RITPART International Partnerships (completed)

• Jan Weber, Anne-Kristin Solbakk, Alejandro Omar Blenkmann, Llorens Anais, Ingrid Funderud & Sabine Liliana Leske [Show all 11 contributors for this article] (2024). Ramping dynamics and theta oscillations reflect dissociable signatures during rule-guided human behavior. Nature Communications. 15(1). doi: 10.1038/s41467-023-44571-7. Full text in Research Archive
• Alejandro Omar Blenkmann, Sabine Liliana Leske, Llorens Anais, Jack J. Lin, Edward F. Chang & Peter Brunner [Show all 12 contributors for this article] (2024). Anatomical registration of intracranial electrodes. Robust model-based localization and deformable smooth brain-shift compensation methods. Journal of Neuroscience Methods. ISSN 0165-0270. 404. doi: 10.1016/j.jneumeth.2024.110056. Full text in Research Archive
• Olgerta Asko, Alejandro Omar Blenkmann, Sabine Liliana Leske, Maja Dyhre Foldal, Llorens Anais & Ingrid Funderud [Show all 10 contributors for this article] (2024). Altered hierarchical auditory predictive processing after lesions to the orbitofrontal cortex. eLIFE. 13. doi: 10.7554/eLife.86386. Full text in Research Archive
• Jan Weber, Gabriela Iwama, Anne-Kristin Solbakk, Alejandro Omar Blenkmann, Pål Gunnar Larsson & Jugoslav Ivanovic [Show all 9 contributors for this article] (2023). Subspace partitioning in the human prefrontal cortex resolves cognitive interference. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS). ISSN 0027-8424. 120(28). doi: 10.1073/pnas.2220523120. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The human prefrontal cortex (PFC) constitutes the structural basis underlying flexible cognitive control, where mixed-selective neural populations encode multiple task features to guide subsequent behavior. The mechanisms by which the brain simultaneously encodes multiple task–relevant variables while minimizing interference from task-irrelevant features remain unknown. Leveraging intracranial recordings from the human PFC, we first demonstrate that competition between coexisting representations of past and present task variables incurs a behavioral switch cost. Our results reveal that this interference between past and present states in the PFC is resolved through coding partitioning into distinct low-dimensional neural states; thereby strongly attenuating behavioral switch costs. In sum, these findings uncover a fundamental coding mechanism that constitutes a central building block of flexible cognitive control.

• Llorens Anais, Ludovic Bellier, Alejandro Omar Blenkmann, Jugoslav Ivanovic, Pål Gunnar Larsson & Jack J. Lin [Show all 9 contributors for this article] (2023). Decision and response monitoring during working memory are sequentially represented in the human insula. iScience. 26(10). doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.107653. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Emerging research supports a role of the insula in human cognition. Here, we used intracranial EEG to investigate the spatiotemporal dynamics in the insula during a verbal working memory (vWM) task. We found robust effects for theta, beta, and high frequency activity (HFA) during probe presentation requiring a decision. Theta band activity showed differential involvement across left and right insulae while sequential HFA modulations were observed along the anteroposterior axis. HFA in anterior insula tracked decision making and subsequent HFA was observed in posterior insula after the behavioral response. Our results provide electrophysiological evidence of engagement of different insula subregions in both decision-making and response monitoring during vWM and expand our knowledge of the role of the insula in complex human behavior.

• Elizabeth L. Johnson, William K. Chang, Callum D. Dewar, Donna Sorensen, Jack J. Lin & Anne-Kristin Solbakk [Show all 12 contributors for this article] (2022). Orbitofrontal cortex governs working memory for temporal order. Current Biology. ISSN 0960-9822. 32(9), p. R410–R411. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.03.074. Full text in Research Archive
• Mari Lesteberg & Alexander Refsum Jensenius (2022). MICRO and MACRO - Developing New Accessible Musicking Technologies. In Michael Iber & Kajetan Enge (Ed.), Audio Mostly 2022: What you hear is what you see? Perspectives on modalities in sound and music interaction. ACM Publications. ISSN 9781450397018. p. 147–150. doi: 10.1145/3561212.3561231. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This paper describes the development of two musical instrument prototypes developed to explore how non-haptic music technologies can be accessed from a web browser and how they can offer accessibility for people with low fine motor skills. Two approaches to browser-based motion capture were developed and tested during an iterative design process. This was followed by observational studies of two user groups: one with low fine motor skills and one with normal motor skills. Contrary to our expectations, we found that avoiding the use of buttons and mice did not make the apps more accessible for the participants with low fine motor skills. Furthermore, motion speed was considered more important for people with low motor skills than the size of the control action. The most important finding is that browser-based musical instruments using sensor-based and video-based motion tracking are not only feasible but allow for reaching much larger groups of people than previously possible. This may ultimately lead to both more personalized and accessible musical experiences.

• Alejandro Omar Blenkmann, Anne-Kristin Solbakk, Jugoslav Ivanovic, Pål Gunnar Larsson, Robert Thomas Knight & Tor Endestad (2022). Modeling intracranial electrodes. A simulation platform for the evaluation of localization algorithms. Frontiers in Neuroinformatics. 16, p. 1–20. doi: 10.3389/fninf.2022.788685. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Introduction Intracranial electrodes are implanted in patients with drug-resistant epilepsy as part of their pre-surgical evaluation. This allows the investigation of normal and pathological brain functions with excellent spatial and temporal resolution. The spatial resolution relies on methods that precisely localize the implanted electrodes in the cerebral cortex, which is critical for drawing valid inferences about the anatomical localization of brain function. Multiple methods have been developed to localize the electrodes, mainly relying on pre-implantation MRI and post-implantation computer tomography (CT) images. However, they are hard to validate because there is no ground truth data to test them and there is no standard approach to systematically quantify their performance. In other words, their validation lacks standardization. Our work aimed to model intracranial electrode arrays and simulate realistic implantation scenarios, thereby providing localization algorithms with new ways to evaluate and optimize their performance. Results We implemented novel methods to model the coordinates of implanted grids, strips, and depth electrodes, as well as the CT artifacts produced by these. We successfully modeled realistic implantation scenarios, including different sizes, inter-electrode distances, and brain areas. In total, ∼3,300 grids and strips were fitted over the brain surface, and ∼850 depth electrode arrays penetrating the cortical tissue were modeled. Realistic CT artifacts were simulated at the electrode locations under 12 different noise levels. Altogether, ∼50,000 thresholded CT artifact arrays were simulated in these scenarios, and validated with real data from 17 patients regarding the coordinates’ spatial deformation, and the CT artifacts’ shape, intensity distribution, and noise level. Finally, we provide an example of how the simulation platform is used to characterize the performance of two cluster-based localization methods. Conclusion We successfully developed the first platform to model implanted intracranial grids, strips, and depth electrodes and realistically simulate thresholded CT artifacts and their noise. These methods provide a basis for developing more complex models, while simulations allow systematic evaluation of the performance of electrode localization techniques. The methods described in this article, and the results obtained from the simulations, are freely available via open repositories. A graphical user interface implementation is also accessible via the open-source iElectrodes toolbox.

• Alexander Refsum Jensenius & Cagri Erdem (2022). Gestures in ensemble performance. In Renee Timmers, Freya Bailes & Helena Daffern (Ed.), Together in Music: Coordination, expression, participation. Oxford University Press. ISSN 9780198860761. doi: 10.1093/oso/9780198860761.003.0014. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The topic of gesture has received growing attention among music researchers over recent decades. Some of this research has been summarized in anthologies on "musical gestures", such as those by Gritten and King (2006), Godøy and Leman (2010), and Gritten and King (2011). There have also been a couple of articles reviewing how the term gesture has been used in various music-related disciplines (and beyond), including those by Cadoz and Wanderley (2000) and Jensenius et al. (2010). Much empirical work has been performed since these reviews were written, aided by better motion capture technologies, new machine learning techniques, and a heightened awareness of the topic. Still there are a number of open questions as to the role of gestures in music performance in general, and in ensemble performance in particular. This chapter aims to clarify some of the basic terminology of music-related body motion, and draw up some perspectives of how one can think about gestures in ensemble performance. This is, obviously, only one way of looking at the very multifaceted concept of gesture, but it may lead to further interest in this exciting and complex research domain.

• Ulysse Côté-Allard, Gabriel Gagnon-Turcotte, Angkoon Phinyomark, Kyrre Harald Glette, Erik Scheme & François Laviolette [Show all 7 contributors for this article] (2021). A Transferable Adaptive Domain Adversarial Neural Network for Virtual Reality Augmented EMG-Based Gesture Recognition. IEEE transactions on neural systems and rehabilitation engineering. ISSN 1534-4320. doi: 10.1109/TNSRE.2021.3059741. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Within the field of electromyography-based (EMG) gesture recognition, disparities exist between the offline accuracy reported in the literature and the real-time usability of a classifier. This gap mainly stems from two factors: 1) The absence of a controller, making the data collected dissimilar to actual control. 2) The difficulty of including the four main dynamic factors (gesture intensity, limb position, electrode shift, and transient changes in the signal), as including their permutations drastically increases the amount of data to be recorded. Contrarily, online datasets are limited to the exact EMG-based controller used to record them, necessitating the recording of a new dataset for each control method or variant to be tested. Consequently, this paper proposes a new type of dataset to serve as an intermediate between offline and online datasets, by recording the data using a real-time experimental protocol. The protocol, performed in virtual reality, includes the four main dynamic factors and uses an EMG-independent controller to guide movements. This EMG-independent feedback ensures that the user is in-the-loop during recording, while enabling the resulting dynamic dataset to be used as an EMG-based benchmark. The dataset is comprised of 20 able-bodied participants completing three to four sessions over a period of 14 to 21 days. The ability of the dynamic dataset to serve as a benchmark is leveraged to evaluate the impact of different recalibration techniques for long-term (across-day) gesture recognition, including a novel algorithm, named TADANN. TADANN consistently and significantly ( p<0.05 ) outperforms using fine-tuning as the recalibration technique.

• Raul Masu, Adam Pultz Melbye, John Sullivan & Alexander Refsum Jensenius (2021). NIME and the Environment: Toward a More Sustainable NIME Practice. In Roger Dannenberg & Xiao Xiao (Ed.), Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. The International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This paper addresses environmental issues around NIME research and practice. We discuss the formulation of an environmental statement for the conference as well as the initiation of a NIME Eco Wiki containing information on environmental concerns related to the creation of new musical instruments. We outline a number of these concerns and, by systematically reviewing the proceedings of all previous NIME conferences, identify a general lack of reflection on the environmental impact of the research undertaken. Finally, we propose a framework for addressing the making, testing, using, and disposal of NIMEs in the hope that sustainability may become a central concern to researchers.

• Alexander Refsum Jensenius (2021). Best versus Good Enough Practices for Open Music Research. Empirical Musicology Review. 16(1). doi: 10.18061/emr.v16i1.7646. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Music researchers work with increasingly large and complex data sets. There are few established data handling practices in the field and several conceptual, technological, and practical challenges. Furthermore, many music researchers are not equipped for (or interested in) the craft of data storage, curation, and archiving. This paper discusses some of the particular challenges that empirical music researchers face when working towards Open Research practices: handling (1) (multi)media files, (2) privacy, and (3) copyright issues. These are exemplified through MusicLab, an event series focused on fostering openness in music research. It is argued that the "best practice" suggested by the FAIR principles is too demanding in many cases, but "good enough practice" may be within reach for many. A four-layer data handling "recipe" is suggested as concrete advice for achieving "good enough practice" in empirical music research.

• Slama Katarina Slama, Richard Jimenez, Sujayam Saha, David King-Stephens, Kenneth D. Laxer & Peter B. Weber [Show all 12 contributors for this article] (2021). Intracranial recordings demonstrate both cortical and medial temporal lobe engagement in visual search in humans. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. ISSN 0898-929X. 33(9), p. 1833–1861. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_01739. Full text in Research Archive
• Anne-Kristin Solbakk, James Lubell, Sabine Leske, Ingrid Funderud, Llorens Anais & Alejandro Omar Blenkmann [Show all 10 contributors for this article] (2021). Monitoring of self-paced action timing and sensory outcomes after lesions to the orbitofrontal cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. ISSN 0898-929X. 33(9), p. 1956–1975. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_01733. Full text in Research Archive
• Anaïs Llorens, Athina Tzovara, Ludovic Bellier, lIina Bhaya-Grossman, Aurelie Bidet-Caulet & William K Chang [Show all 45 contributors for this article] (2021). Gender bias in academia: A lifetime problem that needs solutions. Neuron. ISSN 0896-6273. 109(13), p. 2047–2074. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2021.06.002. Full text in Research Archive
• Balint Laczko & Alexander Refsum Jensenius (2021). Reflections on the Development of the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python. In Prithvi Ravi Kantan, Razvan Paisa & Silvin Willemsen (Ed.), Proceedings of the Nordic Sound and Music Computing Conference. Aalborg Universitetsforlag. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The paper presents the Musical Gestures Toolbox (MGT) for Python, a collection of modules targeted at researchers working with video recordings. The toolbox includes video visualization techniques such as creating motion videos, motion history images, and motiongrams. These visualizations allow for studying video recordings from different temporal and spatial perspectives. The toolbox also includes basic computer vision methods, and it is designed to integrate well with audio analysis toolboxes. The MGT was initially developed to analyze music-related body motion (of musicians, dancers, and perceivers) but is equally helpful for other disciplines working with video recordings of humans, such as linguistics, pedagogy, psychology, and medicine.

• Matthias Liebrand, Anne-Kristin Solbakk, Ingrid Funderud, Macià Buades-Rotger, Robert Thomas Knight & Ulrike M Krämer (2021). Intact Proactive Motor Inhibition after Unilateral Prefrontal Cortex or Basal Ganglia Lesions. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. ISSN 0898-929X. 33(9), p. 1862–1879. doi: 10.1162/jocn_a_01691. Full text in Research Archive
• Maja Dyhre Foldal, Alejandro Omar Blenkmann, Anaïs Llorens, Robert T. Knight, Anne-Kristin Solbakk & Tor Endestad (2020). The brain tracks auditory rhythm predictability independent of selective attention. Scientific Reports. 10, p. 1–13. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-64758-y. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The brain responds to violations of expected rhythms, due to extraction- and prediction of the temporal structure in auditory input. Yet, it is unknown how probability of rhythm violations affects the overall rhythm predictability. Another unresolved question is whether predictive processes are independent of attention processes. In this study, EEG was recorded while subjects listened to rhythmic sequences. Predictability was manipulated by changing the stimulus-onset-asynchrony (SOA deviants) for given tones in the rhythm. When SOA deviants were inserted rarely, predictability remained high, whereas predictability was lower with more frequent SOA deviants. Dichotic tone-presentation allowed for independent manipulation of attention, as specific tones of the rhythm were presented to separate ears. Attention was manipulated by instructing subjects to attend to tones in one ear only, while keeping the rhythmic structure of tones constant. The analyses of event-related potentials revealed an attenuated N1 for tones when rhythm predictability was high, while the N1 was enhanced by attention to tones. Bayesian statistics revealed no interaction between predictability and attention. A right-lateralization of attention effects, but not predictability effects, suggested potentially different cortical processes. This is the first study to show that probability of rhythm violation influences rhythm predictability, independent of attention.

• Anaïs Llorens, Ingrid Funderud, Alejandro Omar Blenkmann, James Lubell, Maja Dyhre Foldal & Sabine Liliana Leske [Show all 11 contributors for this article] (2020). Preservation of Interference Effects in Working Memory After Orbitofrontal Damage. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 13, p. 1–15. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2019.00445. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is implicated in multiple cognitive processes, including inhibitory control, context memory, recency judgment, and choice behavior. Despite an emerging understanding of the role of OFC in memory and executive control, its necessity for core working memory (WM) operations remains undefined. Here, we assessed the impact of OFC damage on interference effects in WM using a Recent Probes task based on the Sternberg item-recognition task (1966). Subjects were asked to memorize a set of letters and then indicate whether a probe letter was presented in a particular set. Four conditions were created according to the forthcoming response ("yes"/"no") and the recency of the probe (presented in the previous trial set or not). We compared behavioral and electroencephalography (EEG) responses between healthy subjects (n = 14) and patients with bilateral OFC damage (n = 14). Both groups had the same recency pattern of slower reaction time (RT) when the probe was presented in the previous trial but not in the current one, reflecting the proactive interference (PI). The within-group electrophysiological results showed no condition difference during letter encoding and maintenance. In contrast, event-related potentials (ERPs) to probes showed distinct within-group condition effects, and condition by group effects. The response and recency effects for controls occurred within the same time window (300-500 ms after probe onset) and were observed in two distinct spatial groups including right centro-posterior and left frontal electrodes. Both clusters showed ERP differences elicited by the response effect, and one cluster was also sensitive to the recency manipulation. Condition differences for the OFC group involved two different clusters, encompassing only left hemisphere electrodes and occurring during two consecutive time windows (345-463 ms and 565-710 ms). Both clusters were sensitive to the response effect, but no recency effect was found despite the behavioral recency effect. Although the groups had different electrophysiological responses, the maintenance of letters in WM, the evaluation of the context of the probe, and the decision to accept or reject a probed letter were preserved in OFC patients. The results suggest that neural reorganization may contribute to intact recency judgment and response after OFC damage.

• Julia W.Y. Kam, Randolph H. Helfrich, Anne-Kristin Solbakk, Tor Endestad, Pål Gunnar Larsson & Jack J. Lin [Show all 7 contributors for this article] (2020). Top-Down Attentional Modulation in Human Frontal Cortex: Differential Engagement during External and Internal Attention. Cerebral Cortex. ISSN 1047-3211. 31(2), p. 873–883. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhaa262. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Decades of electrophysiological research on top-down control converge on the role of the lateral frontal cortex in facilitating attention to behaviorally relevant external inputs. However, the involvement of frontal cortex in the top-down control of attention directed to the external versus internal environment remains poorly understood. To address this, we recorded intracranial electrocorticography while subjects directed their attention externally to tones and responded to infrequent target tones, or internally to their own thoughts while ignoring the tones. Our analyses focused on frontal and temporal cortices. We first computed the target effect, as indexed by the difference in high frequency activity (70-150 Hz) between target and standard tones. Importantly, we then compared the target effect between external and internal attention, reflecting a top-down attentional effect elicited by task demands, in each region of interest. Both frontal and temporal cortices showed target effects during external and internal attention, suggesting this effect is present irrespective of attention states. However, only the frontal cortex showed an enhanced target effect during external relative to internal attention. These findings provide electrophysiological evidence for top-down attentional modulation in the lateral frontal cortex, revealing preferential engagement with external attention.

• Ulysse Côté-Allard, Gabriel Gagnon-Turcotte, Angkoon Phinyomark, Kyrre Glette, Erik Scheme & Francois Laviolette [Show all 7 contributors for this article] (2020). Unsupervised Domain Adversarial Self-Calibration for Electromyography-Based Gesture Recognition. IEEE Access. 8, p. 177941–177955. doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3027497. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Surface electromyography (sEMG) provides an intuitive and non-invasive interface from which to control machines. However, preserving the myoelectric control system’s performance over multiple days is challenging, due to the transient nature of the signals obtained with this recording technique. In practice, if the system is to remain usable, a time-consuming and periodic recalibration is necessary. In the case where the sEMG interface is employed every few days, the user might need to do this recalibration before every use. Thus, severely limiting the practicality of such a control method. Consequently, this paper proposes tackling the especially challenging task of unsupervised adaptation of sEMG signals, when multiple days have elapsed between each recording, by introducing Self-Calibrating Asynchronous Domain Adversarial Neural Network (SCADANN). SCADANN is compared with two state-of-the-art self-calibrating algorithms developed specifically for deep learning within the context of EMG-based gesture recognition and three state-of-the-art domain adversarial algorithms. The comparison is made both on an offline and a dynamic dataset (20 participants per dataset), using two different deep network architectures with two different input modalities (temporal-spatial descriptors and spectrograms). Overall, SCADANN is shown to substantially and systematically improves classification performances over no recalibration and obtains the highest average accuracy for all tested cases across all methods.

• Fumiaki Sato, Bruno Laeng, Shigeki Nakauchi & Tetsuto Minami (2020). Cueing the Necker cube: Pupil dilation reflects the viewing-from-above constraint in bistable perception. Journal of Vision. 20(4). doi: 10.1167/jov.20.4.7. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  We hypothesized that a perceptually ambiguous or bistable object (Necker cube) can be more effectively biased to assume a point of view-from-above (VFA) than from below the object by cueing attention. Participants viewed a Necker cube in which one surface was temporarily shaded so as to prime a specific perspective on the cube. Subsequently, the standard (wireframe) Necker cube was viewed for 3 seconds, and participants reported what perspective they had seen initially and whether their perception shifted to the alternative perspective during the brief viewing. Concomitantly, pupil size was monitored with an eye-tracker to obtain an index of cognitive effort. There were two conditions: passive viewing and forced attention to sustain the initially primed perspective. We confirmed the presence of a VFA bias with forced attention, which was accompanied by reduced attentional effort, as indexed by a reduced pupil diameter, compared with the view-from-below. Participants showed no bias during passive viewing. We suggest that the level of intensive attention, when retrieving and maintaining a specific view from memory, is mirrored in the size of the eye pupils and may reflect ecological constraints on visual perception.

• Yuta Suzuki, Tetsuto Minami, Bruno Laeng & Shigeki Nakauchi (2019). Colorful glares: Effects of colors on brightness illusions measured with pupillometry. Acta Psychologica. ISSN 0001-6918. 198, p. 1–10. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2019.102882. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  We hypothesized that pupil constrictions to the glare illusion, where converging luminance gradients subjectively enhance the perception of brightness, would be stronger for ‘blue’ than for other colors. Such an expectation was based on reflections about the ecology of vision, where the experience of dazzling light is common when one happens to look directly at sunlight through some occluders. Thus, we hypothesized that pupil constrictions to ‘blue’ reflect an ecologically-based expectation of the visual system from the experience of sky's light and color, which also leads to interpret the blue gradients of illusory glare to act as effective cues to impending probable intense light. We therefore manipulated the gradients color of glare illusions and measured changes in subjective brightness of identical shape stimuli. We confirmed that the blue resulted in what was subjectively evaluated as the brightest condition, despite all colored stimuli were equiluminant. This enhanced brightness effect was observed both in a psychophysical adjustment task and in changes in pupil size, where the maximum pupil constriction peak was observed with the ‘blue’ converging gradients over and above to the pupil response to blue in other conditions (i.e., diverging gradients and homogeneous patches). Moreover, glare-related pupil constrictions for each participant were correlated to each individual's subjective brightness adjustments. Homogenous blue hues also constricted the pupil more than other hues, which represents a pupillometric analog of the Helmholtz-Kohlrausch effect on brightness perception. Together, these findings show that pupillometry constitutes an easy tool to assess individual differences in color brightness perception.

• Alejandro Omar Blenkmann, Santiago Collavini, James Lubell, Llorens Anais, Ingrid Funderud & Jugoslav Ivanovic [Show all 13 contributors for this article] (2019). Auditory deviance detection in the human insula: An intracranial EEG study. Cortex. ISSN 0010-9452. 121, p. 189–200. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2019.09.002. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The human insula is known to be involved in auditory processing, but knowledge about its precise functional role and the underlying electrophysiology is limited. To assess its role in automatic auditory deviance detection we analyzed the EEG high frequency activity (HFA; 75–145 Hz) and ERPs from 90 intracranial insular channels across 16 patients undergoing pre-surgical intracranial monitoring for epilepsy treatment. Subjects passively listened to a stream of standard and deviant tones differing in four physical dimensions: intensity, frequency, location or time. HFA responses to auditory stimuli were found in the short and long gyri, and the anterior, superior, and inferior segments of the circular sulcus of the insular cortex. Only a subset of channels in the inferior segment of the circular sulcus of the insula showed HFA deviance detection responses, i.e., a greater and longer latency response to specific deviants relative to standards. Auditory deviancy processing was also later in the insula when compared with the superior temporal cortex. ERP results were more widespread and supported the HFA insular findings. These results provide evidence that the human insula is engaged during auditory deviance detection.

• Sepideh Sadaghiani, Pascasie L. Dombert, Marianne Løvstad, Ingrid Funderud, Torstein Ragnar Meling & Tor Endestad [Show all 9 contributors for this article] (2019). Lesions to the fronto-parietal network impact alpha-band phase synchrony and cognitive control. Cerebral Cortex. ISSN 1047-3211. 29(10), p. 4143–4153. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhy296. Full text in Research Archive
• Elizabeth L. Johnson, Jenna N. Adams, Anne-Kristin Solbakk, Tor Endestad, Pål Gunnar Larsson & Jugoslav Ivanovic [Show all 9 contributors for this article] (2018). Dynamic frontotemporal systems process space and time in working memory. PLoS Biology. ISSN 1544-9173. 16(3). doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.2004274. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  How do we rapidly process incoming streams of information in working memory, a cognitive mechanism central to human behavior? Dominant views of working memory focus on the prefrontal cortex (PFC), but human hippocampal recordings provide a neurophysiological signature distinct from the PFC. Are these regions independent, or do they interact in the service of working memory? We addressed this core issue in behavior by recording directly from frontotemporal sites in humans performing a visuospatial working memory task that operationalizes the types of identity and spatiotemporal information we encounter every day. Theta band oscillations drove bidirectional interactions between the PFC and medial temporal lobe (MTL; including the hippocampus). MTL theta oscillations directed the PFC preferentially during the processing of spatiotemporal information, while PFC theta oscillations directed the MTL for all types of information being processed in working memory. These findings reveal an MTL theta mechanism for processing space and time and a domain-general PFC theta mechanism, providing evidence that rapid, dynamic MTL–PFC interactions underlie working memory for everyday experiences.

• Julia W.Y. Kam, Anne-Kristin Solbakk, Tor Endestad, Torstein Ragnar Meling & Robert Thomas Knight (2018). Lateral prefrontal cortex lesion impairs regulation of internally and externally directed attention. NeuroImage. ISSN 1053-8119. 175(15), p. 91–99. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2018.03.063. Full text in Research Archive
• Anat Perry, Samantha N. Saunders, Jennifer Stiso, Callum Dewar, James Lubell & Torstein Ragnar Meling [Show all 9 contributors for this article] (2017). Effects of prefrontal cortex damage on emotion understanding: EEG and behavioural evidence. Brain. ISSN 0006-8950. 140(4), p. 1086–1099. doi: 10.1093/brain/awx031. Full text in Research Archive
• Elizabeth L. Johnson, Callum Dewar, Anne-Kristin Solbakk, Tor Endestad, Torstein Ragnar Meling & Robert T Knight (2017). Bidirectional Frontoparietal Oscillatory Systems Support Working Memory. Current Biology. ISSN 0960-9822. 27(12), p. 1829–1835. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2017.05.046. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The ability to represent and select information in working memory provides the neurobiological infrastructure for human cognition. For 80 years, dominant views of working memory have focused on the key role of prefrontal cortex (PFC) [1–8]. However, more recent work has implicated posterior cortical regions [9–12], suggesting that PFC engagement during working memory is dependent on the degree of executive demand. We provide evidence from neurological patients with discrete PFC damage that challenges the dominant models attributing working memory to PFC-dependent systems. We show that neural oscillations, which provide a mechanism for PFC to communicate with posterior cortical regions [13], independently subserve communications both to and from PFC—uncovering parallel oscillatory mechanisms for working memory. Fourteen PFC patients and 20 healthy, age-matched controls performed a working memory task where they encoded, maintained, and actively processed information about pairs of common shapes. In controls, the electroencephalogram (EEG) exhibited oscillatory activity in the low-theta range over PFC and directional connectivity from PFC to parieto-occipital regions commensurate with executive processing demands. Concurrent alpha-beta oscillations were observed over parieto-occipital regions, with directional connectivity from parieto-occipital regions to PFC, regardless of processing demands. Accuracy, PFC low-theta activity, and PFC → parieto-occipital connectivity were attenuated in patients, revealing a PFC-independent, alpha-beta system. The PFC patients still demonstrated task proficiency, which indicates that the posterior alpha-beta system provides sufficient resources for working memory. Taken together, our findings reveal neurologically dissociable PFC and parieto-occipital systems and suggest that parallel, bidirectional oscillatory systems form the basis of working memory.

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• Alexander Refsum Jensenius (2022). Sound Actions: Conceptualizing Musical Instruments. MIT Press. ISBN 9780262544634. 304 p. doi: 10.7551/mitpress/14220.001.0001. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  A techno-cognitive look at how new technologies are shaping the future of musicking. “Musicking” encapsulates both the making of and perception of music, so it includes both active and passive forms of musical engagement. But at its core, it is a relationship between actions and sounds, between human bodies and musical instruments. Viewing musicking through this lens and drawing on music cognition and music technology, Sound Actions proposes a model for understanding differences between traditional acoustic “sound makers” and new electro-acoustic “music makers.” What is a musical instrument? How do new technologies change how we perform and perceive music? What happens when composers build instruments, performers write code, perceivers become producers, and instruments play themselves? The answers to these pivotal questions entail a meeting point between interactive music technology and embodied music cognition, what author Alexander Refsum Jensenius calls “embodied music technology.” Moving between objective description and subjective narrative of his own musical experiences, Jensenius explores why music makes people move, how the human body can be used in musical interaction, and how new technologies allow for active musical experiences. The development of new music technologies, he demonstrates, has fundamentally changed how music is performed and perceived.

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• Alejandro Omar Blenkmann, Vegard Akselsson Volehaugen, Vinicius Rezende Carvalho, Sabine Liliana Leske, Anais Llorens & Ingrid Funderud [Show all 14 contributors for this article] (2024). An intracranial EEG study on auditory deviance detection. Full text in Research Archive
• Olgerta Asko, Vegard Akselsson Volehaugen, Sabine Liliana Leske, Ingrid Funderud, Anaïs Llorens & Jugoslav Ivanovic [Show all 12 contributors for this article] (2024). Predictive encoding of deviant tone sequences in the human prefrontal cortex. Full text in Research Archive
• Olgerta Asko, Vegard Akselsson Volehaugen, Sabine Liliana Leske, Ingrid Funderud, Llorens Anais & Jugoslav Ivanovic [Show all 12 contributors for this article] (2024). Predictive encoding of deviant tone sequences in the human prefrontal cortex. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The ability to use predictive information to guide perception and action relies heavily on the prefrontal cortex (PFC), yet the involvement of its subregions in predictive processes remains unclear. Recent perspectives propose that the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) generates predictions about perceptual events, actions, and their outcomes while the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) is involved in prospective functions, which support predictive processes, such as selective attention, working memory, response preparation or inhibition. To further delineate the roles of these PFC areas in predictive processing, we investigated whether lesions would impair the ability to build predictions of future events and detect deviations from expected regularities. We used an auditory deviance detection task, in which the structural regularities of played tones were controlled at two hierarchical levels by rules defined at a local (i.e., between tones within sequences) and global (i.e., between sequences) level. We have recently shown that OFC lesions affect detecting prediction violations at two hierarchical levels of rule abstraction, i.e., altered MMN and P3a to local and simultaneous local + global prediction violations (https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.86386). Now, we focus on the task's predictive aspect and present the latest results showing the involvement of PFC subregions in anticipation of deviances informed by implicit predictive information. Behavioral data shows that deviance expectancy induced faster deviance detection in healthy adults (n=22), suggesting that participants track a state space representation of the task and anticipate upcoming deviant sequences. The analysis of EEG data from patients with focal lesions to the OFC (n = 12) or LPFC (n = 10), and SEEG from the same areas in patients with epilepsy (n = 7), revealed interesting differences. Healthy adults (n = 15) showed modulations of the Contingent Negative Variation (CNV) – a marker of anticipatory activity - tracking the expectancy of deviant tone sequences. However, patients with OFC lesions lacked CNV sensitivity to the predictive context, while patients with LPFC lesions showed moderate sensitivity compared to healthy adults. These results were further supported by intracranial recordings, which revealed expectancy modulation of the high-frequency broadband signal from electrodes in OFC and LPFC, with an earlier latency of activity modulation for the OFC and a later one for the LPFC. Altogether, the complementary approach from behavioral, intracerebral EEG, scalp EEG, and causal lesion data provides compelling evidence for the distinct engagement of the two prefrontal areas in predicting future events and signaling deviations.

• Alejandro Omar Blenkmann (2024). The role of the Orbitofrontal Cortex in building predictions and detecting violations. Full text in Research Archive
• Alejandro Omar Blenkmann (2024). Electrophysiological correlates of auditory regularity expectations and violations at short and long temporal scales: Studies in intracranial EEG and prefrontal cortex lesion patients. Full text in Research Archive
• Alejandro Omar Blenkmann, Sabine Liliana Leske, Anais Llorens, Jack J. Lin, Edward Chang & Peter Brunner [Show all 12 contributors for this article] (2024). Anatomical registration of intracranial electrodes. Full text in Research Archive
• Alexander Refsum Jensenius & Joachim Poutaraud (2023). Video Visualization. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This workshop is targeted at students and researchers working with video recordings. Even though the workshop will be based on quantitative tools, the aim is to provide solutions for qualitative research. This includes visualization techniques such as motion videos, motion history images, and motiongrams, which, in different ways, allow for looking at video recordings from different temporal and spatial perspectives. It also includes basic computer vision analysis modules, such as extracting quantity and centroid of motion, and using such features in analysis. The participants will learn to use the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python, a collection of high-level modules for easily generating all of the above-mentioned visualizations and analyses. This toolbox was initially developed for analyzing music-related body motion but is equally helpful for other disciplines working with video recordings of humans, such as linguistics, psychology, medicine, and educational sciences.

• Mari Lesteberg & Alexander Refsum Jensenius (2022). MICRO and MACRO - Developing New Accessible Musicking Technologies. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This paper describes the development of two musical instrument prototypes developed to explore how non-haptic music technologies can be accessed from a web browser and how they can offer accessibility for people with low fine motor skills. Two approaches to browser-based motion capture were developed and tested during an iterative design process. This was followed by observational studies of two user groups: one with low fine motor skills and one with normal motor skills. Contrary to our expectations, we found that avoiding the use of buttons and mice did not make the apps more accessible for the participants with low fine motor skills. Furthermore, motion speed was considered more important for people with low motor skills than the size of the control action. The most important finding is that browser-based musical instruments using sensor-based and video-based motion tracking are not only feasible but allow for reaching much larger groups of people than previously possible. This may ultimately lead to both more personalized and accessible musical experiences.

• Julian Fuhrer, Kyrre Glette, Jugoslav Ivanovic, Pål Gunnar Larsson, Tristan Bekinschtein & Silvia Kochen [Show all 11 contributors for this article] (2022). Direct brain recordings reveal continuous encoding of structure in random stimuli. Full text in Research Archive
• Olgerta Asko, Alejandro Omar Blenkmann, Sabine Liliana Leske, Maja Dyhre Foldal, Anaïs Llorens & Ingrid Funderud [Show all 10 contributors for this article] (2022). Altered hierarchical auditory predictive processing after lesions to the orbitofrontal cortex. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In this study, we tested the causal involvement of the OFC in noticing breaches of predictions (i.e., PEs) at different hierarchical levels of task structural complexity. With this aim, we examined the event-related potentials (ERPs) of patients with focal OFC lesions and healthy adults while performing an auditory local-global oddball paradigm. Altogether, we found that after OFC damage, low-level PEs (i.e., processing of stimuli that are unpredicted at the local level) and combined low- and high-level PEs (i.e., processing of stimuli that are unpredicted at both the local and global level) were impacted. However, the processing of standard tones was not affected. We conclude that the OFC may contribute to a top-down process that modulates the deviance detection system in the primary auditory cortices, and may be involved in connecting PEs at lower hierarchical areas with predictions at higher areas. The study sheds new light on the poorly explored deficits of hierarchical auditory prediction in patients with damaged OFC.

• Alejandro Omar Blenkmann, Anne-Kristin Solbakk, Sabine Liliana Leske, Anaïs Llorens, Ingrid Funderud & Santiago Collavini [Show all 13 contributors for this article] (2022). Human brain network involved in auditory deviance detection. An intracranial EEG study. Full text in Research Archive
• Alexander Refsum Jensenius (2022). Erfaringer med å lage 3xMOOC. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  I denne presentasjonen vil jeg presentere hvordan vi gjennom årene har utviklet tre komplette nettkurs ved Universitetet i Oslo: Music Moves (2016), Motion Capture (2022) og Pupillometry (2023). Fokuset vil ligge på muligheter og utfordringer i video i utdanningssammenheng.

• Anne-Kristin Solbakk, Tor Endestad & Robert Thomas Knight (2022). Oslo - Berkeley collaboration in cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology. Full text in Research Archive
• Alexander Refsum Jensenius (2021). Visibility for researchers on university web pages. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Academics need to be visible online. If you don’t publish and disseminate your research, it won’t have an impact. So it is in our own interest to have up-to-date personal pages with information about what we do. I would argue that it is also in the interest of universities that their employee’s personal pages are up-to-date and look good.

• Raul Masu, Adam Pultz Melbye, John Sullivan & Alexander Refsum Jensenius (2021). NIME and the Environment: Toward a More Sustainable NIME Practice. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This paper addresses environmental issues around NIME research and practice. We discuss the formulation of an environmental statement for the conference as well as the initiation of a NIME Eco Wiki containing information on environmental concerns related to the creation of new musical instruments. We outline a number of these concerns and, by systematically reviewing the proceedings of all previous NIME conferences, identify a general lack of reflection on the environmental impact of the research undertaken. Finally, we propose a framework for addressing the making, testing, using, and disposal of NIMEs in the hope that sustainability may become a central concern to researchers.

• Anne-Kristin Solbakk, Sabine Liliana Leske, James Isaac Lubell, Alejandro Omar Blenkmann, Anais Llorens & Ingrid Funderud [Show all 13 contributors for this article] (2021). Auditory prediction and prediction error in self-generated tones. Full text in Research Archive
• Stefano Fasciani & Alexander Refsum Jensenius (2021). Sound and Music Computing at the University of Oslo. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  A presentation of labs and studios at the Department of Musicology and RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time, and Motion at the University of Oslo.

• Finn Upham, Agata Zelechowska, Victor Gonzalez & Alexander Refsum Jensenius (2021). Quiet Breathing to Heard Music. Full text in Research Archive
• Raul Masu, Adam Pultz Melbye, John Sullivan & Alexander Refsum Jensenius (2021). NIME Eco Wiki: A Crash Course. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In this workshop, hosted by the three NIME environmental officers, participants will be introduced to the NIME Eco Wiki, a repository for addressing environmental and sustainability issues within the NIME community. During the workshop, the participants will discuss how practices on the communal as well as the individual level may become more sustainable and they will create new additions and ideas for the Wiki.

• Balint Laczko & Alexander Refsum Jensenius (2021). Reflections on the Development of the Musical Gestures Toolbox for Python. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The paper presents the Musical Gestures Toolbox (MGT) for Python, a collection of modules targeted at researchers working with video recordings. The toolbox includes video visualization techniques such as creating motion videos, motion history images, and motiongrams. These visualizations allow for studying video recordings from different temporal and spatial perspectives. The toolbox also includes basic computer vision methods, and it is designed to integrate well with audio analysis toolboxes. The MGT was initially developed to analyze music-related body motion (of musicians, dancers, and perceivers) but is equally helpful for other disciplines working with video recordings of humans, such as linguistics, pedagogy, psychology, and medicine.

• Jim Tørresen (2020). Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration in Rhythm, Time and Motion. Full text in Research Archive
• Alexander Refsum Jensenius (2020). Video Visualization Strategies at RITMO. Full text in Research Archive
• Alexander Refsum Jensenius (2019). Sound actions: An embodied approach to a digital organology. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  What is an instrument in our increasingly electrified world? In this talk I will present a set of theoretical building blocks from my forthcoming book on "musicking in an electronic world". At the core of the argument is the observation that the introduction of new music technologies has led to an increased separation between action and sound in musical performance. This has happened gradually, with pianos and organs being important early examples of instruments that introduced mechanical components between the performer and resonating objects. Today's network-based instruments represent an extreme case of a spatiotemporal dislocation between action and sound. They challenge our ideas of what an instrument can be, who can perform on them, and how they should be analyzed. In the lecture I will explain how we can use the concepts of action-sound couplings and mappings to structure our thinking about such instruments. This will be used at the heart of a new organology that embraces the qualities of both acoustic and electroacoustic instruments.

• Alexander Refsum Jensenius (2019). Lecture-demo: Music-Related Micromotion. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This presentation will summarize findings from my research into music-related micromotion. This includes the smallest human motion that we can perform and perceive, typically measured at at a scale of millimeters. We have carried out a series of studies of such micromotion, in which people have been asked to try to stand still on the floor, both in silence and with (musical) sound. By measuring their bodily responses with different types of motion tracking and physiological devices we find a number of similarities between people's quantity and quality of motion. This has been the starting point for exploring the use of micromotion in musical practice, what I call 'sonic microinteraction'. This includes standstill performances with interactive sound and light. It also includes several installations with our ensemble of self-playing guitars. These are hybrid instruments, using digital sound-production through acoustically resonating guitars. They are controlled through inverse microinteraction, meaning that you need to focus on standing still to produce any sound. This challenges our traditional understanding of the affordance of musical instruments, and opens for both artistically and scientifically interesting perspectives.

• Alexander Refsum Jensenius (2019). Sound actions: An embodied approach to a digital organology. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  What is an instrument in our increasingly electrified world? In this talk I will present a set of theoretical building blocks from my forthcoming book on "musicking in an electronic world". At the core of the argument is the observation that the introduction of new music technologies has led to an increased separation between action and sound in musical performance. This has happened gradually, with pianos and organs being important early examples of instruments that introduced mechanical components between the performer and resonating objects. Today's network-based instruments represent an extreme case of a spatiotemporal dislocation between action and sound. They challenge our ideas of what an instrument can be, who can perform on them, and how they should be analyzed. In the lecture I will explain how we can use the concepts of action-sound couplings and mappings to structure our thinking about such instruments. This will be used at the heart of a new organology that embraces the qualities of both acoustic and electroacoustic instruments.

• Sabine Liliana Leske, James Lubell, Alejandro Omar Blenkmann, Anaïs Llorens, Ingrid Funderud & Maja Dyhre Foldal [Show all 13 contributors for this article] (2019). Action-based auditory predictions. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Sensory consequences of actions are predicted by the brain via an internal forward model to prepare sensory cortical areas, referred to as motor prediction. In a similar vein, the predictive coding framework suggests that perception is based on internal models making predictions about sensory events, based on statistical probabilities of the stimuli. In the current study we investigated action-based sensory predictions. We used a self-paced, two-choice random generation task, infrequently inducing deviant outcomes of voluntary action. Participants repeatedly pressed a right and a left button normatively associated with a 70 ms long 1 kHz and 2 kHz tone, respectively. Occasional deviants occurred, inverting the learned button-tone association. Participants were instructed that their button presses should be random, at a regular but self-paced tempo of one press per 1-2 s, and that they should press both buttons with equal probability. They were informed that the tones are task-irrelevant. We used intracranial EEG (iEEG) data recorded from 10 adult patients with electrodes localized in frontal and temporal lobes. The patients had drug resistant epilepsy and were undergoing presurgical monitoring via implanted stereotactic electrodes. Electrode coordinates and anatomical labels were obtained from coregistered MRI and CT images using iElectrodes toolbox. Initial results indicate that violations of action intentions modulated high frequency band activity (HFA, 75-145 Hz) in distributed brain regions including temporal and prefrontal cortices.

• Connor Spiech (2019). Predicting the Groove: A Combined EEG-Pupillometry Study. Full text in Research Archive
• Justinas Miseikis, Inka Brijacak, Saeed Yahyanejad, Kyrre Glette, Ole Jacob Elle & Jim Tørresen (2019). Two-Stage Transfer Learning for Heterogeneous Robot Detection and 3D Joint Position Estimation in a 2D Camera Image Using CNN. Full text in Research Archive
• Sabine Liliana Leske, James Isaac Lubell, Alejandro Omar Blenkmann, Anaïs Llorens, Ingrid Funderud & Maja Dyhre Foldal [Show all 13 contributors for this article] (2019). Auditory prediction and prediction error in self-generated tones. Full text in Research Archive
• Connor Spiech (2019). Predicting the Groove: A Combined EEG-Pupillometry Study. Full text in Research Archive
• Tønnes Frostad Nygaard, Charles Patrick Martin, Jim Tørresen & Kyrre Glette (2019). Self-Modifying Morphology Experiments with DyRET: Dynamic Robot for Embodied Testing. Full text in Research Archive
• Tønnes Frostad Nygaard, Jørgen Halvorsen Nordmoen, Charles Patrick Martin, Jim Tørresen & Kyrre Glette (2019). Lessons Learned from Real-World Experiments with DyRET: the Dynamic Robot for Embodied Testing. Full text in Research Archive
• Jim Tørresen, Kyrre Glette & Kai Olav Ellefsen (2019). Intelligent, Adaptive Robots in Real-World Scenarios. Full text in Research Archive
• Jim Tørresen, Kyrre Glette & Kai Olav Ellefsen (2019). Adaptive Robot Body and Control for Real-World Environments. Full text in Research Archive
• Britta Westner, Lau Møller Andersen, Alejandro Omar Blenkmann & Sabine Liliana Leske (2019). RITMO International EEG FieldTrip workshop, Lectures and Hands-on sessions. Full text in Research Archive
• Sabine Liliana Leske (2019). Oscillations and their functional relevance and Experimental design issues in EEG studies investigating oscillations. Full text in Research Archive
• Victor Evaristo Gonzalez Sanchez (2019). MICRO: Human Bodily Micromotion in Music Perception and Interaction. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This talk will highlight links between music and human movement, aiming at providing insight into crucial aspects of human perception, cognition, and sensorimotor systems. It will analyze responses to a wide range of music and sound features, exploiting concepts such as the groove, embodied music cognition, and entrainment. Victor will be glad to discuss potential implications of movement-analysis research for embodiment perspectives on technologically enabled conceptual learning.

• Victor Evaristo Gonzalez Sanchez (2019). Characterizing Movement Fluency in Musical Performance. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Virtuosity in music performance is often associated with fast, precise, and efficient sound-producing movements. The generation of such highly skilled movements involves complex joint and muscle control by the central nervous system, and depends on the ability to anticipate, segment, and coarticulate motor elements, all within the biomechanical constraints of the human body. When successful, such motor skill should lead to what we characterize as fluency in musical performance. Detecting typical features of fluency could be very useful for technology-enhanced learning systems, assisting and supporting students during their individual practice sessions by giving feedback and helping them to adopt sustainable movement patterns. In this study, we propose to assess fluency in musical performance as the ability to smoothly and efficiently coordinate while accurately performing slow, transitionary, and rapid movements.

• Alejandro Omar Blenkmann (2019). Origins of the EEG signal and Technical setup of EEG. Full text in Research Archive
• Ingrid Funderud & Anne-Kristin Solbakk (2019). Event Related Potentials and their functional relevance and Experimental design issues in ERP studies. Full text in Research Archive
• Alexander Refsum Jensenius (2019). The RITMO Centre at University of Oslo. Full text in Research Archive
• Alexander Refsum Jensenius (2019). Tutorial: Musical Gestures Toolbox. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  An intensive PhD-level training course on sound and motion analysis with experts in sound and music computing from the Nordic countries.

• Maja Dyhre Foldal, Alejandro Omar Blenkmann, Anaïs Llorens, Robert Thomas Knight, Anne-Kristin Solbakk & Tor Endestad (2019). The brain tracks global temporal regularity in auditory patterns. Full text in Research Archive
• Alejandro Omar Blenkmann, Anne-Kristin Solbakk, James Lubell, Sabine Liliana Leske, Anaïs Llorens & Ingrid Funderud [Show all 14 contributors for this article] (2019). Human brain network involved in auditory deviance detection: Evidence from intracranial EEG recordings. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The neural network underlying human auditory deviance detection is not fully understood. To address this, we recorded intracranial EEG from 22 adult patients with drug resistant epilepsy undergoing presurgical monitoring who had depth electrodes implanted in all brain lobes (1193 channels in total). Patients passively heard a stream of bilaterally presented tones while reading. We used the Optimum-1 paradigm, that consisted of 300 standard tones interleaved with 300 randomly presented deviant tones per block. Patients completed between 3 to 10 blocks. Deviant tones differed from standards in: 1) intensity (louder or softer), 2) frequency (higher or lower), 3) sound source location (right or left), 4) a shorter duration, or 5) a silent gap in the middle of the tone (Näätänen et al., 2004). Electrode coordinates were obtained from coregistered MRI and CT images using iElectrodes toolbox (Blenkmann et al., 2017). Channels were bipolar referenced and high frequency band activity (HFA) analytic amplitude signal was obtained using the Hilbert transform (75-145 Hz). Compared to the baseline period, significant HFA responses to tones in general were observed in 31% of the channels. We used an ANOVA to quantify the HFA response variance across trials that could be explained by the different factors of the stimuli: Intensity, Laterality, Frequency, Duration and Gap. We estimated the amount of explained variance by using ?2 (Siegel et al., 2015). Eighteen % of the channels showed a significant increase of the condition-specific explained variance. Some channels showed condition-specific activations to one particular deviant, while others showed activations to a combination of two or more deviants. The channels showing responses to tones in general and condition-specific effects were mostly observed bilaterally in temporal cortex. Frontal, anterior cingulate, and parietal cortices were also involved to a lesser extent. Our results, in line with the predictive coding framework, reveal that a distributed brain network is involved in auditory processing and deviance detection.

• Alejandro Omar Blenkmann (2019). Auditory deviance detection network in the human brain. Full text in Research Archive
• Tor Endestad, Anne-Kristin Solbakk, Jugoslav Ivanovic, Pål Gunnar Larsson, Robert T. Knight & Alejandro Omar Blenkmann (2019). A robust intracranial electrode localization algorithm. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The accurate localization of electrodes in relationship to the brain’s anatomy is the foundation of the spatial resolution of intracranial EEG recordings. However, in “difficult cases“ the localization needs to be done manually since automatic methods fails, e.g high density arrays up to 3 mm inter-electrode distance, overlapping electrodes, low resolution CT images, or connection cables ovelaying grids. Here, we present a new automatic method that models a flexible array of electrodes and fits it to the artifacts observed in post implantation CT images. We evaluated data from 18 adult patients with drug resistant epilepsy implanted with depth electrodes and/or subdural grids (18 patients, 3261 electrodes). The automatic method was contrasted against manual localization. The main processing steps (Fig. 1 A) were: Thresholding and selection of a cloud of CT voxels containing the electrode artifacts Assembling a model of the grid (depth) array of electrodes Fitting the model to a smooth surface (line) approximation of CT artifacts Fitting the model to the cloud of voxels by minimizing the energy function E = -Ec + Et + Ed Ec was the gaussian weighted spatial correlation between the electrodes and the cloud of voxels. Et penalized the translation of electrodes, and Ed the deformation of a spring grid connecting the electrodes. Automatic localization resulted to be more precise than manual selection, observed as a significant reduction of the inter-electrode distance variance (Fig. 1 B). We provide a robust method for intracranial electrode localization that is applicable to “difficult cases” were previous automatic methods fail (Fig. 1 C). The method was implemented in the open-source iElectrodes toolbox and is available to the research community (Blenkmann et al., 2017).

• Alejandro Omar Blenkmann, Anne-Kristin Solbakk, James Lubell, Sabine Liliana Leske, Anaïs Llorens & Ingrid Funderud [Show all 14 contributors for this article] (2019). Human brain network involved in auditory deviance detection: Evidence from intracranial EEG recordings. Full text in Research Archive
• Victor Evaristo Gonzalez Sanchez (2019). Toward a Generic Measure of Fluency. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Virtuosity in music performance is often associated with fast, precise, and efficient sound-producing movements. The generation of such highly skilled movements involves complex joint and muscle control by the central nervous system, and depends on the ability to anticipate, segment, and coarticulate motor elements, all within the biomechanical constraints of the human body. When successful, such motor skill should lead to what we characterize as fluency in musical performance. Detecting typical features of fluency could be very useful for technology-enhanced learning systems, assisting and supporting students during their individual practice sessions by giving feedback and helping them to adopt sustainable movement patterns. In this study, we propose to assess fluency in musical performance as the ability to smoothly and efficiently coordinate while accurately performing slow, transitionary, and rapid movements.

• Julia W.Y. Kam, Jack J. Lin, Anne-Kristin Solbakk, Tor Endestad, Pål Gunnar Larsson & Robert T. Knight (2018). Functional coupling between default network and fronto-parietal control network supports internally directed attention. Full text in Research Archive
• Eskil Olaf Vestre, Anne Danielsen, Alexander Refsum Jensenius, Justin London, Katja Henriksen Schia & Filip Abramczyk (2018). Rytmen er en danser. [Journal]. Ballade. Full text in Research Archive
• Alexander Refsum Jensenius, Anne Danielsen, Justin London, Katja Henriksen Schia & Filip Abramczyk (2018). Intellectual warm-up: "Rhythm". Full text in Research Archive
• Jim Tørresen & Bruno Laeng (2018). UiO/ROBIN – Toyohashi University of Technology/Japan seminar. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Seminar with collaborators from University of Technology, Japan: Shigeki Nakauchi <https://www.tut.ac.jp/english/schools/faculty/cs/169.html> og Tetsuto Minami <https://www.tut.ac.jp/english/schools/faculty/eiiris/573.html> and their students.

• Anne-Kristin Solbakk, Tor Endestad & Robert T. Knight (2018). Neural oscillations and human behavior. Full text in Research Archive
• Alejandro Omar Blenkmann, James Lubell, Anais Llorens, Ingrid Funderud, Santiago Collavini & PG Larsson [Show all 13 contributors for this article] (2018). Human insula response to auditory deviants: Evidence from intracranial EEG recordings. Full text in Research Archive
• Fumiyaki Sato, Bruno Laeng, Shigeki Nakauchi & Tetsuto Minami (2018). Pupil dilation reflects "Viewing from above bias" in the effort to control perception. Full text in Research Archive
• Julia W.Y. Kam, Anne-Kristin Solbakk, Ingrid Funderud, Tor Endestad, Torstein Ragnar Meling & Robert Thomas Knight (2018). Orbitofrontal damage reduces auditory sensory response in humans. Cortex. ISSN 0010-9452. 101, p. 309–312. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2017.12.023. Full text in Research Archive
• Yuta Suzuki, Tetsuto Minami, Bruno Laeng & Shigeki Nakauchi (2018). The differential effect of glowing appearance in the glare illusion: evidence from pupillometry. Full text in Research Archive
• J.W.Y. Kam, J.J. Lin, Tor Endestad, Anne-Kristin Solbakk, P.G. Larsson & S. Griffin [Show all 7 contributors for this article] (2017). Contributions of medial prefrontal cortex to internally directed attention. Full text in Research Archive
• S.J.K. Slama, Anne-Kristin Solbakk, Tor Endestad, P.G. Larsson, Jack J. Lin & D. King-Stephens [Show all 9 contributors for this article] (2017). Intracranial recordings define a cortical-mesial temporal network in top-down and bottom-up attention. Full text in Research Archive
• Elizabeth L. Johnson, C. Dewar, Anne-Kristin Solbakk, Tor Endestad, Torstein Ragnar Meling & Robert T. Knight (2017). Causal evidence that bidirectional frontoparietal rhythms support working memory. Full text in Research Archive
• Elizabeth L. Johnson, J.N. Adams, S.M. Griffin, Anne-Kristin Solbakk, Tor Endestad & P.G. Larsson [Show all 9 contributors for this article] (2017). Dynamic frontotemporal systems for episodic working memory. Full text in Research Archive
• Fumiyaki Sato, Bruno Laeng, Shigeki Nakauchi & Tetsuto Minami (2017). Pupil dilation during perception of the Necker cube reflects the viewing-from-above bias. Full text in Research Archive

View all works in NVA