Arjen Stolk

Dartmouth College · Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences

Since the second-half of the twentieth century, intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG), including both electrocorticography (ECoG) and stereo-electroencephalography (sEEG), has provided an intimate view into the human brain. At the interface between fundamental research and the clinic, iEEG provides both high temporal resolution and high spatia...

Preparing intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) datasets for analysis presents a unique set of methodological challenges that are absent in non-invasive investigative techniques. Because iEEG is primarily used in epilepsy patients with varying brain pathologies, the main challenges pertain to variability in electrode coverage and therefore the...

Oxytocin modulates various social behaviors. In humans, oxytocin has been shown to modulate recipient design, i.e. how communicators adjust to their presumed mutual knowledge. Here, we investigate electrophysiological correlates of the oxytocinergic modulation of recipient design. Fifty-one males were randomly assigned to receive double-blind intra...

Oxytocin, a pituitary neurotransmitter, is implicated in reproductive and various types of social behaviors. A key of human sociality is to establish shared meaning among interactive agents according to their presumed knowledge about each other, known as recipient design. We have recently found that oxytocin affected recipient design (de Boer et al...

This contribution argues that a common language and its statistics do not explain how people overcome fundamental communicative obstacles. We introduce joint epistemic engineering, a neurosemiotic account of how asymmetric interlocutors can communicate effectively despite using signals that are referentially contingent on the current communicative...

A common way to understand memory structures in the cognitive sciences is as a cognitive map. Cognitive maps are representational systems organized by dimensions shared with physical space. The appeal to these maps begins literally: as an account of how spatial information is represented and used to inform spatial navigation. Invocations of cogniti...

Shared attention experiments examine the potential differences in function or behavior when stimuli are experienced alone or in the presence of others, and when simultaneous attention of the participants to the same stimulus or set is involved. Previous work has found enhanced reactions to emotional stimuli in social situations, yet these changes m...

The sixth edition of the foundational reference on cognitive neuroscience, with entirely new material that covers the latest research, experimental approaches, and measurement methodologies. Each edition of this classic reference has proved to be a benchmark in the developing field of cognitive neuroscience. The sixth edition of The Cognitive Neuro...

The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) is a community-driven specification for organizing neuroscience data and metadata with the aim to make datasets more transparent, reusable, and reproducible. Intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) data offer a unique combination of high spatial and temporal resolution measurements of the living human brai...

This study uses electrocorticography in humans to assess how alpha-and beta-band rhythms modulate excitability of the sensorimotor cortex during psychophysically-controlled movement imagery. Both rhythms displayed effector-specific modulations, tracked spectral markers of action potentials in the local neuronal population, and showed spatially syst...

This study uses electrocorticography in humans to assess how alpha- and beta-band rhythms modulate excitability of the sensorimotor cortex during psychophysically-controlled movement imagery. Both rhythms displayed effector-specific modulations, tracked spectral markers of action potentials in the local neuronal population, and showed spatially sys...

A unique overview of the human language faculty at all levels of organization. Language is not only one of the most complex cognitive functions that we command, it is also the aspect of the mind that makes us uniquely human. Research suggests that the human brain exhibits a language readiness not found in the brains of other species. This volume br...

As scientists, we brainstorm and develop experimental designs with our colleagues and students. Paradoxically, this teamwork has produced a field focused nearly exclusively on mapping the brain as if it evolved in isolation. Here, we discuss promises and challenges in advancing our understanding of how human minds connect during social interaction....

Direct cortical recordings in humans link the spectral structure of local field potentials to inhibition/disinhibition mechanisms coordinating sensorimotor neuronal populations during movement selection.

Alpha-and beta-band rhythms over the sensorimotor cortex are prominent and functionally relevant for movement selection. However, it remains unclear whether these rhythms modulate excitability of the same neuronal ensembles in the same direction when a movement is selected across the sensorimotor cortex. Using electrocorticography in humans (N=11),...

Alpha- and beta-band rhythms over the sensorimotor cortex are prominent and functionally relevant for movement selection. However, it remains unclear whether these rhythms modulate excitability of the same neuronal ensembles in the same direction when a movement is selected across the sensorimotor cortex. Using electrocorticography in humans (N=11)...

Communication deficits are a defining feature of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), manifest during social interactions. Previous studies investigating communicative deficits have largely focused on the perceptual biases, social motivation, cognitive flexibility, or mentalizing abilities of isolated individuals. By embedding autistic individuals in li...

Intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) data offer a unique combination of high spatial and temporal resolution measures of the living human brain. However, data collection is limited to highly specialized clinical environments. To improve internal (re)use and external sharing of these unique data, we present a structure for storing and sharing...

Communication deficits are a defining feature of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), manifest during everyday social interactions. This study quantifies and qualifies communicative deficits in ASD, and connects them to an inability to align communicative concepts with specific individuals. While subjects with ASD showed comparable ability, flexiblity,...

Human orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) has long been implicated in value-based decision making. In recent years, convergent evidence from human and model organisms has further elucidated its role in representing reward-related computations underlying decision making. However, a detailed description of these processes remains elusive due in part to (1) li...

One of the main symptoms of Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) is experiencing cognitive inflexibility when adjustments of behaviour are required. While this so-called behavioural rigidity is broadly recognised in ASC, finding evidence for the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms remains challenging. In this electroencephalographic (EEG) study, parti...

Human intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) recordings provide data with much greater spatiotemporal precision than is possible from data obtained using scalp EEG, magnetoencephalography (MEG), or functional MRI. Until recently, the fusion of anatomical data (MRI and computed tomography (CT) images) with electrophysiological data and their sub...

Wadge et al. demonstrate that individuals with ASD are able and motivated to generate and modify intelligible communicative behaviors for the benefit of a communicative partner. However, they struggle to align the meaning of those behaviors with their partner when meaning relies on knowledge derived from the shared communicative history.

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is diagnosed on the basis of communicative impairments observed in everyday social interactions. Although individuals with ASD show surprising proficiency on several lab tests of social cognition, face-to-face interaction proves problematic and has been associated with biases in processing biological and multimodal li...

The exquisite spatiotemporal precision of human intracranial EEG recordings (iEEG) permits characterizing neural processing with a level of detail that is inaccessible to scalp-EEG, MEG, or fMRI. However, the same qualities that make iEEG an exceptionally powerful tool also present unique challenges. Until now, the fusion of anatomical data (MRI an...

Oxytocin is a neuropeptide known to influence how humans share material resources. Here we explore whether oxytocin influences how we share knowledge. We focus on two distinguishing features of human communication , namely the ability to select communicative signals that disambiguate the many-to-many mappings that exist between a signal's form and...

Referential pointing is a characteristically human behavior, which involves moving a finger through space to direct an addressee towards a desired mental state. Planning this type of action requires an interface between sensorimotor and conceptual abilities. A simple interface could supplement spatially-guided motor routines with communicative-oste...

If a person on the street asks you for directions to the movie theater, the person’s age or the presence of a bike instead of a car is just one of the multiple contextual elements that will influence your reply. You may decide to speak more clearly, use simpler words, or give directions specifically on how to get there by bike. Yet, despite the eas...

Listeners interpret utterances by integrating information from multiple sources including word level semantics and world knowledge. When the semantics of an expression is inconsistent with his or her knowledge about the world, the listener may have to search through the conceptual space for alternative possible world scenarios that can make the exp...

Unlabelled: To select a movement, specific neuronal populations controlling particular features of that movement need to be activated, whereas other populations are downregulated. The selective (dis)inhibition of cortical sensorimotor populations is governed by rhythmic neural activity in the alpha (8-12 Hz) and beta (15-25 Hz) frequency range. Ho...

We share our thoughts with other minds, but we do not understand how. Having a common language certainly helps, but infants' and tourists' communicative success clearly illustrates that sharing thoughts does not require signals with a pre-assigned meaning. In fact, human communicators jointly build a fleeting conceptual space in which signals are a...

Damage to the human ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) leads to profound changes in everyday social interactions [1, 2]. Yet, in the lab, vmPFC patients show surprising proficiency in reasoning about other agents [3-8]. These conflicting observations suggest that what vmPFC patients lack in everyday social interactions might be the ability to g...

Despite the multiple semantic ambiguities present in every utterance during natural language use, people are remarkably efficient in establishing mutual understanding. This chapter illustrates how the study of human communication in novel settings provides a window into the mechanisms supporting the human competence to rapidly generate and understa...

Poster Stolk et al. Curr Biol 2015

Significance Building on recent electrophysiological evidence showing that novel communicative behavior relies on computations that operate over temporal scales independent from transient sensorimotor behavior, here we report that those computations occur simultaneously in pairs with a shared communicative history, but not in pairs without a shared...

Rhythmic neural activity within the alpha (8-12 Hz) and beta (15-25 Hz) frequency bands is modulated during actual and imagined movements. Changes in these rhythms provide a mechanism to select relevant neuronal populations, although the relative contributions of these rhythms remain unclear. Here we use MEG to investigate changes in oscillatory po...

The capacity for mutual understanding, often metaphorically expressed as “being in sync,” is one of the great scientific enigmas ([Levinson, 2006][1]). How can we understand what another is thinking or feeling just by observing their actions? For example, how does my friend know I am suggesting

Despite the ambiguity inherent in human communication, people are remarkably efficient in establishing mutual understanding. Studying how people communicate in novel settings provides a window into the mechanisms supporting the human competence to rapidly generate and understand novel shared symbols, a fundamental property of human communication. P...

This study demonstrates that children age 5 already adjust their communicative behaviors to their beliefs about a social partner. Moreover, the magnitude of those adjustments was predicted by their time spent at daycare early in life, highlighting the relevance of social experience in the development of one's socio-cognitive abilities.

When we interact with another person, we consider what we mutually know. This study suggests this knowledge is continuously and simultaneously adjusted in our minds as interaction unfolds.

A large body of work has focused on children's ability to attribute mental states to other people, and whether these abilities are influenced by the extent and nature of children's social interactions. However, it remains largely unknown which developmental factors shape children's ability to influence the mental states of others. Building on the s...

Time-variability of the communicative adjustments. Time spent on Target and Non-target locations by the participants as a function of presumed Addressee (Toddler, Child) and Task epoch (First Half, Second Half). (EPS)

Explanatory variables and their predictive value on communicative adjustment as determined with single linear regression analyses. (DOCX)

Human referential communication is often thought as coding-decoding a set of symbols, neglecting that establishing shared meanings requires a computational mechanism powerful enough to mutually negotiate them. Sharing the meaning of a novel symbol might rely on similar conceptual inferences across communicators or on statistical similarities in the...

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is measured above the head, which makes it sensitive to variations of the head position with respect to the sensors. Head movements blur the topography of the neuronal sources of the MEG signal, increase localization errors, and reduce statistical sensitivity. Here we describe two novel and readily applicable methods th...

When we interact with another person, we consider what we mutually know. This study suggests this knowledge is continuously considered by frontal and right temporal brain regions, both during production and comprehension of a communicative exchange.

The right posterior superior temporal sulcus (right pSTS) has been strongly implicated with social functioning. This study demonstrates that this region is necessary for learning the meaning of communicative actions by incorporating knowledge abstracted from the recent history with a social partner.

Humans have a remarkable capacity for tuning their communicative behaviors to different addressees, a phenomenon also known as recipient design. It remains unclear how this tuning of communicative behavior is implemented during live human interactions. Classical theories of communication postulate that recipient design involves perspective taking,...