Vivian M Ciaramitaro

• PhD Neuroscience UPenn
• Professor (Associate) at University of Massachusetts Boston

While some models of how various attributes of a face are processed have posited that face features, invariant physical cues such as gender or ethnicity as well as variant social cues such as emotion, may be processed independently (e.g., Bruce and Young, 1986), other models suggest a more distributed representation and interdependent processing (e...

We used a cross-modal dual task to examine how changing visual-task demands influenced auditory processing, namely auditory thresholds for amplitudeand frequency-modulated sounds. Observers had to attend to two consecutive intervals of sounds and report which interval contained the auditory stimulus that was modulated in amplitude (Experiment 1) or...

Sensory over responsivity (SOR) is characterized by extreme or atypical negative reactions to sensory stimuli across one or more sensory domains (Dunn, 1999; Interdisciplinary Council on Developmental and Learning Disorders [ICDL], 2005; Lane, 2002; Parham & Mailloux, 2005; Reynolds & Lane, 2008). Broadly, there are several hypothesized models that...

Sound-shape crossmodal correspondence, the naturally occurring associations between abstract visual shapes and nonsense sounds, is one aspect of multisensory processing that strengthens across early childhood. Little is known regarding whether school-aged children exhibit other variants of sound-shape correspondences such as audio-tactile (AT) asso...

Social anxiety is characterised by fear of negative evaluation and negative perceptual biases; however, the cognitive mechanisms underlying these negative biases are not well understood. We investigated a possible mechanism which could maintain negative biases: altered adaptation to emotional faces. Heightened sensitivity to negative emotions could...

Stimulus factors such as timing, spatial location, and stimulus effectiveness affect whether and how information across the senses is integrated. Extending recent work highlighting interactions between stimulus factors, here we investigated the influence of visual information on auditory processing, complementing previous studies on the influence o...

Correctly assessing the emotional state of others is a crucial part of social interaction. While facial expressions provide much information, faces are often not viewed in isolation, but occur with concurrent sounds, usually voices, which also provide information about the emotion being portrayed. Many studies have examined the crossmodal processin...

While previous research has investigated key factors contributing to multisensory integration in isolation, relatively little is known regarding how these factors interact, especially when considering the enhancement of visual contrast sensitivity by a task-irrelevant sound. Here we explored how auditory stimulus properties, namely salience and tem...

One source of information we glean from everyday experience, which guides social interaction, is assessing the emotional state of others. Emotional state can be expressed through several modalities: body posture or movements, body odor, touch, facial expression, or the intonation in a voice. Much research has examined emotional processing within on...

Faces drive our social interactions. A vast literature suggests an interaction between gender and emotional face perception, with studies using different methodologies demonstrating that the gender of a face can affect how emotions are processed. However, how different is our perception of affective male and female faces? Furthermore, how does our...

Faces convey a wealth of information, cueing us to features such as the gender, identity or emotional status of individuals, and providing crucial signals for navigating social interactions. We examined the extent to which emotionally charged voices alter the emotion seen in a face and the corresponding physiological stress response. We used face a...

Crossmodal correspondence, the association of information across the senses, is an ubiquitous multisensory phenomenon. The bouba/kiki effect, a prime example, finds an association between an abstract shape, spikey or round, and a nonsense word, /kiki/ or /baba/, respectively. This effect is found across cultures and languages, early in development,...

There is long standing interest in understanding how features of a face are represented, with behavioral and neuronal data suggesting independent as well as interdependent processing (for example, (Bestelmeyer, Jones, DeBruine, Little, & Welling, 2010; Haxby, Hoffman, Gobbini, 2000; Ng, Ciaramitaro, Anstis, Boynton, Fine, 2006). We used contingent...

Although the mental life of infants remains a mystery, behavioral and neurophysiological studies have amassed a great deal of data demonstrating similarities and differences between infants and adults in the processing of complex stimuli in several cognitive domains. Here we concentrate on several such studies in diverse domains including the perce...

Previous studies have shown that auditory information can facilitate visual processing by improving visual sensitivity (for example, Caclin, et al., 2011; Gleiss & Kayser, 2014, Lippert et al., 2007, McDonald et al.,2000; Strömer et al., 2009). We tested the role of auditory salience in modulating crossmodal influences on visual detectability. We u...

Faced with an overwhelming amount of sensory information, we are able to prioritize the processing of select spatial locations and visual features. The neuronal mechanisms underlying such spatial and feature-based selection have been studied in considerable detail. More recent work shows that attention can also be allocated to objects, even spatial...

Introduction: It has been shown that subjects are faster and more accurate at detecting or discriminating stimuli when they are more certain of where a stimulus will appear. We have shown that a probability paradigm, in which observers use the probability of where a stimulus is likely to occur, can direct the allocation of resources and improve acc...

Purpose: To examine how auditory spatial attention influences responses in early visual areas. Methods: Subjects were presented four stimuli simultaneously: two drifting gratings, one to the left and one to the right of central fixation, and two auditory tones, one to the left and one to the right ear. Auditory stimuli presented to the left ear was...

Purpose: In a previous fMRI study, we showed that the response to an unattended visual stimulus depended on the modality subjects were attending to, and that this dependence varied across visual areas. In V1/V2, the response to an unattended stimulus was weakest when another visual stimulus was attended. However, in MT+, the response to an unattend...

Purpose: The integration of information across sensory modalities allows us to create a meaningful, unified percept of events in the world. Although the development of cross-modal integration has been studied previously, most studies have focused on higher-level visual and auditory stimuli, or on the spatial and/or temporal constraints on integrati...

Purpose: We examined the neuronal mechanisms of cross-modal and uni-modal attentional selection by measuring fMRI responses to ignored visual stimuli when attention was directed toward another stimulus either in the same modality or a different modality. Methods: Subjects viewed 3 stimuli presented simultaneously: a drifting sinusoidal grating to t...

Attending to a visual or auditory stimulus often requires irrelevant information to be filtered out, both within the modality attended and in other modalities. For example, attentively listening to a phone conversation can diminish our ability to detect visual events. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine brain responses t...

We used psychophysical and functional MRI (fMRI) adaptation to examine how and where the visual configural cues underlying identification of facial ethnicity, gender, and identity are processed. We found that the cortical regions showing selectivity to these cues are distributed widely across the inferior occipital cortex, fusiform areas, and the c...

Previous studies have shown that attention to a particular stimulus feature, such as direction of motion or color, enhances neuronal responses to unattended stimuli sharing that feature. We studied this effect psychophysically by measuring the strength of the motion aftereffect (MAE) induced by an unattended stimulus when attention was directed to...

Lesion or inactivation of the superior colliculus (SC) of the cat results in an animal that fails to orient toward peripheral visual stimuli which normally evoke a brisk, reflexive orienting response. A failure to orient toward a visual stimulus could be the result of a sensory impairment (a failure to detect the visual stimulus) or a motor impairm...

When Horsley and Clark invented the stereotaxic technique they revolutionized experimental neurobiology. For the first time it became possible to repeatably place experimental or surgical probes at precise locations within the skull. Unfortunately, variations in the position and size of neuroanatomical structures within the cranium have always limi...

We examined whether improvements in sensory processing, defined as changes in sensitivity, could be elicited in a simple luminance discrimination task without eliciting concomitant changes in decision processing. To this end we developed a task, for use in both humans and monkeys, in which prior knowledge about where a discriminative stimulus was l...

Following unilateral removal of all known visual cortical areas, a cat is rendered hemianopic in the contralateral visual field. Visual orientation can be restored to the blind hemifield by transection of the commissure of the superior colliculus or by destruction of the superior colliculus (SC) or the substantia nigra pars reticulata (SNpr) contra...

Unilateral removal of all known visual cortical areas in the cat renders the animal hemianopic in the contralateral visual field as measured by visual perimetry and other behavioral tests. We have shown that visual orientation behavior can be restored to the previously blind hemifield by destruction of a critical zone in the substantia nigra pars r...

Visual information from the retina is available to a number of subcortical areas, outside of the traditional pathway from the lateral geniculate nucleus to visual cortex. The purpose of the present series of studies was to understand the subcortical neuroanatomical pathways and pharmacological mechanisms involved in (1) the recovery of visual funct...

The reticular thalamic nucleus consists of densely packed neurons containing the neurotransmitter GABA. It surrounds the lateral border of the thalamus, has extensive reciprocal connections with thalamocortical neurons, and is thought to be involved in attentional processes. The reticular thalamic nucleus also receives direct and indirect inputs fr...

We compared the effects of unilateral surgical aspiration and ibotenic acid produced lesions of the superior colliculus (SC) on visual orienting behavior in 20 cats. Four animals with aspiration lesions initially showed an hemianopia in the contralateral hemifield which recovered fully in 4.5 weeks or less. These lesions also destroyed axons in the...

Lesions of the subthalamic nucleus block behavioral effects of nigrostriatal dopamine depletion in rats and primates, but the contribution of this region to the molecular effects of dopaminergic lesions is unknown. The effects of subthalamic nucleus lesions alone or in combination with a 6-hydroxydopamine-induced lesion of the substantia nigra were...

Phenylketonuria (PKU) is a genetic disorder in which the hydroxylation of phenylalanine (Phe) to tyrosine is severely disrupted. If PKU is left untreated, severe mental retardation results. The accepted treatment is to restrict dietary intake of Phe. It has generally been thought that cognitive impairments are prevented if levels of Phe in plasma a...

Three studies of normal human newborns and of newborns of methadone-maintained mothers evaluated how orotactile (pacifier) and orogustatory (sucrose) stimulation, alone and in combination, affected crying behavior, heart rate, gross motor activity, eye opening, and hand-mouth coordination. For each measure of infant state, pacifier and sucrose stim...