slightly after stationary adaptation. An increase in perceived speed is also evident after stationary adaptation. This increase is more pronounced for low compared to high speeds. Motion adaptation reduces N200 amplitudes over the entire speed range, whereas perceived speeds change from under-estimation to over-estimation when the speed exceeds 1.8 degrees/s after 1 degree/s adaptation and 4.5 degrees/s after 4 degrees/s adaptation. The simultaneous evaluation of motion VEP and psychophysical results supports the view that the neurons generating the N200 component are also involved in speed perception. The data suggest the existence of a limited number (three or more) speed channels.

Adaptation, Physiological↗
PubMed2003

High-fidelity perceptual long-term memory revisited--and confirmed.

Experiments on short-term perceptual memory for elemental visual attributes, such as contrast, motion, orientation, and spatial frequency, have relied on a delayed discrimination technique in which the subject compares two stimuli presented at different points in time and memory is indexed by discrimination thresholds measured for the different time intervals between reference and test. In a variant of this procedure, used in experiments on long-term memory, the presentation of a single reference is followed by a memory test that combines two-alternative forced-choice decisions with the method of constant stimuli With this procedure, it is impossible to distinguish the effects of criterion-setting processes and memory on performance, but this confound can be eliminated by testing many subjects and having each subject make a single decision. The resulting "group thresholds" are stable across time intervals of 24 hr, confirming previous findings of high-fidelity storage in the long-term memory range.

Humans↗
PubMed2002

Coherent motion pops out during smooth pursuit.

Stimulus motion is a prominent feature that is used by the visual system to segment figure from ground and perceptually bind widely separated objects. Pursuit eye movements can be influenced by such perceptual grouping processes. We have examined the subjects' ability to detect small amounts of coherent motion in random dot kinematograms during pursuit. We compared performance on tests of coherent motion perception while subjects fixated a stationary spot or while they tracked a moving target. The results indicate that smooth pursuit can improve subjects' ability to detect the presence of coherent motion. We tentatively propose that an efference copy of the eye movement signal can enhance the ability of the visual system to detect correlations between sparsely placed targets among noisy distractors.

Artifacts↗
PubMed2002

Event-related fMRI responses in the human frontal eye fields in a randomized pro- and antisaccade task.

We examined whether the frontal eye fields (FEF) are involved in the suppression of reflexive saccades. Simultaneous recording of horizontal eye movements and functional magnetic resonance imaging enabled us to perform a randomized pro- and antisaccade task and to sort blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) time series on the basis of task performance. Saccadic reaction time distributions were comparable across tasks indicating a similar effort in preprocessing of the saccades. Furthermore, we found similar BOLD activation in FEF during both correctly performed pro- and antisaccades. Frontal eye field activation started prior to target presentation and saccade generation. While we observed only few erroneous antisaccades, these were associated with a decrease in BOLD activity prior to target presentation, and increased BOLD activity after target presentation relative to correctly performed antisaccades. These findings are consistent with a role of the FEF in the suppression of reflexive saccades. The increase in activity after target presentation for antisaccade errors can only be indirectly linked to such a role but may also reflect activity related to the generation of a correction saccade. Frontal eye field BOLD activity may further represent general arousal, preparatory set, short-term memory, or salience-map related activity.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Hemispheric asymmetry in visual discrimination and memory: ERP evidence for the spatial frequency hypothesis.

Event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during delayed discrimination of simple spatial frequency gratings in the high and low frequency bands. Analyses of the waveforms N170, P220, N310, P400, and slow wave (SW) indicated significant and regionally specific interaction of spatial frequency and hemisphere for N170 amplitude. This interaction was independent of memory conditions, and appeared to be in the opposite direction of what is predicted by the spatial frequency model of hemispheric asymmetry. Additional interactions between spatial frequency and hemisphere were observed for N310 in the encoding process (reference stimulus) and for SW in the retrieval process (test stimulus). The general hypothesis of an interaction of spatial frequency and hemisphere in visual cognition is supported, but the findings indicate caution in interpreting an increase in physiological measures as an indication of more efficient brain processing. Moreover, several stages of information processing may contribute to the asymmetry observed in behavioral studies, and hemispheric balance may change dynamically during the time course of processing.

Adult↗
PubMed2002

Spatial imagery in deductive reasoning: a functional MRI study.

Various cognitive theories aim to explain human deductive reasoning: (1) mental logic theories claim syntactic language-based proofs of derivation, (2) the mental model theory proposes cognitive processes of constructing and manipulating spatially organized mental models, and (3) imagery theories postulate that such abilities are based on visual mental images. To explore the neural substrates of human deductive reasoning, we examined BOLD (blood oxygen level dependent) contrasts of twelve healthy participants during relational and conditional reasoning with whole-brain functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The results indicate that, in the absence of any correlated visual input, reasoning activated an occipitoparietal-frontal network, including parts of the prefrontal cortex (Brodmann's area, BA, 6, 9) and the cingulate gyrus (BA 32), the superior and inferior parietal cortex (BA 7, 40), the precuneus (BA 7), and the visual association cortex (BA 19). In the discussion, we first focus on the activated occipito-parietal pathway that is well known to be involved in spatial perception and spatial working memory. Second, we briefly relate the activation in the prefrontal cortical areas and in the anterior cingulate gyrus to other imaging studies on higher cognitive functions. Finally, we draw some general conclusions and argue that reasoners envisage and inspect spatially organized mental models to solve deductive inference problems.

Adult↗
PubMed1986

A defective angina pectoris pain warning system: experimental findings of ischemic and electrical pain test.

Ischemic pain threshold and tolerance levels using the tourniquet pain technique and electrical cutaneous pain thresholds were measured in patients with asymptomatic ischemic heart disease. Thirty asymptomatic patients, who repeatedly exhibited no angina pectoris pain during the occurrence of exercise-induced coronary ischemia (greater than or equal to 0.1 mV ST segment depression in exercise ECG) were compared to 30 randomly selected symptomatic control patients. In a smaller patient group (6 symptomatic, 6 asymptomatic) the degree of forearm ischemia during the tourniquet test was determined non-invasively by monitoring transcutaneous pO2. Results indicated that asymptomatic patients needed significantly more time to reach pain threshold following occlusion of forearm blood flow and exhibited significantly lower tcpO2 values at threshold than symptomatic patients. Electrical pain thresholds were also elevated in the asymptomatic group. These findings indicate that the phenomenon of asymptomatic myocardial ischemia can be explained by an extracardiac pain modifying mechanism.

Angina Pectoris↗