NÉMETH LAB

Deficits in mentalizing and attachment occur in the autism and schizophrenia spectrum, and their extended traits in the general population. Parental attachment and the broader social environment highly influence the development of mentalizing. Given the similarities in the symptomatology and neurodevelopmental correlates of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and schizophrenia (SCH), it is crucial to identify their overlaps and differences to support screening, differential diagnosis, and intervention. (…)

Transfer learning, the reuse of newly acquired knowledge under novel circumstances, is a critical hallmark of human intelligence that has frequently been pitted against the capacities of artificial learning agents. Yet, the computations relevant to transfer learning have been little investigated in humans. The benefit of efficient inductive biases (meta-level constraints that shape learning, often referred as priors in the Bayesian learning approach), has been both theoretically and experimentally established. (…)

Spontaneous reactivation of brain activity from learning to a subsequent off-line period has been implicated as a neural mechanism underlying memory consolidation. However, similarities in brain activity may also emerge as a result of individual, trait-like characteristics. Here, we introduced a novel approach for analyzing continuous EEG data to investigate learning-induced changes as well as trait-like characteristics in brain activity underlying memory consolidation. (…)

Reactive inhibitory control plays an important role in phenotype of different diseases/different phases of a disease. One candidate electrophysiological marker of inhibitory control is frontal alpha asymmetry (FAA). FAA reflects the relative difference in contralateral frontal brain activity. However, the relationship between FAA and potential behavioral/brain activity indices of reactive inhibitory control is not yet clear. We assessed the relationship between resting-state FAA and indicators of reactive inhibitory control. (…)

Similar to addictive substances, addictive behaviours such as gambling and gaming are associated with maladaptive modulation of key brain areas and functional networks implicated in learning and memory. Therefore, this review sought to understand how different learning and memory processes relate to behavioural addictions and to unravel their underlying neural mechanisms. (…)

Gilles de la Tourette syndrome (GTS) is a disorder characterised by motor and vocal tics, which may represent habitual actions as a result of enhanced learning of associations between stimuli and responses (S-R). In this study, we investigated how adults with GTS and healthy controls (HC) learn two types of regularities in a sequence: statistics (non-adjacent probabilities) and rules (predefined order). Participants completed a visuomotor sequence learning task while EEG was recorded. (…)

Humans can extract statistical regularities of the environment to predict upcoming events. Previous research recognized that implicitly acquired statistical knowledge remained persistent and continued to influence behavior even when the regularities were no longer present in the environment. Here, in an fMRI experiment, we investigated how the persistence of statistical knowledge is represented in the brain. (…)

Tourette syndrome (TS) is a childhood-onset neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by repetitive movements and vocalizations called tics, which are linked to alterations in the cortico-basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical (CBGTC) circuits. CBGTC circuits also play a key role in procedural memory, which is a fundamental human ability that enables us to extract repeating patterns from the environment and underlies skill-based and habitual behavior. The present review summarizes findings on procedural memory in TS, with a focus on more recent studies probing the acquisition and consolidation of procedural knowledge in TS. (…)

The ability of the brain to extract patterns from the environment and predict future events, known as statistical learning, has been proposed to interact in a competitive manner with prefrontal lobe related networks and their characteristic cognitive or executive functions. However, it remains unclear whether these cognitive functions also show competitive relationship with implicit statistical learning across individuals and at the level of latent executive function components. In order to address this currently unknown aspect, we investigated, in two independent experiments (N_Study1 = 186, N_Study2 = 157), the relationship between implicit statistical learning, measured by the Alternating Serial Reaction Time task, and executive functions, measured by multiple neuropsychological tests. (…)

History illustrates that economic crises and other sociopolitical threats often lead to a rise of polarization and radicalism, whereby people become more susceptible to intolerant political messages, including propaganda and ideological rhetoric. Political science, sociology, economics, and psychology have explored many dimensions of this phenomenon, yet a critical piece of the puzzle is still missing: what cognitive and neural mechanisms in the brain mediate between these threats and responsiveness to political messages? To answer this question, here, we present a theory that combines cognitive neuroscience theories, namely stress-induced memory shift and competitive cognitive processes, with political science.(…)