Digital Commons Network^™

The Neural Basis Of Metacognitive Monitoring During Arithmetic In The Developing Brain, Elien Bellon, Wim Fias, Daniel Ansari, Bert De Smedt

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

In contrast to a substantial body of research on the neural basis of cognitive performance in several academic domains, less is known about how the brain generates metacognitive (MC) awareness of such performance. The existing work on the neurobiological underpinnings of metacognition has almost exclusively been done in adults and has largely focused on lower level cognitive processing domains, such as perceptual decision-making. Extending this body of evidence, we investigated MC monitoring by asking children to solve arithmetic problems, an educationally relevant higher-order process, while providing concurrent MC reports during fMRI acquisition. Results are reported on 50 primary school children …

No Laughing Matter: How Humor Styles Relate To Feelings Of Loneliness And Not Mattering, Kristi Baerg Macdonald, Anjali Kumar, Julie Aitken Schermer

Management and Organizational Studies Publications

Loneliness and feeling that one does not matter are closely linked, but further investigation is needed to determine differentiating features. The relationship between not mattering to others (anti-mattering) and loneliness was explored by assessing how the two constructs correlated with an interpersonal dimension, specifically four humor styles (affiliative, self-enhancing, self-defeating, and aggressive). One hundred and fifty-eight women and 96 men completed a three-item loneliness scale, a new measure of anti-mattering, and a humor styles questionnaire. Confirmatory factor analysis results indicated that the new anti-mattering measure is a unidimensional scale. Loneliness and anti-mattering were strongly correlated, and each correlated in the …

Who Are We Missing? The Impact Of Requiring Parental Or Guardian Consent On Research With Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Two-Spirit, Queer/Questioning Youth., Eli Cwinn, Courtney Cadieux, Claire V Crooks

Education Publications

PURPOSE: The purpose was to examine whether a requirement for parental or guardian consent systematically limits which lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, two-spirit, queer/questioning (LGBT2Q+) youth participate in research.

METHODS: A total of 60 LGBT2Q+ youth (aged 14-18 years) completed measures assessing gender and sexual minority identity, depression and anxiety, help-seeking intentions, and social support.

RESULTS: A substantial proportion (37.6%) of youth reported that they would not have participated in the research if parental or guardian consent was required. Those who would not have participated had more negative attitudes about their sexual and gender identity, less family support, lower levels of …

Personality Traits And Transition To First Marriage, Sumangala Sasudevan

MA Research Paper

Context: During the search for a potential partner, individuals emphasize personality as a key factor. The Big Five personality types (Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness, Agreeableness and Conscientiousness) have been commonly used in social psychology literature to analyse personality types in relation to marital satisfaction and relationship outcomes (Botwin, Buss and Shakelford 1997; Holland & Roisman 2008). Objectives: The purpose of this study is to 1) analyse the relationships between the big five personality types and the transition into first marriage; and 2) explore how childhood socioeconomic status moderates the relationship between childhood personality types to first marriage. Data and Methods: I …

Primacy Of (Hypo) Mania In The Postpartum Period: A Concept Worth Considering, Verinder Sharma, Adele C. Viguera, Arianna Di Florio, Dwight Mazmanian, Alexia Koukopoulos, Gabriele Sani, Laura Palagini, Ayşegül Özerdem

Paediatrics Publications

No abstract provided.

Syllables In Sync Form A Link: Neural Phase-Locking Reflects Word Knowledge During Language Learning, Laura Batterink

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Language is composed of small building blocks, which combine to form larger meaningful structures. To understand language, we must process, track, and concatenate these building blocks into larger linguistic units as speech unfolds over time. An influential idea is that phase-locking of neural oscillations across different levels of linguistic structure provides a mechanism for this process. Building on this framework, the goal of the current study was to determine whether neural phase-locking occurs more robustly to novel linguistic items that are successfully learned and encoded into memory, compared to items that are not learned. Participants listened to a continuous speech …

Pain In The Newborn Brain: A Neural Signature, Emma G. Duerden, Steven P. Miller

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

No abstract provided.

An Auditory-Perceptual And Pupillometric Study Of Vocal Strain And Listening Effort In Adductor Spasmodic Dysphonia, Mojgan Farahani, Vijay Parsa, Björn Herrmann, Mason Kadem, Ingrid Johnsrude, Philip C. Doyle

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

© 2020 by the authors. This study evaluated ratings of vocal strain and perceived listening effort by normal hearing participants while listening to speech samples produced by talkers with adductor spasmodic dysphonia (AdSD). In addition, objective listening effort was measured through concurrent pupillometry to determine whether listening to disordered voices changed arousal as a result of emotional state or cognitive load. Recordings of the second sentence of the "Rainbow Passage" produced by talkers with varying degrees of AdSD served as speech stimuli. Twenty naïve young adult listeners perceptually evaluated these stimuli on the dimensions of vocal strain and listening effort …

Decoding Motor Imagery And Action Planning In The Early Visual Cortex: Overlapping But Distinct Neural Mechanisms, Simona Monaco, Giulia Malfatti, Jody C. Culham, Luigi Cattaneo, Luca Turella

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Recent evidence points to a role of the primary visual cortex that goes beyond visual processing into high-level cognitive and motor-related functions, including action planning, even in absence of feedforward visual information. It has been proposed that, at the neural level, motor imagery is a simulation based on motor representations, and neuroimaging studies have shown overlapping and shared activity patterns for motor imagery and action execution in frontal and parietal cortices. Yet, the role of the early visual cortex in motor imagery remains unclear. Here we used multivoxel pattern analyses on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data to examine whether …

Measuring Universal Health Coverage Based On An Index Of Effective Coverage Of Health Services In 204 Countries And Territories, 1990-2019: A Systematic Analysis For The Global Burden Of Disease Study 2019, Stefan Köhler

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Achieving universal health coverage (UHC) involves all people receiving the health services they need, of high quality, without experiencing financial hardship. Making progress towards UHC is a policy priority for both countries and global institutions, as highlighted by the agenda of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and WHO’s Thirteenth General Programme of Work (GPW13). Measuring effective coverage at the health-system level is important for understanding whether health services are aligned with countries’ health profiles and are of sufficient quality to produce health gains for populations of all ages.

The Human Cerebellum Has Almost 80% Of The Surface Area Of The Neocortex, Martin I. Sereno, J. Rn Diedrichsen, Mohamed Tachrount, Guilherme Testa-Silva, Helen D Arceuil, Chris De Zeeuw

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

© 2020 National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved. The surface of the human cerebellar cortex is much more tightly folded than the cerebral cortex. It was computationally reconstructed for the first time to the level of all individual folia from multicontrast high-resolution postmortem MRI scans. Its total shrinkage-corrected surface area (1,590 cm2) was larger than expected or previously reported, equal to 78% of the total surface area of the human neocortex. The unfolded and flattened surface comprised a narrow strip 10 cm wide but almost 1 m long. By applying the same methods to the neocortex and cerebellum of …

Pupil Size Is Modulated By The Size Of Equal-Luminance Gratings, Jie Gao, Athena Ko, Yoshiko Yabe, Melvyn A. Goodale, Juan Chen

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

© 2020 The Authors. Pupil size changes with light. For this reason, researchers studying the effect of attention, contextual processing, and arousal on the pupillary response have matched the mean luminance of their stimuli across conditions to eliminate the contribution of differences in light levels. Here, we argue that the match of mean luminance is not enough. In Experiment 1, we presented a circular sinewave grating on a gray background for 2 seconds. The area of the grating could be 3°, 6°, or 9°. The mean luminance of each grating was equal to the luminance of the gray background, such …

Longitudinal Changes Of Brain Microstructure And Function In Nonconcussed Female Rugby Players, Kathryn Y. Manning, Jeffrey S. Brooks, James P. Dickey, Alexandra Harriss, Lisa Fischer, Tatiana Jevremovic, Kevin Blackney, Christy Barreira, Arthur Brown, Robert Bartha, Tim Doherty, Douglas Fraser, Jeff Holmes, Gregory A. Dekaban, Ravi S. Menon

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

ObjectiveTo longitudinally assess brain microstructure and function in female varsity athletes participating in contact and noncontact sports.MethodsConcussion-free female rugby players (n = 73) were compared to age-matched (ages 18-23) female swimmers and rowers (n = 31) during the in- and off-season. Diffusion and resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) measures were the primary outcomes. The Sports Concussion Assessment Tool and head impact accelerometers were used to monitor symptoms and impacts, respectively.ResultsWe found cross-sectional (contact vs noncontact) and longitudinal (in- vs off-season) changes in white matter diffusion measures and rs-fMRI network connectivity in concussion-free contact athletes relative to noncontact athletes. In particular, mean, axial, …

Screening For Caregiver Psychosocial Risk In Children With Medical Complexity: A Cross-Sectional Study, Rahul Verma, Yasna Mehdian, Neel Sheth, Kathy Netten, Jean Vinette, Ashley Edwards, Joanna Polyviou, Julia Orkin, Reshma Amin

Paediatrics Publications

Objective To quantify psychosocial risk in family caregivers of children with medical complexity using the Psychosocial Assessment Tool (PAT) and to investigate potential contributing sociodemographic factors. Design Cross-sectional study. Setting Family caregivers completed questionnaires during long-term ventilation and complex care clinic visits at The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Patients A total of 136 family caregivers of children with medical complexity completed the PAT questionnaires from 30 June 2017 through 23 August 2017. Main outcome measures Mean PAT scores in family caregivers of children with medical complexity. Caregivers were stratified as 'Universal' low risk, 'Targeted' intermediate risk or …

Looming And Receding Visual Networks In Awake Marmosets Investigated With Fmri, Justine C. Cléry, David J. Schaeffer, Yuki Hori, Kyle M. Gilbert, Lauren K. Hayrynen, Joseph S. Gati, Ravi S. Menon, Stefan Everling

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

© 2020 The Author(s) An object that is looming toward a subject or receding away contains important information for determining if this object is dangerous, beneficial or harmless. This information (motion, direction, identity, time-to-collision, size, velocity) is analyzed by the brain in order to execute the appropriate behavioral responses depending on the context: fleeing, freezing, grasping, eating, exploring. In the current study, we performed ultra-high-field functional MRI (fMRI) at 9.4T in awake marmosets to explore the patterns of brain activation elicited by visual stimuli looming toward or receding away from the monkey. We found that looming and receding visual stimuli …

Music As A Scaffold For Listening To Speech: Better Neural Phase-Locking To Song Than Speech, Christina M. Vanden Bosch Der Nederlanden, Marc F. Joanisse, Jessica A. Grahn

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

© 2020 The Authors Neural activity synchronizes with the rhythmic input of many environmental signals, but the capacity of neural activity to entrain to the slow rhythms of speech is particularly important for successful communication. Compared to speech, song has greater rhythmic regularity, a more stable fundamental frequency, discrete pitch movements, and a metrical structure, this may provide a temporal framework that helps listeners neurally track information better than the rhythmically irregular rhythms of speech. The current study used EEG to examine whether entrainment to the syllable rate of linguistic utterances, as indexed by cerebro-acoustic phase coherence, was greater when …

The "Inferior Temporal Numeral Area" Distinguishes Numerals From Other Character Categories During Passive Viewing: A Representational Similarity Analysis, Darren J. Yeo, Courtney Pollack, Rebecca Merkley, Daniel Ansari, Gavin R. Price

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

A region in the posterior inferior temporal gyrus (pITG) is thought to be specialized for processing Arabic numerals, but fMRI studies that compared passive viewing of numerals to other character types (e.g., letters and novel characters) have not found evidence of numeral preference in the pITG. However, recent studies showed that the engagement of the pITG is modulated by attention and task contexts, suggesting that passive viewing paradigms may be ill-suited for examining numeral specialization in the pITG. It is possible, however, that even if the strengths of responses to different category types are similar, the distributed response patterns (i.e., …

Expanding The Search For Genetic Biomarkers Of Parkinson's Disease Into The Living Brain, Simon M. Benoit, Hu Xu, Susanne Schmid, Roumiana Alexandrova, Gaganjot Kaur, Bhooma Thiruvahindrapuram, Sergio L. Pereira, Mandar Jog, Matthew O. Hebb

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Altered gene expression related to Parkinson's Disease (PD) has not been described in the living brain, yet this information may support novel discovery pertinent to disease pathophysiology and treatment. This study compared the transcriptome in brain biopsies obtained from living PD and Control patients. To evaluate the novelty of this data, a comprehensive literature review also compared differentially expressed gene (DEGs) identified in the current study with those reported in PD cadaveric brain and peripheral tissues. RNA was extracted from rapidly cryopreserved frontal lobe specimens collected from PD and Control patients undergoing neurosurgical procedures. RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) was performed and …

Maternal Immune Activation Alters Fetal Brain Development And Enhances Proliferation Of Neural Precursor Cells In Rats, Kelly J. Baines, Dendra M. Hillier, Faraj L. Haddad, Nagalingam Rajakumar, Susanne Schmid, Stephen J. Renaud

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Maternal immune activation (MIA) caused by exposure to pathogens or inflammation during critical periods of neurodevelopment is a major risk factor for behavioral deficits and psychiatric illness in offspring. A spectrum of behavioral abnormalities can be recapitulated in rodents by inducing MIA using the viral mimetic, PolyI:C. Many studies have focused on long-term changes in brain structure and behavioral outcomes in offspring following maternal PolyI:C exposure, but acute changes in prenatal development are not well-characterized. Using RNA-Sequencing, we profiled acute transcriptomic changes in rat conceptuses (decidua along with nascent embryo and placenta) after maternal PolyI:C exposure during early gestation, which …

Berkeley On Perceptual Discrimination Of Physical Objects, Keota Fields

Western Ontario Early Modern Philosophy (WOEMP) Online Events

Commentators are divided over whether Berkeley holds that physical objects are immediately perceived by sense. As I read Berkeley, discrimination is necessary for perceiving physical objects by sense. Berkeley says that discrimination requires perceiving motion. Since motions can only be mediately perceived according to Berkeley, physical objects can only be mediately perceived by sense. I defend this reading against the following objections. First, that perception of physical objects is non-conceptual. Second, that physical objects are divinely instituted collections of ideas rather than psychologically associated collections of ideas. Third, that some physical objects are small enough to be immediately perceptually discriminated …

The Influence Of Depression-Ptsd Comorbidity On Health-Related Quality Of Life In Treatment-Seeking Veterans, Callista Forchuk, Anthony Nazarov, Renee Hunt, Brent Davis, Kate St. Cyr, J Donald Richardson

Psychiatry Publications

Objective: Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression substantially impair healthrelated quality of life (HRQOL) for many Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) veterans. Although PTSD and depression are highly comorbid, little is known about whether the disorders may interact in their association with HRQOL. We sought to investigate whether depressive symptoms modify the relation between PTSD and HRQOL in treatment-seeking veterans. Method: We accessed the clinical data of 545 CAF veterans aged 18 to 65 years who were seeking treatment at a specialized clinic in London, Ontario. We used hierarchical linear regression to assess the additive and multiplicative relations between depression and …

Registered Replication Report On Fischer, Castel, Dodd, And Pratt (2003), Lincoln J. Colling, Dénes Szűcs, Damiano De Marco, Krzysztof Cipora, Rolf Ulrich, Hans Christoph Nuerk, Mojtaba Soltanlou, Donna Bryce, Sau Chin Chen, Philipp Alexander Schroeder, Dion T. Henare, Christine K. Chrystall, Paul M. Corballis, Daniel Ansari, Celia Goffin, H. Moriah Sokolowski, Peter J.B. Hancock, Ailsa E. Millen, Stephen R.H. Langton, Kevin J. Holmes, Mark S. Saviano, Tia A. Tummino, Oliver Lindemann, Rolf A. Zwaan, Jiří Lukavský, Adéla Becková, Marek A. Vranka, Simone Cutini, Irene Cristina Mammarella

Paediatrics Publications

The attentional spatial-numerical association of response codes (Att-SNARC) effect (Fischer, Castel, Dodd, & Pratt, 2003)—the finding that participants are quicker to detect left-side targets when the targets are preceded by small numbers and quicker to detect right-side targets when they are preceded by large numbers—has been used as evidence for embodied number representations and to support strong claims about the link between number and space (e.g., a mental number line). We attempted to replicate Experiment 2 of Fischer et al. by collecting data from 1,105 participants at 17 labs. Across all 1,105 participants and four interstimulus-interval conditions, the proportion of …

Diffusion Dispersion Imaging: Mapping Oscillating Gradient Spin-Echo Frequency Dependence In The Human Brain., Aidin Arbabi, Jason Kai, Ali R Khan, Corey A Baron

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

PURPOSE: Oscillating gradient spin-echo (OGSE) diffusion MRI provides information about the microstructure of biological tissues by means of the frequency dependence of the apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC). ADC dependence on OGSE frequency has been explored in numerous rodent studies, but applications in the human brain have been limited and have suffered from low contrast between different frequencies, long scan times, and a limited exploration of the nature of the ADC dependence on frequency.

THEORY AND METHODS: Multiple frequency OGSE acquisitions were acquired in healthy subjects at 7T to explore the power-law frequency dependence of ADC, the "diffusion dispersion." Furthermore, a …

What Explains The Relationship Between Spatial And Mathematical Skills? A Review Of Evidence From Brain And Behavior, Zachary Hawes, Daniel Ansari

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

There is an emerging consensus that spatial thinking plays a fundamental role in how people conceive, express, and perform mathematics. However, the underlying nature of this relationship remains elusive. Questions remain as to how, why, and under what conditions spatial skills and mathematics are linked. This review paper addresses this gap. Through a review and synthesis of research in psychology, neuroscience, and education, we examine plausible mechanistic accounts for the oft-reported close, and potentially causal, relations between spatial and mathematical thought. More specifically, this review targets candidate mechanisms that link spatial visualization skills and basic numerical competencies. The four explanatory …

Kindness As An Intervention For Student Social Interaction Anxiety, Affect, And Mood: The Kiss Of Kindness Study, Katie Shillington, Andrew Johnson, Tara Mantler, Jennifer Irwin

Health Studies Publications

No abstract provided.

Development And Usability Testing Of A Web-Based And Therapist-Assisted Coping Skills Program For Managing Psychosocial Problems In Individuals With Hand And Upper Limb Injuries: Mixed Methods Study, Folarin Omoniyi Babatunde, Joy Macdermid, Ruby Grewal, Luciana Macedo, Mike Szekeres

Bone and Joint Institute

© 2020 Folarin Omoniyi Babatunde, Joy MacDermid, Ruby Grewal, Luciana Macedo, Mike Szekeres. Background: Ineffective coping has been linked to prolonged pain, distress, anxiety, and depression after a hand and upper limb injury. Evidence shows that interventions based on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) may be effective in improving treatment outcomes, but traditional psychological interventions are resource intensive and unrealistic in busy hand therapy practices. Developing web-based, evidence-based psychological interventions specifically for hand therapy may be feasible in clinical practice and at home with reduced training and travel costs. Hand Therapy Online Coping Skills (HOCOS) is a program developed to supplement …

Repetita Iuvant: Repetition Facilitates Online Planning Of Sequential Movements, Giacomo Ariani, Young Han Kwon, Jörn Diedrichsen

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Copyright © 2020 the American Physiological Society. Beyond being essential for long-term motor-skill development, movement repetition has immediate benefits on performance, increasing speed and accuracy of a second execution. While repetition effects have been reported for single reaching movements, it has yet to be determined whether they also occur for movement sequences, and what aspects of sequence production are improved. We addressed these questions in two behavioral experiments using a discrete sequence production (DSP) task in which human volunteers had to perform short sequences of finger movements. In experiment 1, we presented participants with randomly varying sequences and manipulated 1) …

Bilingualism Affords No General Cognitive Advantages: A Population Study Of Executive Function In 11,000 People, Emily S. Nichols, Conor J. Wild, Bobby Stojanoski, Michael E. Battista, Adrian M. Owen

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Whether acquiring a second language affords any general advantages to executive function has been a matter of fierce scientific debate for decades. If being bilingual does have benefits over and above the broader social, employment, and lifestyle gains that are available to speakers of a second language, then it should manifest as a cognitive advantage in the general population of bilinguals. We assessed 11,041 participants on a broad battery of 12 executive tasks whose functional and neural properties have been well described. Bilinguals showed an advantage over monolinguals on only one test (whereas monolinguals performed better on four tests), and …

Neuroimaging The Consciousness Of Self: Review, And Conceptual-Methodological Framework, Paul Frewen, Matthias L. Schroeter, Giuseppe Riva, Pietro Cipresso, Beth Fairfield, Caterina Padulo, Andrew Haddon Kemp, Lena Palaniyappan, Mayowa Owolabi, Kwabena Kusi-Mensah, Maryna Polyakova, Nick Fehertoi, Wendy D'Andrea, Leroy Lowe, Georg Northoff

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

We review neuroimaging research investigating self-referential processing (SRP), that is, how we respond to stimuli that reference ourselves, prefaced by a lexical-thematic analysis of words indicative of “self-feelings”. We consider SRP as occurring verbally (V-SRP) and non-verbally (NV-SRP), both in the controlled, “top-down” form of introspective and interoceptive tasks, respectively, as well as in the “bottom-up” spontaneous or automatic form of “mind wandering” and “body wandering” that occurs during resting state. Our review leads us to outline a conceptual and methodological framework for future SRP research that we briefly apply toward understanding certain psychological and neurological disorders symptomatically associated with …

A Comes Before B, Like 1 Comes Before 2. Is The Parietal Cortex Sensitive To Ordinal Relationships In Both Numbers And Letters? An Fmri-Adaptation Study, Celia Goffin, Stephan E. Vogel, Michael Slipenkyj, Daniel Ansari

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

How are number symbols (e.g., Arabic digits) represented in the brain? Functional resonance imaging adaptation (fMRI-A) research has indicated that the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) exhibits a decrease in activation with the repeated presentation of the same number, that is followed by a rebound effect with the presentation of a new number. This rebound effect is modulated by the numerical ratio or difference between presented numbers. It has been suggested that this ratio-dependent rebound effect is reflective of a link between the symbolic numerical representation system and an approximate magnitude system. Experiment 1 used fMRI-A to investigate an alternative hypothesis: that …