Ković Vanja

• DPhil
• Professor (Full) at University of Belgrade

Given that the choices made during recording, preprocessing and analysis of event-related potentials (ERP) data can affect study outcomes, it is critical that they are transparently reported to allow for reproducibility and replicability. Yet, systematic reviews of reporting practices in the field have shown that journal articles do not meet this g...

Given that the choices made during recording, preprocessing and analysis of event-related potentials (ERP) data can affect study outcomes, it is critical that they are transparently reported to allow for reproducibility and replicability. Yet, systematic reviews of reporting practices in the field have shown that journal articles do not meet this g...

Background: The selection of an optimal referencing method in event-related potential (ERP) research has been a long-standing debate, as it can significantly influence results and lead to data misinterpretation. Such misinterpretation can produce flawed scientific conclusions, like the inaccurate localization of neural processes, and in practical a...

Conferences are invaluable for career progression, offering unique opportunities for networking, collaboration, and learning. However, there are challenges associated with the traditional in-person conference format. For example, there is a significant ecological impact from attendees’ travel behaviour, and there are social inequities in conference...

Though people usually imagine the typical person as a man rather than a woman, the effect is mixed for racial groups and understudied among traditionally male social groups (e.g., police and criminals) and non-U.S. populations. Results from a survey (N > 5000) collected via a globally distributed laboratory network in over 40 regions demonstrated t...

This study tackles the Garden of Forking Paths, as a challenge for replicability and reproducibility of ERP studies. Here, we applied a multiverse analysis to a sample ERP N400 dataset, donated by an independent research team. We analyzed this dataset using 14 pipelines selected to showcase the full range of methodological variability found in the...

Mental simulation theories of language comprehension propose that people automatically create mental representations of objects mentioned in sentences. Mental representation is often measured with the sentence-picture verification task, wherein participants first read a sentence that implies the object property (i.e., shape and orientation). Partic...

Developing reliable, quantifiable, and accessible metrics for dyslexia diagnosis and tracking represents an important goal, considering the widespread nature of dyslexia and its negative impact on education and quality of life. In this study, we observe eye-tracking data from 15 dyslexic and 15 neurotypical Serbian school-age children who read text...

Phonological awareness is the ability to correctly recognize and manipulate phonological structures. The role of phonological awareness in reading development has become evident in behavioral research showing that it is inherently tied to measures of phonological processing and reading ability. This has also been shown with ERP research that examin...

Given that the choices made during recording, preprocessing and analysis of event-related potentials (ERP) data can affect study outcomes, it is critical that they are transparently reported to allow for reproducibility and replicability. Yet, systematic reviews of reporting practices in the field have shown that journal articles do not meet this g...

Given that the choices made during recording, preprocessing and analysis of event-related potentials (ERP) data can affect study outcomes, it is critical that they are transparently reported to allow for reproducibility and replicability. Yet, systematic reviews of reporting practices in the field have shown that journal articles do not meet this g...

A potential relationship between unrestricted sucrose intake (USI), overweight, and emotional/behavioral control has not been well documented. We examined the influence of USI and having less sweetness than expected on body weight (BW), motor/exploratory, anxiety-like, and social dominant behavior in adult C57BL/6J male mice. Animals had free acces...

Given the complexity of ERP recording and processing pipeline, the resulting variability of methodological options, and the potential for these decisions to influence study outcomes, it is important to understand how ERP studies are conducted in practice and to what extent researchers are transparent about their data collection and analysis procedu...

Considering the negative impact dyslexia has on school achievements, dyslexia diagnosis and treatment are found to be of great importance. In this paper, a deep convolutional neural network was developed to detect dyslexia in children ages 7-13, based on gathered eye tracking data. The children read a text written in Serbian on 13 different color c...

Considering the detrimental effects of dyslexia on academic performance and its common occurrence, developing tools for dyslexia detection, monitoring, and treatment poses a task of significant priority. The research performed in this paper was focused on detecting and analyzing dyslexic tendencies in Serbian children based on eye-tracking measures...

Background This study aimed to compare the P3 component between patients who have migraines with aura and healthy subjects, and to compare different subtypes of migraine with aura relative to the complexity of migraine aura. Methods Average Migraine Aura Complexity Score was calculated for each MwA patient. Visual oddball paradigm was used to elic...

This paper tackles the Garden of Forking Paths (Gelman & Loken, 2013), as a challenge for replicability and reproducibility of psychology studies. Here, we applied a multiverse analysis to a single dataset - effectively sampling 14 out of 864 possible pre-processing and analysis pipelines which were selected to cover the full range of variability f...

Good Scientific Practice (GSP) refers to both explicit and implicit rules, recommendations, and guidelines that help scientists to produce work that is of the highest quality at any given time, and to efficiently share that work with the community for further scrutiny or utilization. For experimental research using magneto- and electroencephalograp...

Background This study aimed to examine the N400 effect and event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited from congruent and incongruent stimuli in patients who have migraines with aura (MwA). Methods A total of 33 MwA patients and 20 healthy controls (HCs) were studied. They were balanced in age (35.12 ± 8.94 vs 34.70 ± 9.59 years, p = 0.872) and sex (...

As the number of EEG papers increases, so too do the number of guidelines for how to report what has been done. However, current guidelines and checklists appear to have limited adoption, as systematic reviews have shown the journal article format is highly prone to errors, ambiguities and omissions of methodological details. This is a problem for...

Good Scientific Practice (GSP) refers to both explicit and implicit rules or guidelines that help scientists to produce work that is of the highest quality at any given time, and to efficiently share that work with the community for further scrutiny or utilization. For experimental research using magneto- and electroencephalography (MEEG), GSP inc...

In recent decades reported findings regarding gender differences in reading achievement, cognitive abilities and maturation process in boys and girls are conflicting. As reading is one of the most important processes in the maturation of an individual, the aim of the study was to better understand gender differences between primary school students....

As the number of EEG papers increases, so too do the number of guidelines for how to report what has been done. However, current guidelines and checklists appear to have limited adoption, as systematic reviews have shown the journal article format is highly prone to errors, ambiguities and omissions of methodological details. This is a problem for...

The question how the general trend toward physical inactivity and sedentary behavior affects children’s capabilities and cognitive skills is becoming increasingly important. The aim of this study was to compare children’s play time with parents’ play time at their child’s age, as well as the elements of play. A survey was conducted among parents of...

Reading is one of the essential processes during the maturation of an individual. It is estimated that 5-10% of school-age children are affected by dyslexia, the reading disorder characterised by difficulties in the accuracy or fluency of word recognition. There are many studies which have reported that coloured overlays and background could improv...

Reading is one of the essential processes during the maturation of an individual. It is estimated that 5-10% of school-age children are affected by dyslexia, the reading disorder characterised by difficulties in the accuracy or fluency of word recognition. There are many studies which have reported that colour overlays and background could improve...

This study investigated the influence of white vs. 12 background and overlay colors on the reading process in twenty-four school-age children. Previous research reported that colors could affect reading skills as an important factor in the emotional and physiological state of the body. The aim of the study was to assess developmental differences be...

Over the past 10 years, Oosterhof and Todorov’s valence–dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgements of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear w...

The study investigated the influence of white vs 12 background and overlay colours on the reading process in school age children. Previous research reported that colours could affect reading skills as an important factor of the emotional and physiological state of the body. The aim of the study was to assess developmental differences between second...

Link to ARTEM-is project: https://osf.io/pvrn6/ Abstract: For decades, researchers in the fields of EEG and ERP have made calls for better transparency in the arena of reporting EEG/ERP data (e.g. Donchin et al., 1977, Picton et al., 2000; Keil et al., 2014; Duncan et al., 2009; Kappenman & Luck, 2016, Taylor & Baldeweg, 2002; Luck, 2014; Luck & G...

The study investigated the influence of white vs 12 background and overlay colours on the reading process in school age children. Previous research reported that colours could affect reading skills as an important factor of the emotional and physiological state of the body and that reading is one of the most important processes in the maturation of...

The present study tested whether the degree of phonological difference between the labels of categories influence category learning and generalization. For this purpose, two experiments were conducted. In the first experiment, participants learned two categories labelled with pseudo-words that were controlled for the degree of difference between th...

In order to determine whether preference in object matching tasks measures participants' strategy or tells us something about the salience of relations between corresponding concepts, we conducted three experiments. In Experiment 1 and Experiment 2, we approached this question by measuring the ease with which adult participants process different re...

Given the complexity of ERP recording and processing pipeline, the resulting variability of methodological options, and the potential for these decisions to influence study outcomes, it is important to understand how ERP studies are conducted in practice and to what extent researchers are transparent about their data collection and analysis procedu...

Over the last ten years, Oosterhof and Todorov’s valence-dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgments of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear w...

We systematically reviewed methodology reporting of 132 papers on experiments with N400 after picture stimuli and adult participants without psychopathology record. The reports were the clearest about sample size (99%), number of trials (98%), N400 window (99%) and measure (94%), artifacts handling approach (rejection/correction, 95%), and the main...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0189362.].

Mental simulation theories of language comprehension propose that people automatically create mental representations of real objects. Evidence from sentence-picture verification tasks has shown that people mentally represent various visual properties such as shape, color, and size. However, the evidence for mental simulations of object orientation...

PISA results show that a considerable number of 15-year-old pupils after 8 to 10 years of schooling have a low level of functional reading literacy, as defined in the PISA framework. While PISA results help identify the level of reading competency, they do not reveal what might be the reasons why some students fail to solve the tasks. One way to ex...

In search of the optimal method for assessing grammatical context effects on the visual word processing, we designed a study to demonstrate that in a simple task of reacting to “oddball“ word pairs, subjects read and linguistically processed both the function and the content word simultaneously presented in a given pair. Properties of the oddball E...

Wearable sensors provide the possibility to move from conventional, explicit human-computer interaction (HCI), to more natural implicit HCI. In an implicit HCI context, the computer interprets human physiological and behavioral data as its input, enabling the development of cognition-aware computing for the user state monitoring. In this work, we m...

We report the results of a study comparing the temporal dynamics of thematic and taxonomic knowledge activation in a picture-word priming paradigm using event-related potentials. Although we found no behavioral differences between thematic and taxonomic processing, ERP data revealed distinct patterns of N400 and P600 amplitude modulation for themat...

Complete list of stimuli: English translation of the Serbian words used in the study. (DOCX)

In this study, we simulated a manual assembly operation, where participants were exposed to two distinct ways of information presentation, reflecting two task conditions (monotonous and more demanding task condition). We investigated how changes in mental workload (MWL) modulate the P300 component of event-related potentials (ERPs), recorded from w...

The aim of the present paper is to experimentally test whether sound symbolism has selective effects on labels with different ranges-of-reference within a simple noun-hierarchy. In two experiments, adult participants learned the make up of two categories of unfamiliar objects (‘alien life forms’), and were passively exposed to either category-label...

Vincasso stimulus norms The ratings for the roundness and complexity of the Vincasso stimuli used in this study.

Auditory stimuli The analysis of pitch and intensity of pseudowords used in the study previously validated for their soft/sharp associations.

Curious case Misinterpreting the purpose of the task by participants and our approach to it.

In the present work we used wearable EEG sensor for recording brain activity during simulated assembly work, in replicated industrial environment. We investigated attention related modalities of P300 ERP component and engagement index (EI), which is extracted from signal power ratios of α, β and θ frequency bands. Simultaneously, we quantified the...

From a very young age infants form categories to simplify the world they encounter, relying both on the physical features of objects and the labels with which they are paired. A key question in understanding the formation of labeled categories both in children and adults is how perceptual features and labels interact. This question has been address...

The majority of neuroergonomics studies are focused mainly on investigating the interaction between operators and automated systems. Far less attention has been dedicated to the investigation of brain processes in more traditional workplaces, such as manual assembly, which are still ubiquitous in industry. The present study investigates whether ass...

There is something about the sound of a pseudoword like takete that goes better with a spiky, than a curvy shape (Köhler, 1929:1947). Yet despite decades of research into sound symbolism, the role of this effect on real words in the lexicons of natural languages remains controversial. We report one behavioural and one ERP study investigating whethe...

Continuous and objective measurement of the user attention state still represents a major challenge in the ergonomics research. Recently available wearable electroencephalography (EEG) opens new opportunities for objective and continuous evaluation of operators’ attention, which may provide a new paradigm in ergonomics. In this study, wearable EEG...

This paper describes development of a new generation of the interactive industrial workplace, through introduction of a novel implicit Human Computer Interaction (HCI) model. Proposed framework aims at being a foundation of a computer-based system that enables an increase of workers safety and well-being in industrial environments. Further aim is t...

This study investigates the influence of micro-breaks on the attention of an assembly worker, by utilizing wireless electroencephalographic (EEG) measurements. The EEG feature of interest for this study was the P300 event-related potential (ERP) component and P3a and P3b sub-components, as these components reflects the ones attention level. Nine st...

ERP is common abbreviation for event-related brain potentials, which are measured and used in clinical practice as well as in research practice. Contemporary studies of placebo effect are often based on functional neuromagnetic resonance (fMRI), positron emission tomography (PET), and event related potentials (ERP). This paper considers an ERP inst...

U ovom istraživanju bavili smo se neuralnim korelatima efekata placebo i 'anti-placebo' poruka putem merenja moždanih talasa (ERP). Umjesto uobičajenog termina nocebo, koristili smo termin 'anti-placebo', budući da poruke koje smo zadavali ispitanicima nisu trebale da proizvedu negativne efekte, već da umanje ili ponište efekat placeba. Primenili s...

Theoretical accounts as well as behavioral studies reporting animacy effects offer inconsistent and sometimes contradictory results. A possible explanation for these inconsistencies may be inadvertent biases in the stimuli selected for test - with category-specific effects driven by characteristics of test stimuli other than animacy per se. In this...

Measurement of event related potentials have significant role as a diagnostic method, as well as a method for researching cognitive functions of living beings. An important aspect of this measurement is timing. In this paper, one concept of structuring time intervals during the measurement is presented. Further, the implementation of this concept i...

The paper presents a software for P300 potential acquisition integrated into system for measurement, acquisition and processing of event-related brain potential records. ERP (event-related potentials) are analyzed from point of view of its appearance and its significance in areas of cognitive neurosciences and neurophysiology. The software implemen...

A number of studies have demonstrated sound-symbolism effects in adults and in children. Moreover, recently, ERP studies have shown that the sensitivity to sound-symbolic label–object associations occurs within 200 ms of object presentation (Kovic et al., 2010). It was argued that this effect may reflect a more general process of auditory–visual fe...

Since described by Köhler more than half a century ago, phonetic–iconic correspondences have been demonstrated in a series of studies showing remarkable consistency in matches of pseudowords containing specific types of phonemes (e.g., Maluma or Takete) with rounded and angular shapes. If the effect found in these experiments reveals something abou...

The paper presents a system for measurement and processing of event-related brain potential records. ERP (event-related potentials) are described from point of view of its appearance and its significance in areas of cognitive neurosciences and neurophysiology. The system hardware is of modular structure, enabling easier changes of its elements. In...

In this paper we present an ERP study examining the underlying nature of semantic representation of animate and inanimate objects. Time-locking ERP signatures to the onset of auditory stimuli we found topological similarities in animate and inanimate object processing. Moreover, we found no difference between animates and inanimates in the N400 amp...

The present eye-tracking study demonstrates that when animate and inanimate object pictures are presented within a single-study, there are no systematic differences between processing these two categories objects. Although participants were taking less time to initiate their first gaze towards animate than to inanimate objects, a result compatible...

The principle of arbitrariness in language assumes that there is no intrinsic relationship between linguistic signs and their referents. However, a growing body of sound-symbolism research suggests the existence of some naturally-biased mappings between phonological properties of labels and perceptual properties of their referents (Maurer, Pathman,...

This study involved presentation of animate objects under labelling and non-labelling conditions and examination of participants’ looking pattern across these conditions. Results revealed a surprisingly consistent way in which adults look at the pictures of animate objects. The head/eyes of the animals were a typical region attracting a number of f...

This paper presents an ERP experiment examining the underlying natureof semantic representation of animate and inanimate objects. Time-lockingERP signatures to the onset of visual stimuli we found topological similaritiesin animate and inanimate object processing. Moreover, when mapping moregeneral to more specific representation (auditory to visua...

Unlike the animate objects, where participants were consistent in their looking patterns, for inanimates it was difficult to identify both consistent areas of fixations and a consistent order of fixations. Furthermore, in comparison to animate objects, inanimates received significantly shorter total looking time, shorter longest looks and a smaller...

Over the past few decades there has been a lot of debate about language learning and the opinion about the status of mental rule during the process of language learning is still divided between different researches. The present study examines learning morphology of German noun plurals based on rules, examples or on both, rules and examples.The resu...