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The “ventriloquist effect” refers to the fact that vision usually dominates hearing in spatial localization, and this has been shown to be consistent with optimal integration of visual and auditory signals (Alais and Burr in Curr Biol 14(3):257-262, 2004). For temporal localization, however, auditory stimuli often “capture” visual stimuli, in what has become known as “temporal ventriloquism”. We examined this quantitatively using a bisection task, confirming that sound does tend to dominate the perceived timing of audio-visual stimuli. The dominance was predicted qualitatively by considering the better temporal localization of audition, but the quantitative fit was less than perfect, with more weight being given to audition than predicted from thresholds. As predicted by optimal cue combination, the temporal localization of audio-visual stimuli was better than for either sense alone.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0284610.].

Post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 (PASC), also known as Post-Covid Syndrome, and colloquially as Long Covid, has been defined as a constellation of signs and symptoms which persist for weeks or months after the initial SARS-CoV-2 infection. PASC affects a wide range of diverse organs and systems, with manifestations involving lungs, brain, the cardiovascular system and other organs such as kidney and the neuromuscular system. The pathogenesis of PASC is complex and multifactorial. Evidence suggests that seeding and persistence of SARS-CoV-2 in different organs, reactivation, and response to unrelated viruses such as EBV, autoimmunity, and uncontrolled inflammation are major drivers of PASC. The relative importance of pathogenetic pathways may differ in different tissue and organ contexts. Evidence suggests that vaccination, in addition to protecting against disease, reduces PASC after breakthrough infection although its actual impact remains to be defined. PASC represents a formidable challenge for health care systems and dissecting pathogenetic mechanisms may pave the way to targeted preventive and therapeutic approaches.

Perceived time undergoes distortions when we prepare and perform movements, showing compression and/or expansion for visual, tactile and auditory stimuli. However, the actual motor system contribution to these time distortions is far from clear. In this study we investigated visual time perception during preparation of isometric contractions and real movements of the hand in two different directions (right/left). Comparable modulations of visual event-timing are found in the isometric and in the movement condition, excluding explanations based on movement-induced sensory masking or attenuation. Most importantly and surprisingly, visual time depends on the movement direction, being expanded for hand movements pointing away from the body and compressed in the other direction. Furthermore, the effect of movement direction is not constant, but rather undergoes non-monotonic modulations in the brief moments preceding movement initiation. Our findings indicate that time distortions are strongly linked to the motor system and they may be unavoidable consequences of the mechanisms subserving sensory-motor integration.

Much evidence points to an interaction between vision and audition at early cortical sites. However, the functional role of these interactions is not yet understood. Here we show an early response of the occipital cortex to sound that it is strongly linked to the spatial localization task performed by the observer. The early occipital response to a sound, usually absent, increased by more than 10-fold when presented during a space localization task, but not during a time localization task. The response amplification was not only specific to the task, but surprisingly also to the position of the stimulus in the two hemifields. We suggest that early occipital processing of sound is linked to the construction of an audio spatial map that may utilize the visual map of the occipital cortex.

In normally sighted adult volunteers, applying a monocular patch for a few hours produces a short-term shift of ocular dominance in favor of the deprived eye—a phenomenon often interpreted as a form of homeostatic plasticity. We recently showed that the same effect can be elicited without eye-patching, by delaying the image in one eye (by 333 ms) over a 1 h period, during which participants engaged in a visuomotor coordination task; at the end of this period, ocular dominance shifted in favor of the delayed eye. Here we extended these findings, showing that passive exposure to the dichoptic replay of the same video with the same monocular delay did not affect ocular dominance. Moreover, we showed that the ocular dominance shift elicited by monocular delay during goal-directed actions had the same size as the effect of monocular deprivation, achieved by replacing the delayed image with a homogeneous gray screen, and that the two effects were correlated across participants. These results suggest that homeostatic plasticity is gated by a mismatch between vision in one eye and its multimodal context, and it is not necessarily linked with visual deprivation.

How our perceptual experience of the world remains stable and continuous in the face of continuous rapid eye movements still remains a mystery. This review discusses some recent progress towards understanding the neural and psychophysical processes that accompany these eye movements. We firstly report recent evidence from imaging studies in humans showing that many brain regions are tuned in spatiotopic coordinates, but only for items that are actively attended. We then describe a series of experiments measuring the spatial and temporal phenomena that occur around the time of saccades, and discuss how these could be related to visual stability. Finally, we introduce the concept of the spatio-temporal receptive field to describe the local spatiotopicity exhibited by many neurons when the eyes move.

In adults, motion perception is mediated by an extensive network of occipital, parietal, temporal, and insular cortical areas. Little is known about the neural substrate of visual motion in infants, although behavioural studies suggest that motion perception is rudimentary at birth and matures steadily over the first few years. Here, by measuring Blood Oxygenated Level Dependent (BOLD) responses to flow versus random-motion stimuli, we demonstrate that the major cortical areas serving motion processing in adults are operative by 7 wk of age. Resting-state correlations demonstrate adult-like functional connectivity between the motion-selective associative areas, but not between primary cortex and temporo-occipital and posterior-insular cortices. Taken together, the results suggest that the development of motion perception may be limited by slow maturation of the subcortical input and of the cortico-cortical connections. In addition they support the existence of independent input to primary (V1) and temporo-occipital (V5/MT+) cortices very early in life.

Humans share with animals, both vertebrates and invertebrates, the capacity to sense the number of items in their environment already at birth. The pervasiveness of this skill across the animal kingdom suggests that it should emerge in very simple populations of neurons. Current modelling literature, however, has struggled to provide a simple architecture carrying out this task, with most proposals suggesting the emergence of number sense in multi-layered complex neural networks, and typically requiring supervised learning; while simple accumulator models fail to predict Weber’s Law, a common trait of human and animal numerosity processing. We present a simple quantum spin model with all-to-all connectivity, where numerosity is encoded in the spectrum after stimulation with a number of transient signals occurring in a random or orderly temporal sequence. We use a paradigmatic simulational approach borrowed from the theory and methods of open quantum systems out of equilibrium, as a possible way to describe information processing in neural systems. Our method is able to capture many of the perceptual characteristics of numerosity in such systems. The frequency components of the magnetization spectra at harmonics of the system’s tunneling frequency increase with the number of stimuli presented. The amplitude decoding of each spectrum, performed with an ideal-observer model, reveals that the system follows Weber’s law. This contrasts with the well-known failure to reproduce Weber’s law with linear system or accumulators models.

Background Perception depends not only on current sensory input but is also heavily influenced by the immediate past perceptual experience, a phenomenon known as “serial dependence,” particularly robust in face perception. Results We measured discrimination of face-gender in participants to a sequence of intermingled male, female, and androgynous images, while recording EEG responses. The discriminations showed strong serial dependence (androgynous images biased towards male when preceded by male and female when preceded by female). The strength of the bias oscillated over time in the beta range, at 14 Hz for female prior stimuli, 18 Hz for male. Using classification techniques, we were able to successfully classify the previous stimulus from current EEG activity. Classification accuracy correlated well with the strength of serial dependence across individual participants, confirming that the neural signal from the past trial biased face perception. Bandpass filtering of the signal within the beta range showed that the most useful information to classify gender was around 14 Hz when the previous response was “female,” and around 18 Hz when it was “male,” reinforcing the psychophysical results showing serial dependence to be carried at those frequencies. Conclusions Overall, the results suggest that recent experience of face-gender is selectively represented in beta-frequency (14–20 Hz) spectral components of intrinsic neural oscillations. Significance statement The neurophysiological mechanisms of how past perceptual experience affects current perception are poorly understood. Using classification techniques, we demonstrate that the response to gender of the previous face image of a sequence can be decoded from the neural activity of the current EEG response, showing that relevant neural signals are maintained over trials. Classification accuracy was higher for participants with strong serial dependence, strongly implicating these signals as the neural substrate for serial dependence. The best information to classify gender was around 14 Hz for “female” faces, and around 18 Hz for “male,”, reinforcing the psychophysical results showing serial dependence to be carried at those beta -frequencies.