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Clinical and Experimental

Neuropsychology Newsletter

January 2020 Newsletter from the Interuniversity Master’s in Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology

IN THIS ISSUE

Editorial Welcome to IMCEN’s Second Semester

Óscar F. Gonçalves, Ph.D, Program Director

IMCEN’s second semester is about starting (February 3rd). After a first semester of training in experimental neuropsychology (Courses: Research Methods in Neuropsychology; Functional Neuroanatomy; Cognitive Emotional and Social Neuroscience; Experimental Neuropsychology Rotation - Major) IMCEN students are now ready to venture into the clinical realm with four new challenging courses (Clinical Neuropsychology Skills; Neuropsychological Assessment; Neuropsychological and Psychopathological Syndromes; Neuropsychological Rehabilitation) along with continuing their research training, this time with a Minor Experimental Psychology Rotation, in a distinct campus from their affiliation.

Again, we will be combining different teaching strategies: distance learning methods - lectures taught at one campus and provided in real time to the other two campi (Neuropsychological and Psychopathological Syndromes; Neuropsychological Rehabilitation); intensive workshops - joint workshops provided simultaneously to all students alternating at different campi (Clinical Neuropsychology Skills); hybrid model - weekly online sessions in real time will be followed up by practical activities in each of the campi (Neuropsychological Assessment); and, finally intensive research training (Experimental Neuropsychology Rotation – Minor). Detailed information may me found on the courses’ syllabi available at https://www.psi.uminho.pt/en/education/imcen/Pages/training-program.aspx

We believe this is going to be, again, an exciting semester and I wish you all the best of success.

Experimental Neuropsychology Rotation – Minor

Neuropsych. and Psychopathology

Syndromes

Neuropsycho. Assessment

Neuropsych.

Rehabilitation

Clinical Neuropsych.

Skills

Editorial Page 1 Research Rotation Matches Page 2 Faculty Publication Highlights Page 3 IMCEN Program Highlights Page 4 Just Published - Publications from IMCEN Faculty. Page 5 IMCEN December/January Lectures & Conferences. Page 6 IMCEN Erasmus + Page 7/8

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INCEN

Research Rotation Matches The Experimental Neuropsychology Rotation – Major is the core course during the first semester of the IMCEN. We match all students with an IMCEN research mentor and develop their skills in a bottom-up strategy having hands-on experience with distinct research methods and techniques. In this newsletter we will keep sharing with our readers the research matches for the first semester

And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” - Friedrich Nietzsche. Music is an everyday part of our lives. It could be a song we listen to on the radio, a marketing campaign conditioning a song to their product or, more commonly, an artist that we find enjoyable to listen to. It is not surprising to notice that music is often viewed as an expression of emotions, as such, it is easy to find a connection between emotion and music.

Ricardo Francisco has had the privilege to venture alongside Inês Martins on her Master Thesis (under the supervision of Professor Ana Pinheiro) regarding the benefits of musical training in the recognition of emotions. The project aims to find neuronal correlates of emotional recognition in musicians using the advantageous temporal resolution of the EEG (Eletrocenfalography). This is the first research project looking to differentiate subgroups of musicians (Singers vs. Instrumentalists) in their capacity for perceiving emotional stimuli of non-verbal vocalizations and instrumental sounds. Having worked directly on the laboratory, Ricardo has had the opportunity to get familiarized with the practical and theoretical side of the EEG. A few examples of the developed skills include, the data collection process in laboratory, data analyses with the proper software, literature review and data organization in excel, preparation of behavioral tasks on Qualtrics, amongst others. Ricardo aims to continue gathering experience in this project and to maintain a healthy relationship with the researchers involved in the laboratory in order to help put forward high quality investigational projects.

Catarina Carvalho Senra is working at the Psychological Neuroscience Lab at the University of Minho for her Major Lab rotation under supervision of PhD Olivia Morgan Lapenta. She is involved in a project that aims to understand how the auditory stimuli can impact the recognition of human actions and what are the electrophysiological mechanisms underlying such effect. This study emerges from the idea that relevant information about behavior is transmitted to us by many sensory modalities, and our perception is shaped by the co-occurrence of these multiple sensory events. In order to test how semantically congruent and incongruent audiovisual stimuli are integrated and shape action perception in the presence of visual noise, point-light displays of human actions (Figure 1-A) and scrambled moving dots (Figure 1-B) will be presented masked by random moving dots, paired with congruent, incongruent and white noise sounds. Catarina and Olivia expect that the congruent/incongruent auditory stimuli will improve/compromise action recognition and that non-biological movements might be perceived as human actions when paired with biological sounds. The experimental will also account with electrophysiological recording, aiming to identify the event-related potentials and brain oscillations underlying audio-visuo-motor integration and action perception.

This investigation is in an initial stage of review literature and the methods design, these were the major tasks that Catarina had during this semester. Also, they are working on the ethics submission of the project, stimuli editing and programming of the task.

This lab rotation concedes the amazing experience to Catarina of having an overview of all of the stages that compose the elaboration and execution of a research project.

Ricardo Francisco IMCEN Student

Ana Pinheiro, PhD IMCEN Mentor

Catarina Senra

IMCEN Student

Olivia Lapenta IMCEN Mentor

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Faculty Publication

Highlights

Adriana Sampaio, MD, PhD, is the lab director of the Psychological Neuroscience Lab (https://psychologicalneurosciencelab.weebly.com) in the Department of Basic Psychology, School of Psychology, University of Minho, Portugal. She has graduation and PhD in Psychology and is MD by Instituto Ciências Biomédicas Abel Salazar, University of Porto. Her main research is in the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience, namely in the structural and neurofunctional and genetic basis of (ab)normal cognitive and emotional processes. In particular, using cutting edge technologies that combine morphometric with functional neuroimaging measures, her work aims to map specific neurodevelopmental processes associated with normal higher cognitive function and their age-related trajectories, by looking at the dynamic interplay between genetic, biological, and environmental factors that shape brain development. As part of her work, Adriana Sampaio has published more than eighty articles in ISI journals, collaborating with several research teams (Spain, France, United Kingdom, Brazil and USA). She is the principal investigator of several projects funded by FCT and Fundação Bial. She was also awarded for her work in the area of research in Psychology.

Article: Helga, M., Lisboa, I., Gonçalves, O.F., Sampaio, A. (2019). Brain mechanisms for processing discriminative and affective touch in 7-month-old infants. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. 35:20-27. doi: 10.1016/j.dcn.2017.10.008. In this article, published in February 2019, in the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience by Adriana Sampaio that summarizes one of the PhD work in Basic Psychology by Helga Miguel in co-authorship with Isabel Lisboa and Óscar Gonçalves. This article describes a study that sought to assess the neural response to affective and discriminatory touch in 7-month-old infants. Skin is the largest human body sensory system, while touch is the first sensory system to develop in utero (Field, 2001; Montagu, 1986). These two systems interact in major development processes, and skin touch represents the major communication channel between a mother and her newborn (Barnett, 2005; Field, 2001, 2010), playing a core role in attachment processes and socio-emotional development (Hertenstein et al., 2006). To date, research on touch that a specific group of tactile fibers (CT fibers) is responsible for mediating the affective-motivational component of touch, however, its underlying brain mechanisms are still poorly understood during the first year of life. This study used fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy) to examine both affective and discriminative touch in 7- month-old infants (n=35). Experimental protocol consisted in providing blocks of affective stimuli, discriminative affective and rest in a counterbalanced order. Brain activation (oxy-hemoglobin and deoxy-hemoglobin levels) in the somatosensory and temporal regions was registered during administration of the stimuli. There was an increase in oxy-hemoglobin and decrease in deoxyhemoglobin only in the somatosensory region in response to both affective, discriminative touch. No other activations were found. Seven-month-old infants’ brain activation in the somatosensory cortex was similar for both discriminative and affective touch, but the stimuli did not elicit any activation in the temporal region/ pSTS. However, in in the longitudinal follow-up of this group at 12 months of age, we examined the developmental trajectory of the brain responses to affective and discriminative touch by longitudinally following infants from seven to 12 months of age (Miguel,

H., Gonçalves, O., Cruz, S. & Sampaio, A. (2019). Infant brain response to affective and discriminative touch: A longitudinal study using fNIRS. (2018) Social Neurscience, DOI: 10.1080/17470919.2018.1536000). The experimental protocol and ROIs were the same described above. This study showed evidence of a developmental trajectory for distinct aspects of touch brain processing at 7 and 12 months-age in terms of its neural mechanism. At 12 months of age, infants presented a significant increase in hemodynamic activity in channels placed over the temporal region for affective touch, compared to seven-month-olds. Moreover, we also found that a significant hemodynamic response increase in HbO2 to affective touch was observed in the STS for infants with less aversive behavioral responses to tactile stimuli. The findings suggest that brain activity in the STS for affective touch might be related to individual differences in the affective reaction toward touch (Miguel, H., Gonçalves, O., Cruz, S. & Sampaio, A. (2019). Behavioral response to tactile stimuli relates to brain response to affective touch in 12-month-old infants. Developmental Psychobiology, 12. doi: 10.1002/dev.21891). These studies contribute to a better understanding of how affective touch is associated with social-emotional development in infancy.

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IMCEN Program Highlights Neuropsychological Assessment

Neuropsychological Assessment is a core course of the IMCEN’s second semester. Mário R. Simões is the coordinator and presents here the main features of the course. Adriana Sampaio, Ana Pinheiro and Sandra Freitas are the other course instructors.

How would you briefly describe this course? Tell us more about how the course will be run. The course comprises of classroom held at the Faculty of Psychology (Coimbra University) and by videoconference to the other students from Minho and Lisbon Campi and practical workshops at the three Campi. The classes include a combination of [1] oral presentations of theoretical component; [2] analysis and discussion of test protocols including issues like administration, scoring and interpretation scores from several essentials tests and other instruments that are required in the context of neuropsychological assessment; [3] training core knowledge through readings of book chapters and scientific articles concerning theoretical foundations and published portuguese research with neuropsychological tests.

More specifically, the course will address topics that go from intelligence, premorbid intelligence and cognitive reserve evaluation to the main neurocognitive domains like memory, attention, executive functions and their corresponding tests. Topics concerning psychometric issues, assessment techniques like interviews and observation, cognitive screening tests, performance validity tests and neuropsychological reports are also referred.

Why are these aspects important to IMCEN students and to Neuropsychologist in general?

The students will bring that knowledge to a more applied context. In this course, they will develop skills that are at the core of neuropsychological assessment: the administration and scoring several essential instruments/tests.

What are the expected learning outcomes of this course? We expect that students will know the main neuropsychological tests, their use in the framework of neuropsychological assessment and the neuropsychological report and also that they will develop skills and competences to plan and conduct neuropsychological assessment.

IMCEN Courses for the second semester

Experimental Neuropsychology Rotation – Minor

Neuropsych. and

Psychopathology Syndromes

Neuropsycho. Assessment

Neuropsych.

Rehabilitation

Clinical Neuropsych.

Skills

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Just Published January 2020 - Publications from IMCEN Faculty

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31954412

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31734443

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31298419

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31525557

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IMCEN December/January Lectures & Conferences

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IMCEN Erasmus International Mobility Program +

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