Keynote: Cardiac and auditory regularity encoding in human wakefulness, sleep and coma

Talks

Non-invasive brain stimulation in supporting motor abilities in stroke patients and healthy people
Prof. Dr. Jitka Veldema
Done
Transcranial magnetic stimulation - mapping, targeting, and computational modeling
Prof. Dr. Thomas R. Knösche
Done
Brain sources of the theta EEG rhythm underlying inhibitory control and replanning in active navigation in the Virtual House Locomotor Maze
Prof. Dr. Guy Cheron
Done
Combining Mobile Brain/Body Imaging with Virtual Reality – new prospects for ecological investigations of human brain function
Prof. Dr. Klaus Gramann
Done
EEG based triage of stroke patients in the ambulance
Dr. Wouter Potters
Done
A Lower-Dimensional Parameter?: Searching for Brain/Body electrophysiological metrics for individual and hyperscanning recordings
Prof. Francisco Parada
Done
Optically pumped magnetometers for neuroscience - disruptive or evolutionary?
Dr. Tilmann Sander-Thömmes
Done
Frontiers in Non-invasive Brain Stimulation: Clinical Applications and Future Directions
Surjo Soekadar
Done
EEG in health monitoring for long-term spaceflight
Prof. Patrique Fiedler
Done
Transient events in single-trial EEG during photic driving
Hannes Oppermann, MSc
Done

Location: Room 101 - 11/2/23, 9:15 AM - 11/2/23, 10:00 AM (Europe/Amsterdam) (45 minutes)

Dr. Marzia De Lucia

Senior Lecturer at Lausanne University and Lausanne University Hospital

Marzia De Lucia is a neuroscientist at the Lausanne University Hospital and the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. She studied Physics at the University of La Sapienza in Rome and was a research fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London. After obtaining her PhD, she worked at the Medical Physics Department, University College London. In 2006, she joined the Center for Biomedical Imaging in Lausanne, Switzerland, and in 2016, she was appointed as a senior scientist and lecturer at the University of Lausanne and the University Hospital. Marzia De Lucia’s work focuses on investigating the neural bases of human cognition in altered states of consciousness (coma and sleep) and on developing methods for the analysis of electrophysiological signals in humans.

Across different vigilance states and levels of consciousness, the human brain can process sensory stimuli and generate predictions based on past sensory patterns. While this is evident for environmental stimuli, the role of bodily signals in shaping sensory predictions remains unknown. In this study, I demonstrate that the human brain uses the temporal relationship between cardiac and auditory inputs to anticipate upcoming sounds during wakefulness, sleep, and coma. After administering sounds in synchrony with the ongoing heartbeat, a sound omission triggered both a deceleration in heart rate and a prediction error signal, as measured by the electroencephalographic response. Heartbeat signals support the encoding of auditory regularities across different levels of vigilance and consciousness, highlighting one mechanism for enhancing the detection of unexpected stimuli by leveraging the continuously monitored cardiac signals. Future research will reveal whether cardio-audio regularity encoding is relevant in daily life, where the presence of regular environmental stimuli could recalibrate the ongoing heartbeat to align with the timing of upcoming sensory stimuli, thus facilitating their prediction.