Hector Rieiro

Abnormal Capillary Vasodynamics Contribute to Ictal Neurodegeneration in Epilepsy

Seizure-driven brain damage in epilepsy accumulates over time, especially in the hippocampus, which can lead to sclerosis, cognitive decline, and death. Excitotoxicity is the prevalent model to explain ictal neurodegeneration. Current labeling technologies cannot distinguish between excitotoxicity and hypoxia, however, because they share common molecular mechanisms. This leaves open the possibility that undetected ischemic hypoxia, due to ictal blood flow restriction, could contribute to neurodegeneration previously ascribed to excitotoxicity. We tested this possibility with Confocal Laser Endomicroscopy (CLE) and novel stereological analyses in several models of epileptic mice. We found a higher number and magnitude of NG2+ mural-cell mediated capillary constrictions in the hippocampus of epileptic mice than in that of normal mice, in addition to spatial coupling between capillary constrictions and oxidative stressed neurons and neurodegeneration. These results reveal a role for hypoxia driven by capillary blood flow restriction in ictal neurodegeneration.

Optimizing the temporal dynamics of light to human perception

No previous research has tuned the temporal characteristics of light-emitting devices to enhance brightness perception in human vision, despite the potential for significant power savings. The role of stimulus duration on perceived contrast is unclear, due to contradiction between the models proposed by Bloch and by Broca and Sulzer over 100 years ago. We propose that the discrepancy is accounted for by the observer’s “inherent expertise bias,” a type of experimental bias in which the observer’s life-long experience with interpreting the sensory world overcomes perceptual ambiguities and biases experimental outcomes. By controlling for this and all other known biases, we show that perceived contrast peaks at durations of 50–100 ms, and we conclude that the Broca–Sulzer effect best describes human temporal vision. We also show that the plateau in perceived brightness with stimulus duration, described by Bloch’s law, is a previously uncharacterized type of temporal brightness constancy that, like classical constancy effects, serves to enhance object recognition across varied lighting conditions in natural vision—although this is a constancy effect that normalizes perception across temporal modulation conditions. A practical outcome of this study is that tuning light-emitting devices to match the temporal dynamics of the human visual system’s temporal response function will result in significant power savings.

Perceptual elements in Penn & Teller’s “Cups and Balls” magic trick

Magic illusions provide the perceptual and cognitive scientist with a toolbox of experimental manipulations and testable hypotheses about the building blocks of conscious experience. Here we studied several sleight-of-hand manipulations in the performance of the classic “Cups and Balls” magic trick (where balls appear and disappear inside upside-down opaque cups). We examined a version inspired by the entertainment duo Penn & Teller, conducted with three opaque and subsequently with three transparent cups. Magician Teller used his right hand to load (i.e. introduce surreptitiously) a small ball inside each of two upside-down cups, one at a time, while using his left hand to remove a different ball from the upside-down bottom of the cup. The sleight at the third cup involved one of six manipulations: (a) standard maneuver, (b) standard maneuver without a third ball, (c) ball placed on the table, (d) ball lifted, (e) ball dropped to the floor, and (f) ball stuck to the cup. Seven subjects watched the videos of the performances while reporting, via button press, whenever balls were removed from the cups/table (button “1”) or placed inside the cups/on the table (button “2”). Subjects’ perception was more accurate with transparent than with opaque cups. Perceptual performance was worse for the conditions where the ball was placed on the table, or stuck to the cup, than for the standard maneuver. The condition in which the ball was lifted displaced the subjects’ gaze position the most, whereas the condition in which there was no ball caused the smallest gaze displacement. Training improved the subjects’ perceptual performance. Occlusion of the magician’s face did not affect the subjects’ perception, suggesting that gaze misdirection does not play a strong role in the Cups and Balls illusion. Our results have implications for how to optimize the performance of this classic magic trick, and for the types of hand and object motion that maximize magic misdirection.

Characteristics of Spontaneous Square-Wave Jerks in the Healthy Macaque Monkey during Visual Fixation.

Saccadic intrusions (SIs), predominantly horizontal saccades that interrupt accurate fixation, include square-wave jerks (SWJs; the most common type of SI), which consist of an initial saccade away from the fixation target followed, after a short delay, by a return saccade that brings the eye back onto target. SWJs are present in most human subjects, but are prominent by their increased frequency and size in certain parkinsonian disorders and in recessive, hereditary spinocerebellar ataxias. SWJs have been also documented in monkeys with tectal and cerebellar etiologies, but no studies to date have investigated the occurrence of SWJs in healthy nonhuman primates. Here we set out to determine the characteristics of SWJs in healthy rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) during attempted fixation of a small visual target. Our results indicate that SWJs are common in healthy nonhuman primates. We moreover found primate SWJs to share many characteristics with human SWJs, including the relationship between the size of a saccade and its likelihood to be part of a SWJ. One main discrepancy between monkey and human SWJs was that monkey SWJs tended to be more vertical than horizontal, whereas human SWJs have a strong horizontal preference. Yet, our combined data indicate that primate and human SWJs play a similar role in fixation correction, suggesting that they share a comparable coupling mechanism at the oculomotor generation level. These findings constrain the potential brain areas and mechanisms underlying the generation of fixational saccades in human and nonhuman primates.

Reply to Gorea and Tyler: Casting light on previous bumps in the dark

In their reply (1) to our study (2), Gorea and Tyler assert that our results are trivial, that they are wrong, and that Gorea and Tyler discovered them first anyway. Here we describe the problems with their logic and previous related research, and resolve that our results and conclusions stand.