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Papers by mariano Ibañez

Research paper thumbnail of Biomarcadores acessíveis de demência frontotemporal: um estudo de classificação baseado na conectividade da rede cerebral

El desarrollo de biomarcadores de demencias efectivos y asequibles resulta esencial dada la dific... more El desarrollo de biomarcadores de demencias efectivos y asequibles resulta esencial dada la dificultad de realizar un diagnóstico temprano de estas patologías. En este sentido, los métodos de electroencefalografía (EEG) brindan alternativas promisorias por su bajo costo, portabilidad y creciente robustez. En este trabajo, nos basamos en señales de EEG y en un novedoso método de intercambio de información para estudiar la conectividad en estado de reposo en pacientes afectados por la variante conductual de la demencia frontotemporal (vcDFT) y en un grupo control. Para evaluar la especificidad de los resultados obtenidos, también examinamos pacientes que padecen la enfermedad de Alzheimer (EA). El poder de clasificación de los patrones de conectividad resultantes se evaluó mediante un algoritmo de clasificación supervisada (máquina de soporte vectorial). Además, comparamos el poder de clasificación obtenido mediante (i) la conectividad funcional, (ii) una batería de pruebas neuropsico...

Research paper thumbnail of Frontotemporal dementia and potential therapeutics

Memory impairment due to aging and various memory disorders represent a great medical challenge t... more Memory impairment due to aging and various memory disorders represent a great medical challenge to our society. Since the publication of the fifth volume of this collection, the rapid progress in the research fields of Alzheimer´s disease (AD) and other types of dementias continues through the intense efforts of research scientists worldwide. This sixth volume contains eight chapters, bringing together a presentation of scientific frontiers in current AD/dementia research. The topics include a discussion on impairments in dementias, memory binding in AD, therapeutic targeting of BACE1 and neprilysin, Tau Immunotherapy, targeting 5-lipoxygenase targets for tauopathy, potential therapeutics for frontotemporal dementia, potential therapeutics for Down´s syndrome, and cognitive rehabilitation in multiple sclerosis. Research advances in these areas are presented and discussed in great detail in the chapters. The book will be highly valuable to students and scientists worldwide who are in...

Research paper thumbnail of The social sontext network model in psychiatric and neurological diseases

Social Behavior from Rodents to Humans: Neural Foundations and Clinical Implications, 2017

The role of contextual modulations has been extensively studied in basic sensory and cognitive pr... more The role of contextual modulations has been extensively studied in basic sensory and cognitive processes. However, little is known about their impact on social cognition, let alone their disruption in disorders compromising such a domain. In this chapter, we flesh out the social context network model (SCNM), a neuroscientific proposal devised to address the issue. In SCNM terms, social context effects rely on a fronto-temporo-insular network in charge of (a) updating context cues to make predictions, (b) consolidating context?target associative learning, and (c) coordinating internal and external milieus. First, we characterize various social cognition domains as context-dependent phenomena. Then, we review behavioral and neural evidence of social context impairments in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD), highlighting their relation with key SCNM hubs. Next, we show that other psychiatric and neurological conditions involve context-processing impairments following damage to the brain regions included in the model. Finally, we call for an ecological approach to social cognition assessment, moving beyond widespread abstract and decontextualized methods.Fil: Báez Buitrago, Sandra Jimena. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva. Fundación Favaloro. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva; Argentina. 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; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva. Fundación Favaloro. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo; Argentina. Universidad Diego Portales; ChileFil: Ibanez Barassi, Agustin Mariano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Neurociencias Cognitivas y Traslacional; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva. Fundación Favaloro. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva; Argentina. Universidad Adolfo Ibañez; Chile. Universidad Autónoma Del Caribe; Colombi

Research paper thumbnail of fMRI lag structure during waking up from early sleep stages

Cortex, 2021

The brain mechanisms by which we transition from sleep to a conscious state remain largely unknow... more The brain mechanisms by which we transition from sleep to a conscious state remain largely unknown in humans, partly because of methodological challenges. Here we study a pre-existing dataset of waking up participants originally designed for a study of dreaming (Horikawa, Tamaki, Miyawaki, & Kamitani, 2013) and suggest that suddenly awakening from early sleep stages results from a two-stage process that involves a sequence of cortical and subcortical brain activity. First, subcortical and sensorimotor structures seem to be recruited before most cortical regions, followed by fast, ignition-like whole-brain activation-with frontal regions engaging a little after the rest of the brain. Second, a comparably slower and possibly mirror-reversed stage might take place, with cortical regions activating before subcortical structures and the cerebellum. This pattern of activation points to a key role of subcortical structures for the initiation and maintenance of conscious states.

Research paper thumbnail of Exploring the Borderlands of Neuroscience and Social Science

The field of social cognitive affective neuroscience seems to overcome long-standing problems und... more The field of social cognitive affective neuroscience seems to overcome long-standing problems undermining old-fashioned cognitive neuroscience, such as its reductionist approach; its exclusion of affect, body, and culture in the comprehension of mental phenomena; and its propensity toward isolationist models over integrative or multilevel theories. Moreover, in this developing field, centuries-old arguments of incommensurability between natural and human sciences can be reframed as little more than pseudoproblems. The apparent paradigm shift inherent in social cognitive neuroscience entails new conceptual, methodological, metatheoretical, and aesthetic questions. Also, it gives rise to novel problems as it taxes the boundaries with other disciplines. Many of these dynamical tensions among related fields of knowledge, which are often left implicit, continue to change across domains and periods. Here we chart such new borderlands and summarize the contributions comprised in the presen...

Research paper thumbnail of How Does Social Context Influence Our Brain and Behavior?

Frontiers for Young Minds, 2018

When we interact with others, the context in which our actions take place plays a major role in o... more When we interact with others, the context in which our actions take place plays a major role in our behavior. This means that our understanding of objects, words, emotions, and social cues may differ depending on where we encounter them. Here, we explain how context affects daily mental processes, ranging from how people see things to how they behave with others. Then, we present the social context network model. This model explains how people process contextual cues when they interact, through the activity of the frontal, temporal, and insular brain regions. Next, we show that when those brain areas are affected by some diseases, patients find it hard to process contextual cues. Finally, we describe new ways to explore social behavior through brain recordings in daily situations. introDuction Everything you do is influenced by the situation in which you do it. The situation that surrounds an action is called its context. In fact, analyzing revieweD BY: Darius aGe: 13 BHarGavi ram aGe: 17

Research paper thumbnail of Semantic and attentional networks in bilingual processing: fMRI connectivity signatures of translation directionality

Brain and Cognition, 2020

Research paper thumbnail of COVID-19 in older people with cognitive impairment in Latin America

The Lancet Neurology, 2020

Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on ... more Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre-including this research content-immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.

Research paper thumbnail of Transgression of cooperative helping norms outweighs children’s intergroup bias

Cognitive Development, 2020

Abstract Some forms of cooperative helping do not bind people from a moral perspective but ensure... more Abstract Some forms of cooperative helping do not bind people from a moral perspective but ensure the functioning of social groups. Here, we have assessed how children coordinate such nonobligatory social concerns with group identity concerns. We have performed three studies (3–11-years-old; N = 393) aimed at testing children’s peer preferences and resource allocation toward neutral individuals that engage in helping and hindering behaviors toward in-group and out-group peers. In Study 1, we have found that, in helping contexts, children prioritized group concerns and exhibited in-group favoritism. In hindering contexts, they privileged helping norms and did not exhibit out-group derogation. In Studies 2 and 3, we have confirmed that transgressions of cooperative helping norms outweighed intergroup bias. Our results suggest that, when cooperative helping norms conflict with group identity concerns, helping norms take priority. When these principles are coextensive and not in conflict, children give priority to group concerns.

Research paper thumbnail of Rethinking the Neural Basis of Prosody and Non-literal Language: Spared Pragmatics and Cognitive Compensation in a Bilingual With Extensive Right-Hemisphere Damage

Frontiers in Psychology, 2019

Bilingual Pragmatics and Right-Hemisphere Damage damage to the RH, and that claims for a putative... more Bilingual Pragmatics and Right-Hemisphere Damage damage to the RH, and that claims for a putative relation between pragmatics and the RH may have been overemphasized in the monolingual and bilingual literature. We further discuss the case in light of previous reports of pragmatic and linguistic deficits following brain lesions and address its relation to cognitive compensation in bilingual patients.

Research paper thumbnail of Dissociable Neural Information Dynamics of Perceptual Integration and Differentiation during Bistable Perception

Cerebral Cortex, 2020

At any given moment, we experience a perceptual scene as a single whole and yet we may distinguis... more At any given moment, we experience a perceptual scene as a single whole and yet we may distinguish a variety of objects within it. This phenomenon instantiates two properties of conscious perception: integration and differentiation. Integration is the property of experiencing a collection of objects as a unitary percept and differentiation is the property of experiencing these objects as distinct from each other. Here, we evaluated the neural information dynamics underlying integration and differentiation of perceptual contents during bistable perception. Participants listened to a sequence of tones (auditory bistable stimuli) experienced either as a single stream (perceptual integration) or as two parallel streams (perceptual differentiation) of sounds. We computed neurophysiological indices of information integration and information differentiation with electroencephalographic and intracranial recordings. When perceptual alternations were endogenously driven, the integrated percep...

Research paper thumbnail of A multidimensional and multi-feature framework for cardiac interoception

Research paper thumbnail of Too late to be grounded? Motor resonance for action words acquired after middle childhood

Brain and Cognition, 2020

Though well established for languages acquired in infancy, the role of embodied mechanisms remain... more Though well established for languages acquired in infancy, the role of embodied mechanisms remains poorly understood for languages learned in middle childhood and adulthood. To bridge this gap, we examined 34 experiments that assessed sensorimotor resonance during processing of action-related words in real and artificial languages acquired since age 7 and into adulthood. Evidence from late bilinguals indicates that foreign-language action words modulate neural activity in motor circuits and predictably facilitate or delay physical movements (even in an effector-specific fashion), with outcomes that prove partly sensitive to language proficiency. Also, data from newly learned vocabularies suggest that embodied effects emerge after brief periods of adult language exposure, remain stable through time, and hinge on the performance of bodily movements (and, seemingly, on action observation, too). In sum, our work shows that infant language exposure is not indispensable for the recruitment of embodied mechanisms during language processing, a finding that carries non-trivial theoretical, pedagogical, and clinical implications for neurolinguistics, in general, and bilingualism research, in particular.

Research paper thumbnail of Explicit and implicit monitoring in neurodegeneration and stroke

Scientific Reports, 2019

Monitoring is a complex multidimensional neurocognitive phenomenon. Patients with fronto-insular ... more 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 be...

Research paper thumbnail of Robust automated computational approach for classifying frontotemporal neurodegeneration: Multimodal/multicenter neuroimaging

Alzheimer's & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring, 2019

Research paper thumbnail of Structural neuroimaging differentiates vulnerability from disease manifestation in colombian families with Huntington’s disease

Research paper thumbnail of The Embodied Penman: Effector‐Specific Motor–Language Integration During Handwriting

Research paper thumbnail of How meaning unfolds in neural time: Embodied reactivations can precede multimodal semantic effects during language processing

NeuroImage, 2019

Research on how the brain construes meaning during language use has prompted two conflicting acco... more Research on how the brain construes meaning during language use has prompted two conflicting accounts. According to the 'grounded view', word understanding involves quick reactivations of sensorimotor (embodied) experiences evoked by the stimuli, with simultaneous or later engagement of multimodal (conceptual) systems integrating information from various sensory streams. Contrariwise, for the 'symbolic view', this capacity depends crucially on multimodal operations, with embodied systems playing epiphenomenal roles after comprehension. To test these contradictory hypotheses, the present magnetoencephalography study assessed implicit semantic access to grammatically constrained action and non-action verbs (n = 100 per category) while measuring spatiotemporally precise signals from the primary motor cortex (M1, a core region subserving bodily movements) and the anterior temporal lobe (ATL, a putative multimodal semantic hub). Convergent evidence from sensor- and source-level analyses revealed that increased modulations for action verbs occurred earlier in M1 (∼130-190 ms) than in specific ATL hubs (∼250-410 ms). Moreover, machine-learning decoding showed that trial-by-trial classification peaks emerged faster in M1 (∼100-175 ms) than in the ATL (∼345-500 ms), with over 71% accuracy in both cases. Considering their latencies, these results challenge the 'symbolic view' and its implication that sensorimotor mechanisms play only secondary roles in semantic processing. Instead, our findings support the 'grounded view', showing that early semantic effects are critically driven by embodied reactivations and that these cannot be reduced to post-comprehension epiphenomena, even when words are individually classified. Briefly, our study offers non-trivial insights to constrain fine-grained models of language and understand how meaning unfolds in neural time.

Research paper thumbnail of Multimodal neurocognitive markers of interoceptive tuning in smoked cocaine

Neuropsychopharmacology, 2019

Contemporary neurocognitive models of drug addiction have associated this condition with changes ... more Contemporary neurocognitive models of drug addiction have associated this condition with changes in interoception-namely, the sensing and processing of body signals that fulfill homeostatic functions relevant for the onset and maintenance of addictive behavior. However, most previous evidence is inconsistent, behaviorally unspecific, and virtually null in terms of direct electrophysiological and multimodal markers. To circumvent these limitations, we conducted the first assessment of the relation between cardiac interoception and smoked cocaine dependence (SCD) in a sample of (a) 25 participants who fulfilled criteria for dependence on such a drug, (b) 22 participants addicted to insufflated clorhidrate cocaine (only for behavioral assessment), and (c) 25 healthy controls matched by age, gender, education, and socioeconomic status. We use a validated heartbeat-detection (HBD) task and measured modulations of the heart-evoked potential (HEP) during interoceptive accuracy and interoceptive learning conditions. We complemented this behavioral and electrophysiological data with offline structural (MRI) and functional connectivity (fMRI) analysis of the main interoceptive hubs. HBD and HEP results convergently showed that SCD subjects presented ongoing psychophysiological measures of enhanced interoceptive accuracy. This pattern was associated with a structural and functional tuning of interoceptive networks (reduced volume and specialized network segregation). Taken together, our findings provide the first evidence of an association between cardiac interoception and smoked cocaine, partially supporting models that propose hyper-interoception as a key aspect of addiction. More generally, our study shows that multimodal assessments of interoception could substantially inform the clinical and neurocognitive characterization of psychophysiological and neurocognitive adaptations triggered by addiction.

Research paper thumbnail of Consistent gradient of performance and decoding of stimulus type and valence from local and network activity

IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, 2019

The individual differences approach focuses on the variation of behavioral and neural signatures ... more The individual differences approach focuses on the variation of behavioral and neural signatures across subjects. In this context, we searched for intracranial neural markers of performance in three individuals with distinct behavioral patterns (efficient, borderline, and inefficient) in a dual-valence task assessing facial and lexical emotion recognition. First, we performed a preliminary study to replicate well-established evoked responses in relevant brain regions. Then, we examined time series data and network connectivity, combined with multivariate pattern analyses and machine learning, to explore electrophysiological differences in resting-state versus task-related activity across subjects. Next, using the same methodological approach, we assessed the neural decoding of performance for different dimensions of the task. The classification of time series data mirrored the behavioral gradient across subjects for stimulus type but not for valence. However, network-based measures reflected the subjects’ hierarchical profiles for both stimulus types and valence. Therefore, this measure serves as a sensitive marker for capturing distributed processes such as emotional valence discrimination, which relies on an extended set of regions. Network measures combined with classification methods may offer useful insights to study single subjects and understand inter-individual performance variability. Promisingly, this approach could eventually be extrapolated to other neuroscientific techniques.

Research paper thumbnail of Biomarcadores acessíveis de demência frontotemporal: um estudo de classificação baseado na conectividade da rede cerebral

El desarrollo de biomarcadores de demencias efectivos y asequibles resulta esencial dada la dific... more El desarrollo de biomarcadores de demencias efectivos y asequibles resulta esencial dada la dificultad de realizar un diagnóstico temprano de estas patologías. En este sentido, los métodos de electroencefalografía (EEG) brindan alternativas promisorias por su bajo costo, portabilidad y creciente robustez. En este trabajo, nos basamos en señales de EEG y en un novedoso método de intercambio de información para estudiar la conectividad en estado de reposo en pacientes afectados por la variante conductual de la demencia frontotemporal (vcDFT) y en un grupo control. Para evaluar la especificidad de los resultados obtenidos, también examinamos pacientes que padecen la enfermedad de Alzheimer (EA). El poder de clasificación de los patrones de conectividad resultantes se evaluó mediante un algoritmo de clasificación supervisada (máquina de soporte vectorial). Además, comparamos el poder de clasificación obtenido mediante (i) la conectividad funcional, (ii) una batería de pruebas neuropsico...

Research paper thumbnail of Frontotemporal dementia and potential therapeutics

Memory impairment due to aging and various memory disorders represent a great medical challenge t... more Memory impairment due to aging and various memory disorders represent a great medical challenge to our society. Since the publication of the fifth volume of this collection, the rapid progress in the research fields of Alzheimer´s disease (AD) and other types of dementias continues through the intense efforts of research scientists worldwide. This sixth volume contains eight chapters, bringing together a presentation of scientific frontiers in current AD/dementia research. The topics include a discussion on impairments in dementias, memory binding in AD, therapeutic targeting of BACE1 and neprilysin, Tau Immunotherapy, targeting 5-lipoxygenase targets for tauopathy, potential therapeutics for frontotemporal dementia, potential therapeutics for Down´s syndrome, and cognitive rehabilitation in multiple sclerosis. Research advances in these areas are presented and discussed in great detail in the chapters. The book will be highly valuable to students and scientists worldwide who are in...

Research paper thumbnail of The social sontext network model in psychiatric and neurological diseases

Social Behavior from Rodents to Humans: Neural Foundations and Clinical Implications, 2017

The role of contextual modulations has been extensively studied in basic sensory and cognitive pr... more The role of contextual modulations has been extensively studied in basic sensory and cognitive processes. However, little is known about their impact on social cognition, let alone their disruption in disorders compromising such a domain. In this chapter, we flesh out the social context network model (SCNM), a neuroscientific proposal devised to address the issue. In SCNM terms, social context effects rely on a fronto-temporo-insular network in charge of (a) updating context cues to make predictions, (b) consolidating context?target associative learning, and (c) coordinating internal and external milieus. First, we characterize various social cognition domains as context-dependent phenomena. Then, we review behavioral and neural evidence of social context impairments in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD), highlighting their relation with key SCNM hubs. Next, we show that other psychiatric and neurological conditions involve context-processing impairments following damage to the brain regions included in the model. Finally, we call for an ecological approach to social cognition assessment, moving beyond widespread abstract and decontextualized methods.Fil: Báez Buitrago, Sandra Jimena. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva. Fundación Favaloro. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva; Argentina. 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; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva. Fundación Favaloro. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Cuyo; Argentina. Universidad Diego Portales; ChileFil: Ibanez Barassi, Agustin Mariano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Neurociencias Cognitivas y Traslacional; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva. Fundación Favaloro. Instituto de Neurociencia Cognitiva; Argentina. Universidad Adolfo Ibañez; Chile. Universidad Autónoma Del Caribe; Colombi

Research paper thumbnail of fMRI lag structure during waking up from early sleep stages

Cortex, 2021

The brain mechanisms by which we transition from sleep to a conscious state remain largely unknow... more The brain mechanisms by which we transition from sleep to a conscious state remain largely unknown in humans, partly because of methodological challenges. Here we study a pre-existing dataset of waking up participants originally designed for a study of dreaming (Horikawa, Tamaki, Miyawaki, & Kamitani, 2013) and suggest that suddenly awakening from early sleep stages results from a two-stage process that involves a sequence of cortical and subcortical brain activity. First, subcortical and sensorimotor structures seem to be recruited before most cortical regions, followed by fast, ignition-like whole-brain activation-with frontal regions engaging a little after the rest of the brain. Second, a comparably slower and possibly mirror-reversed stage might take place, with cortical regions activating before subcortical structures and the cerebellum. This pattern of activation points to a key role of subcortical structures for the initiation and maintenance of conscious states.

Research paper thumbnail of Exploring the Borderlands of Neuroscience and Social Science

The field of social cognitive affective neuroscience seems to overcome long-standing problems und... more The field of social cognitive affective neuroscience seems to overcome long-standing problems undermining old-fashioned cognitive neuroscience, such as its reductionist approach; its exclusion of affect, body, and culture in the comprehension of mental phenomena; and its propensity toward isolationist models over integrative or multilevel theories. Moreover, in this developing field, centuries-old arguments of incommensurability between natural and human sciences can be reframed as little more than pseudoproblems. The apparent paradigm shift inherent in social cognitive neuroscience entails new conceptual, methodological, metatheoretical, and aesthetic questions. Also, it gives rise to novel problems as it taxes the boundaries with other disciplines. Many of these dynamical tensions among related fields of knowledge, which are often left implicit, continue to change across domains and periods. Here we chart such new borderlands and summarize the contributions comprised in the presen...

Research paper thumbnail of How Does Social Context Influence Our Brain and Behavior?

Frontiers for Young Minds, 2018

When we interact with others, the context in which our actions take place plays a major role in o... more When we interact with others, the context in which our actions take place plays a major role in our behavior. This means that our understanding of objects, words, emotions, and social cues may differ depending on where we encounter them. Here, we explain how context affects daily mental processes, ranging from how people see things to how they behave with others. Then, we present the social context network model. This model explains how people process contextual cues when they interact, through the activity of the frontal, temporal, and insular brain regions. Next, we show that when those brain areas are affected by some diseases, patients find it hard to process contextual cues. Finally, we describe new ways to explore social behavior through brain recordings in daily situations. introDuction Everything you do is influenced by the situation in which you do it. The situation that surrounds an action is called its context. In fact, analyzing revieweD BY: Darius aGe: 13 BHarGavi ram aGe: 17

Research paper thumbnail of Semantic and attentional networks in bilingual processing: fMRI connectivity signatures of translation directionality

Brain and Cognition, 2020

Research paper thumbnail of COVID-19 in older people with cognitive impairment in Latin America

The Lancet Neurology, 2020

Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on ... more Elsevier has created a COVID-19 resource centre with free information in English and Mandarin on the novel coronavirus COVID-19. The COVID-19 resource centre is hosted on Elsevier Connect, the company's public news and information website. Elsevier hereby grants permission to make all its COVID-19-related research that is available on the COVID-19 resource centre-including this research content-immediately available in PubMed Central and other publicly funded repositories, such as the WHO COVID database with rights for unrestricted research re-use and analyses in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for free by Elsevier for as long as the COVID-19 resource centre remains active.

Research paper thumbnail of Transgression of cooperative helping norms outweighs children’s intergroup bias

Cognitive Development, 2020

Abstract Some forms of cooperative helping do not bind people from a moral perspective but ensure... more Abstract Some forms of cooperative helping do not bind people from a moral perspective but ensure the functioning of social groups. Here, we have assessed how children coordinate such nonobligatory social concerns with group identity concerns. We have performed three studies (3–11-years-old; N = 393) aimed at testing children’s peer preferences and resource allocation toward neutral individuals that engage in helping and hindering behaviors toward in-group and out-group peers. In Study 1, we have found that, in helping contexts, children prioritized group concerns and exhibited in-group favoritism. In hindering contexts, they privileged helping norms and did not exhibit out-group derogation. In Studies 2 and 3, we have confirmed that transgressions of cooperative helping norms outweighed intergroup bias. Our results suggest that, when cooperative helping norms conflict with group identity concerns, helping norms take priority. When these principles are coextensive and not in conflict, children give priority to group concerns.

Research paper thumbnail of Rethinking the Neural Basis of Prosody and Non-literal Language: Spared Pragmatics and Cognitive Compensation in a Bilingual With Extensive Right-Hemisphere Damage

Frontiers in Psychology, 2019

Bilingual Pragmatics and Right-Hemisphere Damage damage to the RH, and that claims for a putative... more Bilingual Pragmatics and Right-Hemisphere Damage damage to the RH, and that claims for a putative relation between pragmatics and the RH may have been overemphasized in the monolingual and bilingual literature. We further discuss the case in light of previous reports of pragmatic and linguistic deficits following brain lesions and address its relation to cognitive compensation in bilingual patients.

Research paper thumbnail of Dissociable Neural Information Dynamics of Perceptual Integration and Differentiation during Bistable Perception

Cerebral Cortex, 2020

At any given moment, we experience a perceptual scene as a single whole and yet we may distinguis... more At any given moment, we experience a perceptual scene as a single whole and yet we may distinguish a variety of objects within it. This phenomenon instantiates two properties of conscious perception: integration and differentiation. Integration is the property of experiencing a collection of objects as a unitary percept and differentiation is the property of experiencing these objects as distinct from each other. Here, we evaluated the neural information dynamics underlying integration and differentiation of perceptual contents during bistable perception. Participants listened to a sequence of tones (auditory bistable stimuli) experienced either as a single stream (perceptual integration) or as two parallel streams (perceptual differentiation) of sounds. We computed neurophysiological indices of information integration and information differentiation with electroencephalographic and intracranial recordings. When perceptual alternations were endogenously driven, the integrated percep...

Research paper thumbnail of A multidimensional and multi-feature framework for cardiac interoception

Research paper thumbnail of Too late to be grounded? Motor resonance for action words acquired after middle childhood

Brain and Cognition, 2020

Though well established for languages acquired in infancy, the role of embodied mechanisms remain... more Though well established for languages acquired in infancy, the role of embodied mechanisms remains poorly understood for languages learned in middle childhood and adulthood. To bridge this gap, we examined 34 experiments that assessed sensorimotor resonance during processing of action-related words in real and artificial languages acquired since age 7 and into adulthood. Evidence from late bilinguals indicates that foreign-language action words modulate neural activity in motor circuits and predictably facilitate or delay physical movements (even in an effector-specific fashion), with outcomes that prove partly sensitive to language proficiency. Also, data from newly learned vocabularies suggest that embodied effects emerge after brief periods of adult language exposure, remain stable through time, and hinge on the performance of bodily movements (and, seemingly, on action observation, too). In sum, our work shows that infant language exposure is not indispensable for the recruitment of embodied mechanisms during language processing, a finding that carries non-trivial theoretical, pedagogical, and clinical implications for neurolinguistics, in general, and bilingualism research, in particular.

Research paper thumbnail of Explicit and implicit monitoring in neurodegeneration and stroke

Scientific Reports, 2019

Monitoring is a complex multidimensional neurocognitive phenomenon. Patients with fronto-insular ... more 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 be...

Research paper thumbnail of Robust automated computational approach for classifying frontotemporal neurodegeneration: Multimodal/multicenter neuroimaging

Alzheimer's & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring, 2019

Research paper thumbnail of Structural neuroimaging differentiates vulnerability from disease manifestation in colombian families with Huntington’s disease

Research paper thumbnail of The Embodied Penman: Effector‐Specific Motor–Language Integration During Handwriting

Research paper thumbnail of How meaning unfolds in neural time: Embodied reactivations can precede multimodal semantic effects during language processing

NeuroImage, 2019

Research on how the brain construes meaning during language use has prompted two conflicting acco... more Research on how the brain construes meaning during language use has prompted two conflicting accounts. According to the 'grounded view', word understanding involves quick reactivations of sensorimotor (embodied) experiences evoked by the stimuli, with simultaneous or later engagement of multimodal (conceptual) systems integrating information from various sensory streams. Contrariwise, for the 'symbolic view', this capacity depends crucially on multimodal operations, with embodied systems playing epiphenomenal roles after comprehension. To test these contradictory hypotheses, the present magnetoencephalography study assessed implicit semantic access to grammatically constrained action and non-action verbs (n = 100 per category) while measuring spatiotemporally precise signals from the primary motor cortex (M1, a core region subserving bodily movements) and the anterior temporal lobe (ATL, a putative multimodal semantic hub). Convergent evidence from sensor- and source-level analyses revealed that increased modulations for action verbs occurred earlier in M1 (∼130-190 ms) than in specific ATL hubs (∼250-410 ms). Moreover, machine-learning decoding showed that trial-by-trial classification peaks emerged faster in M1 (∼100-175 ms) than in the ATL (∼345-500 ms), with over 71% accuracy in both cases. Considering their latencies, these results challenge the 'symbolic view' and its implication that sensorimotor mechanisms play only secondary roles in semantic processing. Instead, our findings support the 'grounded view', showing that early semantic effects are critically driven by embodied reactivations and that these cannot be reduced to post-comprehension epiphenomena, even when words are individually classified. Briefly, our study offers non-trivial insights to constrain fine-grained models of language and understand how meaning unfolds in neural time.

Research paper thumbnail of Multimodal neurocognitive markers of interoceptive tuning in smoked cocaine

Neuropsychopharmacology, 2019

Contemporary neurocognitive models of drug addiction have associated this condition with changes ... more Contemporary neurocognitive models of drug addiction have associated this condition with changes in interoception-namely, the sensing and processing of body signals that fulfill homeostatic functions relevant for the onset and maintenance of addictive behavior. However, most previous evidence is inconsistent, behaviorally unspecific, and virtually null in terms of direct electrophysiological and multimodal markers. To circumvent these limitations, we conducted the first assessment of the relation between cardiac interoception and smoked cocaine dependence (SCD) in a sample of (a) 25 participants who fulfilled criteria for dependence on such a drug, (b) 22 participants addicted to insufflated clorhidrate cocaine (only for behavioral assessment), and (c) 25 healthy controls matched by age, gender, education, and socioeconomic status. We use a validated heartbeat-detection (HBD) task and measured modulations of the heart-evoked potential (HEP) during interoceptive accuracy and interoceptive learning conditions. We complemented this behavioral and electrophysiological data with offline structural (MRI) and functional connectivity (fMRI) analysis of the main interoceptive hubs. HBD and HEP results convergently showed that SCD subjects presented ongoing psychophysiological measures of enhanced interoceptive accuracy. This pattern was associated with a structural and functional tuning of interoceptive networks (reduced volume and specialized network segregation). Taken together, our findings provide the first evidence of an association between cardiac interoception and smoked cocaine, partially supporting models that propose hyper-interoception as a key aspect of addiction. More generally, our study shows that multimodal assessments of interoception could substantially inform the clinical and neurocognitive characterization of psychophysiological and neurocognitive adaptations triggered by addiction.

Research paper thumbnail of Consistent gradient of performance and decoding of stimulus type and valence from local and network activity

IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, 2019

The individual differences approach focuses on the variation of behavioral and neural signatures ... more The individual differences approach focuses on the variation of behavioral and neural signatures across subjects. In this context, we searched for intracranial neural markers of performance in three individuals with distinct behavioral patterns (efficient, borderline, and inefficient) in a dual-valence task assessing facial and lexical emotion recognition. First, we performed a preliminary study to replicate well-established evoked responses in relevant brain regions. Then, we examined time series data and network connectivity, combined with multivariate pattern analyses and machine learning, to explore electrophysiological differences in resting-state versus task-related activity across subjects. Next, using the same methodological approach, we assessed the neural decoding of performance for different dimensions of the task. The classification of time series data mirrored the behavioral gradient across subjects for stimulus type but not for valence. However, network-based measures reflected the subjects’ hierarchical profiles for both stimulus types and valence. Therefore, this measure serves as a sensitive marker for capturing distributed processes such as emotional valence discrimination, which relies on an extended set of regions. Network measures combined with classification methods may offer useful insights to study single subjects and understand inter-individual performance variability. Promisingly, this approach could eventually be extrapolated to other neuroscientific techniques.