Zsuzsanna Kocsis

Carnegie Mellon University | CMU

The human brain extracts meaning using an extensive neural system for semantic knowledge. Whether broadly distributed systems depend on or can compensate after losing a highly interconnected hub is controversial. We report intracranial recordings from two patients during a speech prediction task, obtained minutes before and after neurosurgical trea...

Activity-induced gene expression underlies synaptic plasticity and brain function. Here, using molecular sequencing techniques, we define activity-dependent transcriptomic and epigenomic changes at the tissue and single-cell level in the human brain following direct electrical stimulation of the anterior temporal lobe in patients undergoing neurosu...

Understanding how the brain represents and binds complex information distributed over time is a challenging problem, requiring computationally and neurobiologically informed approaches to solve. Human language is a salient example, whereby syntactic knowledge facilitates “movement” and transformation of sequential information into hierarchical ment...

The human brain extracts meaning from the world using an extensive neural system for semantic knowledge. Whether such broadly distributed systems crucially depend on or can compensate for the loss of one of their highly interconnected hubs is controversial. The strongest level of causal evidence for the role of a brain hub is to evaluate its acute...

Human brain pathways supporting language and declarative memory are thought to have differentiated substantially during evolution. However, cross-species comparisons are missing on site-specific effective connectivity between regions important for cognition. We harnessed functional imaging to visualize the effects of direct electrical brain stimula...

Speech motor control requires integration of sensory and motor information. Bidirectional communication between frontal and auditory cortices is crucial for speech production, self-monitoring and motor control. We used cortical direct electrical stimulation (DES) to functionally dissect audio-motor interactions underlying speech production and moto...

Cognitive pathways supporting human language and declarative memory are thought to have uniquely evolutionarily differentiated in our species. However, cross-species comparisons are missing on site-specific effective connectivity between regions important for cognition. We harnessed a new approach using functional imaging to visualize the impact of...

Understanding the impact of surgical disconnection on neural responses in the human brain has the potential to advance models of normal neurophysiology and its disruption by pathology. We present data from four patients who underwent surgical disconnection of the anterior temporal lobe as part of the procedure to treat intractable epilepsy. In two...

Understanding how the brain binds complex information distributed over time is a challenging problem facing the neuroscientific community, requiring computationally and neurobiologically informed approaches to solve. The combinatorial binding problem is particularly salient in language, whereby human syntactic knowledge supports the encoding and de...

The dynamics of perceptual bistability, the phenomenon in which perception switches between different interpretations of an unchanging stimulus, are characterised by very similar properties across a wide range of qualitatively different paradigms. This suggests that perceptual switching may be triggered by some common source. However, it is also po...

Background and aims: Syntax needs to be processed in order to understand a sentence. Here we studied the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) elicited by syntactic violations: the left anterior negativity (LAN) and the P600. LAN signals the morphosyntactic violations. P600 is assumed to reflect structural reanalysis when encountering grammatically...

The auditory environment typically comprises several simultaneously active sound sources. In contrast to the perceptual segregation of two concurrent sounds, the perception of three simultaneous sound objects has not yet been studied systematically. We conducted two experiments in which participants were presented with complex sounds containing sou...

The ability to isolate a single sound source among concurrent sources is crucial for veridical auditory perception. The present study investigated the event-related oscillations evoked by complex tones, which could be perceived as a single sound and tonal complexes with cues promoting the perception of two concurrent sounds by inharmonicity, onset...

In two experiments, we assessed the effects of combining different cues of concurrent sound segregation on the object-related negativity (ORN) and the P400 event-related potential components. Participants were presented with sequences of complex tones, half of which contained some manipulation: One or two harmonic partials were mistuned, delayed, o...

The ability of the auditory system to parse complex scenes into component objects in order to extract information from the environment is very robust, yet the processing principles underlying this ability are still not well understood. This study was designed to investigate the proposal that the auditory system constructs multiple interpretations o...