Contextual impairments in Schizophrenia and the FN400

Our brains are good at extracting and proccessing social contextual cues. Ongoing information is rapidly linked to memory traces of previous experiences, allowing us to generate predictions which help us interpret daily situations. These predictions are a core aspect of human cognition as long as they make social behaviors more effcient. Current evidence, however, suggests that schizophrenia patients are less able to benefit from context and, consequently, social impairments are commonly observed in this complex disorder.Fil: Amoruso, Lucía. Instituto de Neurologia Cognitiva. Laboratorio de Psicologia Experimental y Neurociencia; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Cardona Londoño, Juan Felipe. Instituto de Neurologia Cognitiva. Laboratorio de Psicologia Experimental y Neurociencia; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Favaloro. Facultad de Medicina. Instituto de Neurociencias; ArgentinaFil: Melloni, Margherita. Instituto de Neurologia Cognitiva. Laboratorio de Psicologia Experimental y Neurociencia; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Sedeño, Lucas. Instituto de Neurologia Cognitiva. Laboratorio de Psicologia Experimental y Neurociencia; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Ibañez, Agustin Mariano. Instituto de Neurologia Cognitiva. Laboratorio de Psicologia Experimental y Neurociencia; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Favaloro. Facultad de Medicina. Instituto de Neurociencias; Argentina. Universidad Diego Portales; Chil

What event-related potentials (ERPs) bring to social neuroscience?

Social cognitive neuroscience is a recent interdisciplinary field that studies the neural basis of the social mind. Event-related potentials (ERPs) provide precise information about the time dynamics of the brain. In this study, we assess the role of ERPs in cognitive neuroscience, particularly in the emerging area of social neuroscience. First, we briefly introduce the technique of ERPs. Subsequently, we describe several ERP components (P1, N1, N170, vertex positive potential, early posterior negativity, N2, P2, P3, N400, N400-like, late positive complex, late positive potential, P600, error-related negativity, feedback error-related negativity, contingent negative variation, readiness potential, lateralized readiness potential, motor potential, re-afferent potential) that assess perceptual, cognitive, and motor processing. Then, we introduce ERP studies in social neuroscience on contextual effects on speech, emotional processing, empathy, and decision making. We provide an outline of ERPs' relevance and applications in the field of social cognitive neuroscience. We also introduce important methodological issues that extend classical ERP research, such as intracranial recordings (iERP) and source location in dense arrays and simultaneous functional magnetic resonance imaging recordings. Further, this review discusses possible caveats of the ERP question assessment on neuroanatomical areas, biophysical origin, and methodological problems, and their relevance to explanatory pluralism and multilevel, contextual, and situated approaches to social neuroscience.Fil: Ibañez, Agustin Mariano. Universidad Diego Portales; Chile. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Melloni, Margherita. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Huepe, David. Universidad Diego Portales; ChileFil: Helgiu, Elena. Harvard University; Estados UnidosFil: Rivera Rei, Alvaro. Universidad Diego Portales; ChileFil: Canales Johnson, Andrés. Universidad Diego Portales; ChileFil: Baker, Phil. Universidad Favaloro; ArgentinaFil: Moya, Alvaro. Universidad Favaloro; Argentin

Preliminary evidence about the effects of meditation on interoceptive sensitivity and social cognition

Background: Interoception refers to the conscious perception of body signals. Mindfulness is a meditation practice that encourages individuals to focus on their internal experiences such as bodily sensations, thoughts, and emotions. In this study, we selected a behavioral measure of interoceptive sensitivity (heartbeat detection task, HBD) to compare the effect of meditation practice on interoceptive sensitivity among long term practitioners (LTP), short term meditators (STM, subjects that completed a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program) and controls (non-meditators). All participants were examined with a battery of different tasks including mood state, executive function and social cognition tests (emotion recognition, empathy and theory of mind). Findings: Compared to controls, both meditators’ groups showed lower levels of anxiety and depression, but no improvement in executive function or social cognition performance was observed (except for lower scores compared to controls only in the personal distress dimension of empathy). More importantly, meditators’ performance did not differ from that of nonmeditators regarding cardiac interoceptive sensitivity. Conclusion: Results suggest no influence of meditation practice in cardiac interoception and in most related social cognition measures. These negative results could be partially due to the fact that awareness of heartbeat sensations is not emphasized during mindfulness/vipassana meditation and may not be the best index of the awareness supported by the practice of meditation.Fil: Melloni, Margherita. Instituto de Neurologia Cognitiva. Laboratorio de Psicologia Experimental y Neurociencia; Argentina. Universidad Favaloro. Facultad de Medicina. Instituto de Neurociencias; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Sedeño, Lucas. Instituto de Neurologia Cognitiva. Laboratorio de Psicologia Experimental y Neurociencia; Argentina. Universidad Favaloro. Facultad de Medicina. Instituto de Neurociencias; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Couto, Juan Blas Marcos. Instituto de Neurologia Cognitiva. Laboratorio de Psicologia Experimental y Neurociencia; Argentina. Universidad Favaloro. Facultad de Medicina. Instituto de Neurociencias; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Reynoso, Martín. Universidad Favaloro. Facultad de Medicina. Instituto de Neurociencias; Argentina. Instituto de Neurologia Cognitiva. Laboratorio de Psicologia Experimental y Neurociencia; ArgentinaFil: Gelormini Lezama, Carlos. Instituto de Neurologia Cognitiva. Laboratorio de Psicologia Experimental y Neurociencia; Argentina. Universidad Favaloro. Facultad de Medicina. Instituto de Neurociencias; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Favaloro, Roberto. Universidad Favaloro. Facultad de Medicina. Instituto de Neurociencias; Argentina. Instituto de Neurologia Cognitiva. Laboratorio de Psicologia Experimental y Neurociencia; ArgentinaFil: Canales Johnson, Andres. Universidad Diego Portales; ChileFil: Sigman, Mariano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Departamento de Física. Laboratorio de Neurociencia Integrativa; Argentina. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; ArgentinaFil: Manes, Facundo Francisco. Instituto de Neurologia Cognitiva. Laboratorio de Psicologia Experimental y Neurociencia; Argentina. Universidad Favaloro. Facultad de Medicina. Instituto de Neurociencias; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Ibanez Barassi, Agustin Mariano. Universidad Favaloro. Facultad de Medicina. Instituto de Neurociencias; Argentina. Instituto de Neurologia Cognitiva. Laboratorio de Psicologia Experimental y Neurociencia; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Explicit and implicit monitoring in neurodegeneration and stroke

Monitoring is a complex multidimensional neurocognitive phenomenon. Patients with fronto-insular stroke (FIS), behavioural variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and Alzheimer?s disease (AD) show a lack of self-awareness, insight, and self-monitoring, which translate into anosognosia and daily behavioural impairments. Notably, they also present damage in key monitoring areas. While neuroscientific research on this domain has accrued in recent years, no previous study has compared monitoring performance across these brain diseases and none has applied a multiple lesion model approach combined with neuroimaging analysis. Here, we evaluated explicit and implicit monitoring in patients with focal stoke (FIS) and two types of dementia (bvFTD and AD) presenting damage in key monitoring areas. Participants performed a visual perception task and provided two types of report: confidence (explicit judgment of trust about their performance) and wagering (implicit reports which consisted in betting on their accuracy in the perceptual task). Then, damaged areas were analyzed via structural MRI to identify associations with potential behavioral deficits. In AD, inadequate confidence judgments were accompanied by poor wagering performance, demonstrating explicit and implicit monitoring impairments. Bycontrast, disorders of implicit monitoring in FIS and bvFTD patients occurred in the context of accurate confidence reports, suggesting a reduced ability to turn self-knowledge into appropriate wagering conducts. MRI analysis showed that ventromedial compromise was related to overconfidence, whereas fronto-temporo-insular damage was associated with excessive wagering. Therefore, joint assessment of explicit and implicit monitoring could favor a better differentiation of neurological profiles (frontal damage vs AD) and eventuallycontribute to delineating clinical interventions.Fil: García Cordero, Indira Ruth. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Neurociencias Cognitivas y Traslacional; ArgentinaFil: Sedeño, Lucas. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Neurociencias Cognitivas y Traslacional; ArgentinaFil: Babino, Andrés. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Física de Buenos Aires; ArgentinaFil: Dottori, Martin. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Neurociencias Cognitivas y Traslacional; ArgentinaFil: Melloni, Margherita. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Neurociencias Cognitivas y Traslacional; ArgentinaFil: Martorell Caro, Miguel Angel. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Neurociencias Cognitivas y Traslacional; ArgentinaFil: Sigman, Mariano. Universidad Torcuato Di Tella; Argentina. Universidad Nebrija.; . Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Herrera, Eduar. Universidad ICESI; ColombiaFil: Manes, Facundo Francisco. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Neurociencias Cognitivas y Traslacional; ArgentinaFil: García, Adolfo Martín. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Neurociencias Cognitivas y Traslacional; ArgentinaFil: Ibanez Barassi, Agustin Mariano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Neurociencias Cognitivas y Traslacional; Argentina. Universidad Adolfo Ibañez; Chile. Universidad Autónoma del Caribe; Colombi

Weighted Symbolic Dependence Metric (wSDM) for fMRI restingstate connectivity : A multicentric validation for frontotemporal dementia

Q1Reporte Científico1-15The search for biomarkers of neurodegenerative diseases via fMRI functional connectivity (FC) research has yielded inconsistent results. Yet, most FC studies are blind to non-linear brain dynamics. To circumvent this limitation, we developed a “weighted Symbolic Dependence Metric” (wSDM) measure. Using symbolic transforms, we factor in local and global temporal features of the BOLD signal to weigh a robust copula-based dependence measure by symbolic similarity, capturing both linear and non-linear associations. We compared this measure with a linear connectivity metric (Pearson’s R) in its capacity to identify patients with behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and controls based on resting-state data. We recruited participants from two international centers with different MRI recordings to assess the consistency of our measure across heterogeneous conditions. First, a seed-analysis comparison of the salience network (a specific target of bvFTD) and the default-mode network (as a complementary control) between patients and controls showed that wSDM yields better identification of resting-state networks. Moreover, machine learning analysis revealed that wSDM yielded higher classification accuracy. These results were consistent across centers, highlighting their robustness despite heterogeneous conditions. Our findings underscore the potential of wSDM to assess fMRI-derived FC data, and to identify sensitive biomarkers in bvFTD

Cortical dynamics and subcortical signatures of motor-language coupling in Parkinson's disease

Impairments of action language have been documented in early stage Parkinson's disease (EPD). The action-sentence compatibility effect (ACE) paradigm has revealed that EPD involves deficits to integrate action-verb processing and ongoing motor actions. Recent studies suggest that an abolished ACE in EPD reflects a cortico-subcortical disruption, and recent neurocognitive models highlight the role of the basal ganglia (BG) in motor-language coupling. Building on such breakthroughs, we report the first exploration of convergent cortical and subcortical signatures of ACE in EPD patients and matched controls. Specifically, we combined cortical recordings of the motor potential, functional connectivity measures, and structural analysis of the BG through voxel-based morphometry. Relative to controls, EPD patients exhibited an impaired ACE, a reduced motor potential, and aberrant frontotemporal connectivity. Furthermore, motor potential abnormalities during the ACE task were predicted by overall BG volume and atrophy. These results corroborate that motor-language coupling is mainly subserved by a cortico-subcortical network including the BG as a key hub. They also evince that action-verb processing may constitute a neurocognitive marker of EPD. Our findings suggest that research on the relationship between language and motor domains is crucial to develop models of motor cognition as well as diagnostic and intervention strategies.Facultad de Ciencias ExactasInstituto de Física La Plat

The Neural Basis of Decision-Making and Reward Processing in Adults with Euthymic Bipolar Disorder or Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and bipolar disorder (BD) share DSM-IV criteria in adults and cause problems in decision-making. Nevertheless, no previous report has assessed a decision-making task that includes the examination of the neural correlates of reward and gambling in adults with ADHD and those with BD

Empathy and contextual social cognition

Empathy is a highly flexible and adaptive process that allows for the interplay of prosocial behavior in many different social contexts. Empathy appears to be a very situated cognitive process, embedded with specific contextual cues that trigger different automatic and controlled responses. In this review, we summarize relevant evidence regarding social context modulation of empathy for pain. Several contextual factors, such as stimulus reality and personal experience, affectively link with other factors, emotional cues, threat information, group membership, and attitudes toward others to influence the affective, sensorimotor, and cognitive processing of empathy. Thus, we propose that the frontoinsular-temporal network, the so-called social context network model (SCNM), is recruited during the contextual processing of empathy. This network would (1) update the contextual cues and use them to construct fast predictions (frontal regions), (2) coordinate the internal (body) and external milieus (insula), and (3) consolidate the context-target associative learning of empathic processes (temporal sites). Furthermore, we propose these context-dependent effects of empathy in the framework of the frontoinsular-temporal network and examine the behavioral and neural evidence of three neuropsychiatric conditions (Asperger syndrome, schizophrenia, and the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia), which simultaneously present with empathy and contextual integration impairments. We suggest potential advantages of a situated approach to empathy in the assessment of these neuropsychiatric disorders, as well as their relationship with the SCNM.Fil: Melloni, Margherita. Instituto de Neurología Cognitiva. Laboratorio de Psicología Experimental y Neurociencia; Argentina. Universidad Favaloro; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Lopez, Vladimir. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile; ChileFil: Ibáñez Barassi, Agustín Mariano. Instituto de Neurología Cognitiva. Laboratorio de Psicología Experimental y Neurociencia; Argentina. Universidad Favaloro; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Diego Portales; Chil