Pawel Matusz

HES-SO Valais-Wallis | HES-SO · Haute École de Santé

Real-world environments are typically dynamic, complex, and multisensory in nature and require the support of top-down attention and memory mechanisms for us to be able to drive a car, make a shopping list, or pour a cup of coffee. Fundamental principles of perception and functional brain organization have been established by research utilizing wel...

Research on attentional control has largely focused on single senses and the importance of one’s behavioural goals in controlling attention. However, everyday situations are multisensory and contain regularities, both likely influencing attention. We investigated how visual attentional capture is simultaneously impacted by top-down goals, multisens...

Outside the laboratory, people need to pay attention to relevant objects that are typically multisensory, but it remains poorly understood how the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms develop. We investigated when adult-like mechanisms controlling one’s attentional selection of visual and multisensory objects emerge across childhood. Five-, 7-, and...

Background Amblyopia is the most common developmental vision disorder in children. The initial treatment consists of refractive correction. When insufficient, occlusion therapy may further improve visual acuity. However, the challenges and compliance issues associated with occlusion therapy may result in treatment failure and residual amblyopia. Vi...

This "Read & Reviewed" article is a review and a commentary on the recent Birch et al. (2023) study. In that study, in visually impaired children binocular games and movies improved vision and manual skills, and the degree of their improvement was linked. This large study with multiple vision measures provided strong evidence for which visual funct...

All data is available at https://zenodo.org/records/8363126 Decades of research into hand-object interaction and manipulation skills has yielded fundamental insights with applications in robotics and motor learning. Nevertheless, integrating visual function (especially binocular function, important to perceive depth) into this equation is crucial,...

Background Amblyopia is the most common developmental vision disorder in children. The initial treatment consists of refractive correction. When insufficient, occlusion therapy may further improve visual acuity. However, the challenges and compliance issues associated with occlusion therapy may result in treatment failure and residual amblyopia. Vi...

In cognitive neurosciences, fundamental principles of mental processes and functional brain organization have been established with highly controlled tasks and testing environments. Recent technical advances allowed the investigation of these functions and their brain mechanisms in naturalistic settings. The diversity in those approaches have been...

Research on attentional control has largely focused on single senses and the importance of behavioural goals in controlling attention. However, everyday situations are multisensory and contain regularities, both likely influencing attention. We investigated how visual attentional capture is simultaneously impacted by top-down goals, the multisensor...

Schooling may shape children's abilities to control their attention, but it is unclear if this impact extends from control over visual objects to encompass multisensory objects, which are more typical of everyday environments. We compared children across three primary school grades (Swiss first, third, and fifth grades) on their performance on a ga...

Selective attention is the ability to promote the processing of objects important for the accomplishment of our behavioral goals (target objects) over the objects not important to those goals (distractor objects). Previous investigations have shown that the mechanisms of selective attention contribute to enhancing perception in both simple daily ta...

PJM & DS - joint senior authorship Selective attention is the ability to promote the processing of objects important for the accomplishment of our behavioral goals (target objects) over the objects not important to those goals (distractor objects). Previous investigations have shown that the mechanisms of selective attention contribute to enhanci...

Studies of amblyopia have typically focused on purely visual problems, although amblyopia also causes deficits in motor control: trajectories have inaccurate endpoints, with increased duration and pathlength. Poor stereo-acuity may explain these deficits. We will compare behavioral and neurophysiological correlates of motor control to stereovision...

In cognitive neurosciences, fundamental principles of mental processes and functional brain organization have been established with highly controlled tasks and testing environments. Recent technical advances allowed to investigate those functions and their brain mechanisms in naturalistic settings. The diversity in those approaches has been recentl...

Abstract Tasks designed to study adult attention skills have helped clarify the development of such skills in childhood. We recently demonstrated how children develop goal-based visual and stimulus-driven multisensory attention. Here, we tested whether children improve these attention skills within a single testing session, and whether this depend...

Schooling may shape children’s abilities to control their attention, but it is unclear if this impact extends from control over visual objects to encompass multisensory objects, which are more typical of everyday environments. We compared children across three primary school grades (Swiss 1 st , 3 rd , and 5 th grade) on their performance on a comp...

Attentional control outside of the laboratory operates in multisensory settings, but the development of mechanisms subserving such control remains poorly understood. We investigated when, over the course of childhood, adult-like attentional control mechanisms begin to emerge. Children aged five, seven, and nine were compared with adults on behaviou...

Contemporary schemas of brain organization now include multisensory processes both in low-level cortices as well as at early stages of stimulus processing. Evidence has also accumulated showing that unisensory stimulus processing can result in cross-modal effects. For example, task-irrelevant and lateralised sounds can activate visual cortices; a p...

The capacity to integrate information from different senses is central for coherent perception across the lifespan from infancy onwards. Later in life, multisensory processes are related to cognitive functions, such as speech or social communication. During learning, multisensory processes can in fact enhance subsequent recognition memory for unise...

Contemporary schemas of brain organization now include multisensory processes both in low-level cortices as well as at early stages of stimulus processing. Evidence has also accumulated showing that unisensory stimulus processing can result in cross-modal effects. For example, task-irrelevant and lateralized sounds can activate visual cortices; a p...

The aim of educational neuroscience research is to better understand the neurocognitive processes shaping how developing brains learn. We now understand that children’s ability to learn and deploy new skills depends critically on their capacity to promote the processing of task-relevant information and suppress the goal-irrelevant information (i.e....

Visual attention skills shape learning, but how do these abilities interact with multisensory processes that must contribute to shaping literacy and numeracy skills? We investigated how involuntary multisensory integration and top-down visual attention develop together during primary school and how these processes contribute to reading and basic ma...

The capacity to integrate information from different senses is central for coherent perception across the lifespan from infancy onwards. Later in life, multisensory processes are related to cognitive functions, such as speech or social communication. During learning, multisensory processes can in fact enhance subsequent recognition memory for unise...

In real-world environments, information is typically multisensory, and objects are a primary unit of information processing. Object recognition and action necessitates attentional selection of task-relevant from among task-irrelevant objects. However, brain and cognitive mechanisms governing attentional selection of multisensory objects remain poor...

Background: Premature infants are at risk for abnormal sensory development due to brain immaturity at birth and atypical early sensory experiences in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. This altered sensory development can have downstream effects on other more complex developmental processes. There are currently no interventions that address rehabili...

Sensory substitution is an effective means to rehabilitate many visual functions after visual impairment or blindness. Tactile information, for example, is particularly useful for functions such as reading, mental rotation, shape recognition, or exploration of space. Extant haptic technologies typically rely on real physical objects or pneumaticall...

Everyday environments, such as classrooms or the High Street, typically stimulate multiple senses at once (i.e., are multisensory). Evidence from the last 40 years has characterized how multisensory perception unfolds and manifests neurophysiologically. However, a large majority of this research has focused on the effects of multisensory processes...

Cerebral palsy (CP) is predominantly a disorder of movement, with evidence of sensory-motor dysfunction. CIMT1 is a widely used treatment for hemiplegic CP. However, effects of CIMT on somatosensory processing remain unclear. To examine potential CIMT-induced changes in cortical tactile processing, we designed a prospective study, during which 10 c...

In real-world environments information is typically multisensory, and objects are a primary unit of information processing. Object recognition and action necessitates attentional selection of task-relevant from among task-irrelevant objects. However, the brain and cognitive mechanisms governing these processes remain not well understood. Here, we d...

Traditional models developed within cognitive psychology suggest that attention is deployed flexibly and irrespective of differences in expertise with to-be-attended stimuli. However, everyday environments are inherently multisensory and observers differ in familiarity with particular unisensory representations (e.g., number words, in contrast with...

Everyday vision includes the detection of stimuli, figure-ground segregation, as well as object localization and recognition. Such processes must often surmount impoverished or noisy conditions; borders are perceived despite occlusion or absent contrast gradients. These illusory contours (ICs) are an example of so-called mid-level vision, with an e...

Traditional models developed within cognitive psychology suggest that attention is deployed fexibly and irrespective of diferences in expertise with to-be-attended stimuli. However, everyday environments are inherently multisensory and observers difer in familiarity with particular unisensory representations (e.g., number words, in contrast with di...

Traditional models developed within cognitive psychology suggest that attention is deployed flexibly and irrespective of differences in expertise with to-be-attended stimuli. However, everyday environments are inherently multisensory and observers differ in familiarity with particular unisensory representations (e.g., number words, in contrast with...

Multisensory information typically confers neural and behavioural advantages over unisensory information. We used a simple audio-visual detection task to compare healthy young (HY), healthy older (HO) and mild-cognitive impairment (MCI) individuals. Neuropsychological tests assessed individuals’ learning and memory impairments. First, we provide mu...

Distinct anatomical and functional pathways are postulated for analysing a sound's object-related ('what') and space-related ('where') information. It remains unresolved to which extent distinct or overlapping neural resources subserve specific object-related dimensions (i.e. who is speaking and what is being said can both be derived from the same...

Traditional studies of memory and object recognition involved objects presented within a single sensory modality (i.e., purely visual or purely auditory objects). However, in naturalistic settings, objects are often evaluated and processed in a multisensory manner. This begets the question of how object representations that combine information from...

Frontiers for Young Minds: New Discovery The world is a distracting place – full of shapes and colors, sounds, and smells that constantly excite our senses. Sometimes, things that distract us can stimulate multiple senses at once. When the TV is switched on while we are trying to read, moving images on the screen are accompanied by sounds. But you...

Every year, 15 million preterm infants are born, and most spend their first weeks in neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) [1]. Although essential for the support and survival of these infants, NICU sensory environments are dramatically different from those in which full-term infants mature and thus likely impact the development of functional brain...

Our understanding of how perception operates in real-world environments has been substantially advanced by studying both multisensory processes and “top-down” control processes influencing sensory processing via activity from higher-order brain areas, such as attention, memory, and expectations. As the two topics have been traditionally studied sep...

Diagnosing heart conditions by auscultation is an important clinical skill, commonly learnt by medical students. However, clinical proficiency for this skill is in decline [1], and new teaching methods are needed. Successful discrimination of heartbeat sounds is believed to benefit mainly from acoustical training [2]. Based on recent studies of aud...

Objects’ borders are readily perceived despite absent contrast gradients, e.g. due to poor lighting or occlusion. In humans, a visual evoked potential (VEP) correlate of illusory contour (IC) sensitivity, the “IC effect”, has been identified with an onset at ~90ms and generators within bilateral lateral occipital cortices (LOC). The IC effect is ob...

This study analysed high-density event-related potentials (ERPs) within an electrical neuroimaging framework to provide insights regarding the interaction between multisensory processes and stimulus probabilities. Specifically, we identified the spatio-temporal brain mechanisms by which the proportion of temporally congruent and task-irrelevant aud...

Cataracts cause one third of blindness worldwide [1]. Although nowadays cataracts are readily treated surgically (and potentially in the near future even using eye-drops [2]), these techniques are not equally accessible worldwide. The case of Claude Monet, who went blind late in life, illustrates the debilitating consequences of cataracts (Figure 1...

The study investigated whether the strength of the relationship between attentional and implicit-memory biases for threat-related material can be moderated by individual differences in temperament and personality. A spatial cueing task, where task-irrelevant angry, happy, and neutral faces acted as spatial cues preceding a target, was immediately f...

Single-trial encounters with multisensory stimuli affect both memory performance and early-latency brain responses to visual stimuli. Whether and how auditory cortices support memory processes based on single-trial multisensory learning is unknown and may differ qualitatively and quantitatively from comparable processes within visual cortices due t...

How does the multi-sensory nature of stimuli influence information processing? Cognitive systems with limited selective attention can elucidate these processes. Six-year-olds, 11-yearolds and 20-year-olds engaged in a visual search task that required them to detect a pre-defined colored shape under conditions of low or high visual perceptual load....

Traditional views contend that behaviorally-relevant multisensory interactions occur relatively late during stimulus processing and subsequently to influences of (top-down) attentional control. In contrast, work from the last 15 years shows that information from different senses is integrated in the brain also during the initial 100ms after stimulu...

Multisensory processes facilitate perception of currently-presented stimuli and can likewise enhance later object recognition. Memories for objects originally encountered in a multisensory context can be more robust than those for objects encountered in an exclusively visual or auditory context [1 • Thelen A. • Murray M.M. The efficacy of single-t...

To test whether the attentional selection of targets defined by a combination of visual and auditory features is guided in a modality-specific fashion or by control processes that are integrated across modalities, we measured attentional capture by visual stimuli during unimodal visual and audiovisual search. Search arrays were preceded by spatiall...

We investigated whether top-down attentional control settings can specify task-relevant features in different sensory modalities (vision and audition). Two audiovisual search tasks were used where a spatially uninformative visual singleton cue preceded a target search array. In different blocks, participants searched for a visual target (defined by...

Multisensory integration increases the salience of sensory events and, therefore, possibly also their ability to capture attention in visual search. This was investigated in two experiments where spatially uninformative color change cues preceded visual search arrays with color-defined targets. Tones were presented synchronously with these cues on...

Attention-driven bias for threat-related stimuli in implicit memory. Preliminary results from the Posner cueing paradigm An implicit memory advantage for angry faces was investigated in this experiment by means of an additional cueing task. Participants were to assess the orientation of a triangle's peak, which side of presentation was cued informa...

Czy obiekt stymulujący dwie modalności zmysłowe zostanie spostrzeżony bardziej efektywnie niż obiekt stymulujący tylko jedną modalność? W czym przejawia się ta efektywność i gdzie są jej granice? Przetwarzanie wielozmysłowe (multisensory processing) jest przedmiotem trwających od ponad czterdziestu lat [za Stanford i Stein 2007] intensywnych badań....