Doug Crawford

@jdcrawford.bsky.social

Distinguished Research Professor in Neuroscience; York Research Chair in Visuomotor Neuroscience; Director, Centre for Integrative and Applied Neuroscience; Founding Director: VISTA and Connected Minds Programs. 🍁

How does brain know what someone's feeling? New Nature research from Dr. @kohitij.bsky.social reveals expression and identity are processed through overlapping neural representations. We read faces instantly but the brain's strategy is more nuanced.What does this mean for AI understanding emotions?

Facial expression discrimination emerges from partially overlapping neural subspaces of detection and identity - Nature Communications

How the brain supports facial expression perception remains unclear. Here, the authors show that macaques are a good model of human expression perception and that early high-level visual cortex activi...

nature.com

What if motion tracking didn't require expensive tools? Drs. @jonathanamichaels.bsky.social and Mulla developed ATHENA, open-source AI that captures natural movement without wearable sensors. Moving research from labs to clinics to communities. Read more:

AI tool developed at York U signals breakthrough for movement research - YFile

Learn about ATHENA, a new, open-source AI system created by York University researchers that removes barriers to motion tracking, making it easier to study how people move.

yorku.ca

Neuroscientist Dr. Brenda Milner is recognized as one of the fundamental founders of modern cognitive neuropsychology. She proved the hippocampus is essential for forming long-term "declarative" memory (facts, names & events). She was born #OTD in 1918--she's 108 years old today! #WomenInSTEM

A color photograph of Dr. Brenda Milner (born 1918), the pioneering British-Canadian founder of cognitive neuropsychology whose landmark work mapped localized memory in the human hippocampus. Seated and facing left, she engages an audience with an expressive, animated posture, both hands raised in gestural emphasis. Her short, silver-gray hair is styled back with soft volume, framing a deeply lined, intent face with a focused expression. She wears a tailored, dark navy and black textured tweed jacket over a simple cream blouse. A multi-strand necklace of dark, polished beads hangs around her neck, and a small, delicate pin is affixed to her left lapel. A flesh-colored over-ear microphone wire curves across her cheek. The dimly lit stage setting shows a blurred equipment in the background under subtle stage lighting, giving the composition a dynamic, scholarly atmosphere that highlights her enduring intellectual passion.

New lab paper by Jonathan Yi & co., where we find some interesting dissociations between detection performance, confidence, and sampling strategies when instructing participants to search for visuomotor matches vs mismatches - in an array of sort-of controlled virtual hands: doi.org/10.1098/rsos...

Searching for visuomotor matches versus mismatches biases confidence and visual sampling strategies

Abstract. Visuomotor self–other distinction relies on the comparison of forward predictions from one’s motor system with visual movement data. Previous wor

doi.org

My first first-author paper has just been published. If you are interested in brain stimulation and / or visuo-proprioceptive conflict, check out the paper below. doi.org/10.1007/s110... A big thank you to my amazing co-authors and supervisors, especially @jlimanowski.bsky.social!

Occipital tACS does not modulate manual performance but fixation variability under visuo-proprioceptive conflict - Neurophysiology

The modulation of oscillations at alpha and beta frequency ranges recorded over sensory cortices has been linked to the top-down weighting of sensory information relative to (competing) information from other modalities. Here, using a virtual reality-based hand-target matching task under visuo-proprioceptive conflict, we tested whether alpha-/beta-tACS over the occipital cortex would improve action performance when conflicting visual movement feedback needed to be ignored in favor of proprioception. Participants had to match a target rhythm with either their unseen real hand (RH) grasping movements, or with the movements of a virtual hand (VH) that displayed their actual movements after a constant time delay. Visual movement feedback was, consequently, either task-relevant (VH task) or a distractor (RH task). In a cross-over, double-blind, within-subject design, we applied either low-intensity (2 mA peak-to-peak) transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) at 10 Hz (“alpha”) or 20 Hz (“beta”), or sham, over the occipital cortex during this task. Neither alpha- nor beta-tACS significantly affected hand-target matching performance, but fixation variability in the RH condition significantly decreased during beta-tACS relative to sham stimulation. Thus, despite not directly modulating manual performance, occipital beta-tACS could have facilitated ignoring the mismatching (distracting) visual movement feedback when needed.

doi.org

Brain Injury Awareness Month: Dr. Mochizuki's lab is uncovering how brain injury disrupts the systems that keep us steady. Understanding these connections could transform rehabilitation. Have you or someone you know experienced changes in balance after injury? What helped?

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Traveling waves steer neural timing across cortex, causally linking wave propagation to working-memory performance and sensory processing. Traveling-wave transcranial alternating current stimulation (twtACS) causally links neural timing to cognitive function doi.org/10.1073/pnas... #neuroscience

PNAS

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

doi.org