Paul Christopher John Taylor

Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich | LMU · Department of Experimental Psychology

Navigating through our environment raises challenges for perception by generating salient background visual motion, and eliciting prominent eye movements to stabilise the retinal image. It remains unclear if exogenous spatial attentional orienting is possible during background motion and the eye movements it causes, and whether this compromises the...

Mentalizing is the powerful cognitive ability to understand others. By attributing mental states to others, we become able to explain and predict their behavior. The right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ) plays a key role in processing models of mental states. Yet, a different line of research suggests that the rTPJ is crucially involved in attentio...

It is unclear how the brain reaches the correct balance between temporal and spatial processing necessary to perceive motion across space. Here, we tested whether visual motion area V5/MT+ plays a causal role in Ternus illusion. Ternus displays can be perceived as showing either group motion or element motion and are empirically useful for dissocia...

As we move through our environment, our visual system is presented with optic flow, a potentially important cue for perception, navigation and postural control. How does the brain anticipate the optic flow that arises as a consequence of our own movement? Converging evidence suggests that stimuli are processed differently by the brain if occurring...

Background Recent evidence suggests that the dorsal medial frontal cortex (dMFC) may make an important contribution to perceptual decision-making, and not only to motor control. Objective/hypothesis By fitting psychometric functions to behavioural data after TMS we tested whether the dMFC is critical specifically for the precision and/or bias of p...

Objectives Inhibitory interactions between the visual and motor systems have been observed during transient stimulation of either system. However, it is unknown how inhibition operates during simultaneous and continuous engagement of both systems. Methods We presented right-handed participants (n = 14) with optokinetic stimulation (OKS), with and...

The right frontal eye field (rFEF) is associated with visual perception and eye movements. rFEF is activated during optokinetic nystagmus (OKN), a reflex that moves the eye in response to visual motion (optokinetic stimulation, OKS). It remains unclear whether rFEF plays causal perceptual and/or oculomotor roles during OKS and OKN. To test this, pa...

Background: The ability to record brain activity in humans during movement, and in real world environments, is an important step towards understanding cognition. Electroencephalography (EEG) is well suited to mobile applications but suffers from the problem of artefacts introduced into the signal during movement. Steady state visually evoked poten...

Self-motion perception is a key aspect of higher vestibular processing, suggested to rely upon hemispheric lateralization and alpha-band oscillations. The first aim of this study was to test for any lateralization in the EEG alpha-band during the illusory sense of self-movement (vection) induced by large optic flow stimuli. Visual stimuli flickered...

Background The ability to record brain activity in humans during movement, and in real world environments, is an important step towards understanding cognition. Electroencephalography (EEG) is well suited to mobile applications but suffers from the problem of artefacts introduced into the signal during movement. Steady state visually evoked potenti...

Distinguishing between verbal and visual working memory processes is complicated by the fact that the strategy used is hard to control or even assess. Many stimuli used in working memory tasks can be processed via verbal or visual coding, such as the digits in the digit span backwards task (DSB). The present study used repetitive transcranial magne...

The intraparietal sulcus within the dorsal right posterior parietal cortex is associated with spatial orientation and attention in relation to egocentric reference frames, such as left or right hemifield. It remains unclear whether it plays a causal role in the human in the roll plane (i.e. when visual stimuli are tilted clockwise or anticlockwise)...

This study investigates the causal contribution of the left frontopolar cortex (FPC) to the processing of violated expectations from learned target-distractor spatial contingencies during visual search. The experiment consisted of two phases: learning and test. Participants searched for targets presented either among repeated or nonrepeated target-...

Purpose of Review Given recent controversies about the limitations of using unnatural experimental contexts and overly reductionist approaches, it is timely to illustrate how combined TMS-EEG can inform the study of normal cognition. Recent Findings The effect of TMS to visual cortices has been characterized with EEG, and related to specific aspec...

Inhibitory control is an important executive function that is necessary to suppress premature actions and to block interference from irrelevant stimuli. Current experimental studies and models highlight proactive and reactive mechanisms and claim several cortical and subcortical structures to be involved in response inhibition. However, the involve...

Visually induced vection is the illusory sensation of self-motion caused by visual stimuli (such as a dot cloud) that emulate what is seen when an agent moves through space. The sufficient stimulus parameters to generate vection are unknown, but elucidating this is of interest in the study of higher (cognitive) neurological disorders where the rela...

Question Transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) has until now mostly been administered as a sinusoidal wave. As tACS is a relatively new technique there is a huge parameter space of unexplored possibilities which may prove superior or complimentary to the traditional sinusoidal waveform. Evidence from animal models suggests that the gr...

When humans perform two tasks simultaneously, responses to the second task are increasingly delayed as the interval between the two tasks decreases (psychological refractory period). This delay of the second task is thought to reflect a central processing limitation at the response selection stage. However, the neural mechanisms underlying this cen...

Current models of conflict processing propose that cognitive control resolves conflict in the flanker task by enhancing task-relevant stimulus processing at a perceptual level. However, because conflicts occur at both a perceptual and a response selection level in that task, we tested the hypothesis of conflict-specific control networks for percept...

Probing brain functions by brain stimulation while simultaneously recording brain activity allows addressing major issues in cognitive neuroscience. We review recent studies where electroencephalography (EEG) has been combined with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in order to investigate possible neuronal substrates of visual perception and...

During priming of pop-out, performance at discriminating a pop-out feature target in visual search is affected by whether the target on the previous trial was defined by the same feature as on the upcoming trial. Recent studies suggest that priming of pop-out relies on attentional processes. With the use of simultaneous, combined transcranial magne...

Artificial percepts (phosphenes) can be induced by applying transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) over human visual cortex. Although phosphenes have been used to study visual awareness, the neural mechanisms generating them have not yet been delineated. We directly tested the two leading hypotheses of how phosphenes arise. These hypotheses corres...

In the last decade, combined transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)-neuroimaging studies have greatly stimulated research in the field of TMS and neuroimaging. Here, we review how TMS can be combined with various neuroimaging techniques to investigate human brain function. When applied during neuroimaging (online approach), TMS can be used to test...

There has long been an interest in exploring the functional dynamics of the brain's connectivity during cognitive processing, and some recent methodological developments now allow us to test important long-standing hypotheses. This review focuses on the recent development of combined online transcranial magnetic stimulation and electroencephalograp...

To investigate how we orient our spatial attention, previous studies have recorded neural activity while participants are instructed where to attend. Here we contrast this classical instructed attention condition with a novel condition in which the focus of voluntary attention is not specified by the experimenter but rather is freely chosen by the...

We review three ways in which transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has been used to investigate causal interactions between different brain areas: (1) combined with functional imaging; (2) combined with EEG; and (3) applied successively over two brain areas. We discuss the theoretical advantages of each technique, illustrated by examples from th...

Action selection requires choosing one of all the possible conflicting action plans that are available. There is currently a debate as to whether the dorsal medial frontal cortex (dMFC) merely detects or actively resolves response conflict. We used combined on-line transcranial magnetic stimulation and electroencephalographic recording (TMS-EEG) to...

Subliminal stimuli, of which subjects are unaware, affect movements made to subsequent visible cues. Sumner and colleagues in this issue of Neuron show that restricted supplementary motor and eye field lesions compromise voluntary control of action because they disrupt the normal unconscious and automatic inhibition of alternative movements partial...

A key problem in reinforcement learning is how an animal is able to learn a sequence of movements when the reward signal only occurs at the end of the sequence. We describe how a hierarchical dynamical model of motor function is able to solve the problem of delayed reward in learning movement sequences using associative (Hebbian) learning. At the l...

We tested whether the frontal eye field (FEF) is critical in controlling visual processing in posterior visual brain areas during the orienting of spatial attention. Short trains (5 pulses at 10 Hz) of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) were applied to the right FEF during the cueing period of a covert attentional task while event-related pote...

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is one of the most recent techniques to have been used in investigations of the parietal cortex but already a number of studies have employed it as a tool in investigations of attentional and sensorimotor processes in the human parietal cortices. The high temporal resolution of TMS has proved to be a particul...