Electroencephalographic Biomarkers of Relaxation: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

by Clinical Neuropsychologist | Sunday, March 1, 2026 | Cognitive Neuropsychology

AbstractAlpha oscillations (8–13 Hz), which are prominent in human EEG, have long been considered a neural marker of relaxation. However, the extent to which different frequency bands and electrode positions of the EEG reflect relaxation remains unclear. This...

Regularization, Action, and Attractors in the Dynamical “Bayesian” Brain

by Clinical Neuropsychologist | Sunday, March 1, 2026 | Cognitive Neuropsychology

AbstractThe idea that the brain is a probabilistic (Bayesian) inference machine, continuously trying to figure out the hidden causes of its inputs, has become very influential in cognitive (neuro)science over recent decades. Here, I present a relatively...

Neurocognitive Dynamics Underlying Penalty-induced Boosting of Proactive Metacontrol and Its Influence on Reactive Metacontrol

by Clinical Neuropsychologist | Sunday, March 1, 2026 | Cognitive Neuropsychology

AbstractMetacontrol states involve adapting cognitive control to contextual demands—being more flexible in frequent task-switching environments or more stable in those with infrequent switching. While these metacontrol states can be engaged proactively in anticipation...

Experience-driven Predictability Does Not Influence Neural Entrainment to the Beat

by Clinical Neuropsychologist | Sunday, February 1, 2026 | Cognitive Neuropsychology

AbstractHumans spontaneously synchronize movements to a perceived underlying pulse, or beat, in music. Beat perception may be indexed by the synchronization of neural oscillations to the beat, marked by increases in EEG amplitude at the beat frequency [Nozaradan, S.,...

Context Matters: Human Faces Hinder Face Pareidolia

by Clinical Neuropsychologist | Sunday, February 1, 2026 | Cognitive Neuropsychology

AbstractThe human visual system readily processes illusory faces (IFs) as faces, a phenomenon known as face pareidolia. Building on evidence that IF processing elicits face-like neural activity and is sensitive to contextual cues, we investigated, via two experiments,...

Item-based Parsing of Dynamic Scenes in a Combined Attentional Tracking and Working Memory Task

by Clinical Neuropsychologist | Sunday, February 1, 2026 | Cognitive Neuropsychology

AbstractHuman visual processing is limited—we can only track a few moving objects at a time and store a few items in visual working memory (WM). A shared mechanism that may underlie these performance limits is how the visual system parses a scene into representational...