Digital Phenotyping in Clinical Neurology

Internet-connected devices, including personal computers, smartphones, smartwatches, and voice assistants, have evolved into powerful multisensor technologies that billions of people interact with daily to connect with friends and colleagues, access and share information, purchase goods, play games, and navigate their environment. Digital phenotyping taps into the data streams captured by these devices to characterize and understand health and disease. The purpose of this article is to summarize opportunities for digital phenotyping in neurology, review studies using everyday technologies to obtain motor and cognitive information, and provide a perspective on how neurologists can embrace and accelerate progress in this emerging field.

An Interoperable Framework for Computational Models of Emotion

Computational models of emotion (CMEs) are software systems designed to emulate specific aspects of the human emotions process. The underlying components of CMEs interact with cognitive components of cognitive agent architectures to produce realistic behaviors in intelligent agents. However, in contemporary CMEs, the interaction between affective and cognitive components occurs in ad-hoc manner, which leads to difficulties when new affective or cognitive components should be added in the CME. This paper presents a framework that facilitates taking into account in CMEs the cognitive information generated by cognitive components implemented in cognitive agent architectures. The framework is designed to allow researchers define how cognitive information biases the internal workings of affective components. This framework is inspired in software interoperability practices to enable communication and interpretation of cognitive information and standardize the cognitive-affective communication process by ensuring semantic communication channels used to modulate affective mechanisms of CMEs

Interactions within the social brain: Co-activation and connectivity among networks enabling empathy and Theory of Mind

While empathy and Theory of Mind (ToM) have classically been studied as separate social functions, recent advances demonstrate the need to investigate the two in interaction: Naturalistic settings often blur the distinction of affect and cognition and demand the simultaneous processing of such different stimulus dimensions. Here, we investigate how empathy and ToM related brain networks interact in contexts wherein multiple cognitive and affective demands must be processed simultaneously. Building on the findings of a recent meta-analysis and hierarchical clustering analysis, we perform meta-analytic connectivity modeling to determine patterns of task-context specific network changes. We analyze 140 studies including classical empathy and ToM tasks, as well as complex social tasks. For studies at the intersection of empathy and ToM, neural co-activation patterns included areas typically associated with both empathy and ToM. Network integration is discussed as a means of combining mechanisms across unique behavioral domains. Such integration may enable adaptive behavior in complex, naturalistic social settings that require simultaneous processing of a multitude of different affective and cognitive information.

Towards a Blending-Based Approach to Early Christian Characters: Nicodemus as a Test Case

This article presents a blending-based approach to characters in early Christian narratives. Even cognitive approaches to complex characters (including my previous work) tend to frame character development as a primarily linear unidirectional process. However, the human mind integrates incoming information through processes that are more recursive than linear and more synergistic than summative. I propose that Cognitive Blending Theory, pioneered by Gilles Fauconnier & Mark Turner, provides a heuristic approach that better accounts for the complexity of cognitive information processing. First, I articulate a blending-based approach to ancient characters. Next, I show the validity of such an approach by modeling the blends for each of Nicodemus’s appearances in John’s gospel, focusing on the novel insights only available through blending. As will become apparent, these blends are interrelated, building upon and challenging one another on the path toward a complete characterization of “Nicodemus” across John’s gospel. I conclude with brief reflections on the future prospects of blending-based character studies.

Atypical action updating in a dynamic environment associated with adolescent obsessive-compulsive disorder

Background Computational research had determined that adults with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) display heightened action updating in response to noise in the environment and neglect meta-cognitive information (such as confidence) when making decisions. These features are proposed to underlie patients compulsions despite knowledge they are irrational. Nonetheless, it is unclear whether this extends to adolescents with OCD as research in this population is lacking. Thus, this study aimed to investigate the interplay between action and confidence in adolescents with OCD. Methods Twenty-seven adolescents with OCD and 46 controls completed a predictive-inference task, designed to probe how subjects actions and confidence ratings fluctuate in response to unexpected outcomes. We investigated how subjects update actions in response to prediction errors (indexing mismatches between expectations and outcomes) and used parameters from a Bayesian model to predict how confidence and action evolve over time. Confidence-action association strength was assessed using a regression model. We also investigated the effects of serotonergic medication. Results Adolescents with OCD showed significantly increased learning rates, particularly following small prediction errors. Results were driven primarily by unmedicated patients. Confidence ratings appeared equivalent between groups, although model-based analysis revealed that patients confidence was less affected by prediction errors compared to controls. Patients and controls did not differ in the extent to which they updated actions and confidence in tandem. Conclusions Adolescents with OCD showed enhanced action adjustments, especially in the face of small prediction errors, consistent with previous research establishing just-right compulsions, enhanced error-related negativity, and greater decision-uncertainty in paediatric-OCD. These tendencies were ameliorated in patients receiving serotonergic medication, emphasising the importance of early intervention in preventing disorder-related cognitive deficits. Confidence ratings were equivalent between young patients and controls, mirroring findings in adults OCD research.

Gibsonian Information: an agent-based paradigm for quantitative information

We propose a new way to quantitatively characterize information: Gibsonian Information (GI). This framework is relevant to both the study of cognitive agents and single cell systems that exhibit cognitive behaviors. GI provides a means to characterize how agents extract information from direct perceptual signals. This differs from existing information theories in two ways. The first involves an emphasis on sensory processing, engagement in collective behaviors, and the dynamic evolution of such interactions. GI is useful for understanding information in terms of agent interactions with naturalistic contexts, and also allows us to distinguish the role of first-order sensory inputs in the context of higher-order representations. This allows us to extend GI to cybernetic and other types of symbolic systems representations. As an alternate way to look at information in nervous systems, GI also emphasizes the role of information content in the relationship between ecology and nervous systems. Along with direct sensory input and simple internal representations, statistical affordances are an important component of transforming environmental signals into GI. Statistical affordances, defined as clustered information that is spatiotemporally dependent perceptual input, facilitates the extraction of GI from the environment. Quantitatively accounting for perceptual information, GI provides a means to measure spatial concentration in addition to being a generalized indicator of nervous system input. To better understand GI as a measurable phenomenon, we characterize three model scenarios: disjoint distributions, contingent action, and coherent movement. All of these cases provide a means to create a differential system between both motion (information) and random noise/stasis (non-information) and between the active sensory channel and information derived from mental representations. By applying this framework to a variety of specific contexts, including a four-channel model of multisensory embodiment, we demonstrate how GI is essential to understanding the full scope of cognitive information processing.

Deconstructing scale-free neuronal avalanches: behavioral transitions and neuronal response

Observations of neurons in a resting brain and neurons in cultures often display spontaneous scale-free collective dynamics in the form of information cascades, also called “neuronal avalanches”. This has motivated the so called critical brain hypothesis which posits that the brain is self-tuned to a critical point or regime, separating exponentially-growing dynamics from quiescent states, to achieve optimality. Yet, how such optimality of information transmission is related to behaviour and whether it persists under behavioural transitions has remained a fundamental knowledge gap. Here, we aim to tackle this challenge by studying behavioural transitions in mice using two-photon calcium imaging of the retrosplenial cortex -- an area of the brain well positioned to integrate sensory, mnemonic, and cognitive information by virtue of its strong connectivity with the hippocampus, medial prefrontal cortex, and primary sensory cortices. Our work shows that the response of the underlying neural population to behavioural transitions can vary significantly between different sub-populations such that one needs to take the structural and functional network properties of these sub-populations into account to understand the properties at the total population level. Specifically, we show that the retrosplenial cortex contains at least one sub-population capable of switching between two different scale-free regimes, indicating an intricate relationship between behaviour and the optimality of neuronal response at the subgroup level. This asks for a potential reinterpretation of the emergence of self-organized criticality in neuronal systems.

Cultural codes of the new reality in the multilingual space and interlingual contacts (through the lens of color term research)

Colors, color terms and color symbolism are determined by a multitude of linguistic and cultural contacts in various spheres of social, political and cultural aspects of life in various geopolitical dimensions. They are of a great interest to scholars studying linguistic processes in the multilingual space. In the recent decades the mental modus operandi has shifted towards the visual aspect, precoding texts into images. This process has had a great influence on interlinguistic contacts; it is represented in the new reality through various semiotic devices, among which are the color components. The research rationale is motivated by the fact that images of total socialization lead to a multidirectional cognition of colors and color code transformation. Researching these processes through the lens of color studies reveals the multitude of ways of linguistic experience objectification and the impact it has on mentality. Due to the relevance of the problem, the authors aim to study the potential of cultural and cognitive information contained by color terms in various languages by addressing cultural codes of the new language reality in the multidimensional linguistic space. Color is an important component of culture and the realization of moral and aesthetic values; it is surrounded by a system of associations created by the objective material world and various cultural factors that are widely represented in the modern linguistic practice, which determines the relevance of comparative studies. This scientific approach facilitates a comprehensive description of connections between colors and tokens in different languages, as well as the practical value of color terms and their multidimensionality.

Reversing anterior insular cortex neuronal hypoexcitability attenuates compulsive behavior in juvenile rats

Development of self-regulatory competencies during adolescence is partially dependent on normative brain maturation. Here we report that juvenile rats as compared to adults exhibit impulsive and compulsive-like behavioral traits, the latter being associated with lower expression of mRNA levels of the immediate early gene zif268 in the anterior insula (AI). This observation suggests that deficits in AI function in juvenile rats could explain their immature pattern of interoceptive cue integration in rational decision-making and compulsive phenotype. In support of this, here we report hypoexcitability of juvenile layer-V pyramidal neurons in the AI, concomitant with reduced glutamatergic synaptic input to these cells. Chemogenetic activation of the AI attenuated the compulsive trait suggesting that delayed maturation of the AI results in suboptimal integration of sensory and cognitive information in adolescents and this contributes to inflexible behaviors in specific conditions of reward availability.