Agustin Ibanez

Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez · Latin American Brain Health Institute (BrainLat)

From the robust to the nonreplicable, from the trivial to the groundbreaking, virtually all findings in cognitive neuroscience stem from the same approach: divide and conquer. Indeed, the field’s ethos has long been to decompose mental phenomena into a series of separate mechanisms which can be individually operationalized. Imagine we want to explo...

The study of moral emotions (i.e., Schadenfreude and envy) is critical to understand the ecological complexity of everyday interactions between cognitive, affective, and social cognition processes. Most previous studies in this area have used correlational imaging techniques and framed Schadenfreude and envy as unified and monolithic emotional doma...

As shown by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, terrorism is one of the most pernicious threats to contemporary societies. In addition to obliterating the freedom and physical integrity of victims, terrorist practices can destabilize governments, undermine civil harmony and threaten economic development1. This is tr...

View largeDownload slide Social bargaining requires the ability to integrate one’s own preferences with inferences about another’s choices. Melloni et al . investigate the structural correlates, ongoing brain dynamics, and fMRI networks of social negotiation in individuals with neurodegeneration or stroke. A successful self-other integration strat...

View largeDownload slide Central to moral cognition is the detection of intentional harm. Using direct electrophysiological recordings in human subjects, Hesse et al. show that scenes of intentional harm induce early activation of the amygdala. This activation predicts intention attribution and engages a frontotemporal network, supporting the ‘man...

Video games are a valuable tool for studying the effects of training and neural plasticity on the brain. However, the underlaying mechanisms related to plasticity-induced brain structural changes and their impact in brain dynamics are unknown. Here, we used a semi-empirical whole-brain model to study structural neural plasticity mechanisms linked t...

Latin American populations may present patterns of sociodemographic, ethnic and cultural diversity that can defy current universal models of healthy aging. The potential combination of risk factors that influence aging across populations in Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries is unknown. Compared to other regions where classical factors su...

Social adaptation arises from the interaction between the individual and the social environment. However, little empirical evidence exists regarding the relationship between social contact and social adaptation. We propose that loneliness and social networks are key factors explaining social adaptation. Sixty-four healthy subjects with no history o...

Background: People with high levels of neuroticism are greater users of health services. Similarly, people with dementia have a higher risk of hospitalization and medical visits. As a result, dementia and a high level of neuroticism increase healthcare use (HCU). However, how these joint factors impact the HCU at the population level is unknown. S...

How do socioeconomic disparities shape brain health and disease? Ibáñez et al. discuss the need for further research into how wealth and socioeconomic status affect biological models of dementia, highlighting the biological ripple effects of socioeconomic inequalities and the importance of globally inclusive brain health research.

This Comment highlights the intertwined nature of mental and brain health and disease. Common genetic, environmental and lifestyle factors contribute to psychiatric and neurological disorders, which partially share neurocognitive and pathophysiological mechanisms. A call for a more dimensional, interdisciplinary approach can accelerate the developm...

Introduction: Harmonization protocols that address batch effects and cross-site methodological differences in multi-center studies are critical for strengthening electroencephalography (EEG) signatures of functional connectivity (FC) as potential dementia biomarkers. Methods: We implemented an automatic processing pipeline incorporating electrod...

Introduction: Subjective Cognitive Decline (SCD) refers to a self-perceived experience of decreased cognitive function without objective signs of cognitive impairment in neuropsychological tests or daily living activities. Despite the abundance of instruments addressing SCD, there is no consensus on the methods to be used. Our study is founded on...

Unlike classical artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI has the potential to transform scientists into intellectual cyborgs. Leveraging embodied cognition and extended mind theories can help us understand this scientific revolution. Despite ethical concerns, generative AI can enhance research efficiency and accessibility. However, this require...

Background White matter hyperintensities (WMH) are frequently observed on MRI scans of older people. Usually interpreted as a sign of cerebrovascular disease (CVD), they are also associated with increased risk of cognitive impairment and dementia. While WMH and CVD are highly prevalent in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), this has been less studied in beha...

Background The aging population and the prevalence of dementia are rapidly growing in Latin America. People with dementia are underdiagnosed and not well characterized in this region. The scenario is complicated by limited options for culturally proper testing and Latinos' socio‐biological and phenotypic diversity, which affect dementia presentatio...

Background There is a lack of instruments designed to capture exposures across various social and determinants of health throughout the lifespan in persons with late‐life neurodegenerative disorders. Responding to this need, we created and piloted the administration of the MAC‐RedLat Social Determinants of Health Questionnaire. Method The question...

Introduction Alzheimer’s disease (AD) causes disruptions in brain functions, which can be tracked by proper analysis of electroencephalography (EEG). Current efforts to understand the impact of AD on brain activity have leveraged the development of high-density EEG. Alternatively, we propose that AD can be discriminated from healthy controls (HC) b...

Prosocial values play a critical role in promoting care and concern for the well-being of others and prioritizing the common good of society. Evidence from population-based reports, cognitive neuroscience, and clinical studies suggests that these values depend on social cognition processes, such as empathy, deontological moral cognition, moral emot...

Aging may diminish social cognition, which is crucial for interaction with others, and significant changes in this capacity can indicate pathological processes like dementia. However, the extent to which non-specific factors explain variability in social cognition performance, especially among older adults and in global settings, remains unknown. A...

Objective: Cognitive assessment able to detect impairments in the early neuropathological stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is urgently needed. The visual short-term memory binding task (VSTMBT) and the Free and Cued Selective Reminding Test (FCSRT) have been recommended by the neurodegenerative disease working group as promising tests to aid in...

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all domains of human life, including the economic and social fabric of societies. One of the central strategies for managing public health throughout the pandemic has been through persuasive messaging and collective behaviour change. To help scholars better understand the social and moral psychology behind public...

Gender inequality across the world has been associated with a higher risk to mental health problems and lower academic achievement in women compared to men. We also know that the brain is shaped by nurturing and adverse socio-environmental experiences. Therefore, unequal exposure to harsher conditions for women compared to men in gender-unequal cou...

Brain states are frequently represented using a unidimensional scale measuring the richness of subjective experience (level of consciousness). This description assumes a mapping between the high-dimensional space of whole-brain configurations and the trajectories of brain states associated with changes in consciousness, yet this mapping and its pro...

Anticipating social stress evokes strong reactions in the organism, including interoceptive modulations. However, evidence for this claim comes from behavioral studies, often with inconsistent results, and relates almost solely to the reactive and recovery phase of social stress exposure. Here, we adopted an allostatic-interoceptive predictive codi...

Although social functioning relies on working memory, whether a social-specific mechanism exists remains unclear. This undermines the characterization of neurodegenerative conditions with both working memory and social deficits. We assessed working memory domain-specificity across behavioral, electrophysiological, and neuroimaging dimensions in 245...

Objectives: To examine the theoretical substitutions of screen exposure, non-screen sitting time, moderate and vigorous physical activity with depressive and anxiety symptoms in South American adults during the COVID-19 pandemic. Design: A cross-sectional study during the first months of the COVID-19 pandemic with data from 1981 adults from Chil...

The treatment of neurodegenerative diseases is hindered by lack of interventions capable of steering multimodal whole-brain dynamics towards patterns indicative of preserved brain health. To address this problem, we combined deep learning with a model capable of reproducing whole-brain functional connectivity in patients diagnosed with Alzheimer's...

Background: Dementia's diagnostic protocols are mostly based on standardised neuroimaging data collected in the Global North from homogeneous samples. In other non-stereotypical samples (participants with diverse admixture, genetics, demographics, MRI signals, or cultural origins), classifications of disease are difficult due to demographic and re...

Usually considered as internal representations of self-concepts, the individual-self and the collective-self have been primarily studied in social and personality psychology while the experimental and theoretical advances of the cognitive and neurophysiological mechanisms of these self-representations are poorly understood. Two competing hypotheses...

Introduction Early detection of depression is a cost-effective way to prevent adverse outcomes on brain physiology, cognition, and health. Here we propose that loneliness and social adaptation are key factors that can anticipate depressive symptoms. Methods We analyzed data from two separate samples to evaluate the associations between loneliness,...

Vigilance is the challenging ability to maintain attention during long periods. When performing prolonged tasks, vigilance failures are often observed, reflecting a decrease in performance. Previous research has shown that changes in oscillatory rhythms are associated with states of vigilance loss. The present study aimed to investigate whether cha...

Disease-specific mechanisms underlying emotion recognition difficulties in behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD), Alzheimer's disease (AD), and Parkinson's disease (PD) are unknown. Interoceptive accuracy, accurately detecting internal cues (e.g., one's heart beating), and cognitive abilities are candidate mechanisms underlying emotio...

Global initiatives call for further understanding of the impact of inequity on aging across underserved populations. Previous research in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) presents limitations in assessing combined sources of inequity and outcomes (i.e., cognition and functionality). In this study, we assessed how social determinants of heal...

Nowadays, there is a broad range of methods for detecting and evaluating executive dysfunction ranging from clinical interview to neuropsychological evaluation. Nevertheless, a critical issue of these assessments is the lack of correspondence of the neuropsychological test's results with real-world functioning. This paper proposes serious games as...

Attention is regulated by three independent but interacting networks, that is, alerting, comprising phasic alertness and vigilance, orienting, and executive control. Previous studies analyzing event-related potentials (ERPs) associated with attentional networks have focused on phasic alertness, orienting, and executive control, without an independe...

Background The triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cell 2 (TREM2) is a major regulator of neuroinflammatory processes in neurodegeneration. To date, the p.H157Y variant of TREM2 has been reported only in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Here, we report three patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD) from three unrelated families with heter...

Multicentric initiatives based on high-density electroencephalography (hd-EEG) are urgently needed for classification and characterization of diseases subtypes in diverse and low-resource settings. These initiatives are, however, not without challenges, with sources of variability arising from differing data acquisition and harmonization methods, m...

Healthy brain dynamics can be understood as the emergence of a complex system far from thermodynamic equilibrium. Brain dynamics are temporally irreversible and thus establish a preferred direction in time (i.e., arrow of time). However, little is known about how the time-reversal symmetry of spontaneous brain activity is affected by Alzheimer's di...

Brain functional connectivity in dementia has been assessed with dissimilar EEG connectivity metrics and estimation procedures, thereby increasing results' heterogeneity. In this scenario, joint analyses integrating information from different metrics may allow for a more comprehensive characterization of brain functional interactions in different d...

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) present difficulties in integrating mental state information in complex moral tasks. Yet, ASD research has not examined whether this process is influenced by emotions, let alone while capturing its neural bases. We investigated how language-induced emotions modulate intent-based moral judgment in ASD....

Background: Although social cognition is compromised in patients with neurodegenerative disorders such as behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and Alzheimer's disease (AD), research on moral emotions and their neural correlates in these populations is scarce. No previous study has explored the utility of moral emotions, compared to a...

In this chapter, we describe a step-by-step implementation of an automated anatomical MRI feature extractor based on artificial intelligence machine learning to for classification. We applied the DenseNet – a state-of-the-art convolutional neural network producing more robust results than previous deep learning network architectures – to data from...

Social emotions are critical to successfully navigate in a complex social world because they promote self-regulation of behavior. Difficulties in social behavior are at the core of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, social emotions and their neural correlates have been scarcely investigated in this population. In particular, the experience of...

Background Global brain health initiatives call for improving methods for the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in underrepresented populations. However, diagnostic procedures in upper-middle-income countries (UMICs) and lower-middle income countries (LMICs), such as Latin American countries (LAC), face multipl...

Neurocognitive research on social concepts underscores their reliance on fronto-temporo-limbic regions mediating broad socio-cognitive skills. Yet, the field has neglected another structure increasingly implicated in social cognition: the cerebellum. The present exploratory study examines this link combining a novel naturalistic text paradigm, a re...

The value of Electroencephalography (EEG) to unveil pathophysiological signatures in neurodegenerative diseases that cause dementia has been recently highlighted. To grant EEG tools the necessary validity, reliability, and scalability to support the diagnosis of dementia globally, efforts will need to integrate knowledge developed by EEG labs acros...

Recent allostatic‐interoceptive predictive coding theories propose that efficient regulation of the internal milieu is necessary to correctly anticipate the needs required to overcome environmental challenges before they arise. These theories are based on neurocognitive models of allostatic load and interoceptive processes, dimensions convergently...

White matter hyperintensities (WMH) are frequently observed on MRI scans of older people. Usually interpreted as a sign of cerebrovascular disease (CVD), they are also associated with increased risk of cognitive impairment and dementia. While WMH and CVD are highly prevalent in Alzheimer's disease (AD), this has been less studied in behavioral vari...

Brain functional connectivity analyses derived from electroencephalography (EEG) provides relevant information for classification of dementia subtypes. The predictive strength of classification tools can be benefit from integrative, multi‐feature analysis of EEG which result in composite metric of functional connectivity. Additionally, significant...

Large variability exists across brain regions in health and disease, considering their cellular and molecular composition, connectivity and function. Large-scale whole-brain models comprising coupled brain regions provide insights into the underlying dynamics that shape complex patterns of spontaneous brain activity. In particular, biophysically gr...

Background Behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) has been related to different genetic factors. Identifying multimodal phenotypic heterogeneity triggered by various genetic influences is critical for improving diagnosis, prognosis, and treatments. However, the specific impact of different genetic levels (mutations vs. risk variants vs....

Brain functional networks have been traditionally studied considering only interactions between pairs of regions, neglecting the richer information encoded in higher orders of interactions. In consequence, most of the connectivity studies in neurodegeneration and dementia use standard pairwise metrics. Here, we developed a genuine high-order functi...

Socioeconomic status (SES) negatively impacts cognitive and executive functioning in older adults, yet its effects on socioemotional abilities have not been studied in this population. Also, evidence on neurocognitive processes associated with aging primary comes from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) populations, hind...

Dementia worldwide is one of the most important causes of disability in the elderly and the most rapidly growing cause of death in the last 20 years in Chile. Cognitive complaint is considered a predictor for cognitive and functional decline (FD), incident mild cognitive impairment, and incident dementia. The GERO cohort aims to determine multidime...

This handbook introduces neurosemiotics, a pluralistic framework to reconsider semiosis as an emergent phenomenon at the interface of biology and culture. Across individual and interpersonal settings, meaning is influenced by external and internal processes bridging phenomenological and biological dimensions. Yet, each of these dyads has been segr...

Background Mild cognitive impairment often precedes dementia. The purpose of this analysis was to estimate the population attributable fraction for physical activity in Colombia, which is the reduction in cases that would occur if all participants were physically active. Methods The sample included 20,174 men and women aged 70.04 ± 7.68 years (mea...

Democracies are increasingly under siege. Beyond direct external (e.g., warfare) and internal (e.g., populism, extremism) threats to democratic nations, multiple democracy-weakening factors are converging in our modern world. Brain health challenges, including mental, neurologic, and substance use disorders, social determinants of health, long COVI...

This study sought to evaluate the roles of and interactions between cognitive processes that have been shown to exhibit impact from socioeconomic status (SES) and living conditions in predicting social adaptation (SA) in a population of adults living in socially vulnerable conditions. Participants included 226 people between the ages of 18 and 60 w...

Adverse environments cause well-established detrimental effects on subjects living there. They ultimately increase the likelihood of developing negative cognitive, emotional, and social outcomes. However, these adverse effects are not ubiquitous across all people. While some individuals develop maladaptive behavior and seem unable to cope with thes...

Characterizing a particular neurodegenerative condition against others possible diseases remains a challenge along clinical, biomarker, and neuroscientific levels. This is the particular case of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) variants, where their specific characterization requires high levels of expertise and multidisciplinary teams to subtlety dis...

Background and objective More research is required to understand associations of body mass index (BMI) and sarcopenia with cognition, especially in Latin America. The objective of this study was to investigate associations of BMI and sarcopenia with mild cognitive impairment in Colombia. Design, setting, and participants Data were from the Nationa...

Brain states are frequently represented using a unidimensional scale measuring the richness of subjective experience (level of consciousness). This description assumes a mapping between the high-dimensional space of whole-brain configurations and the trajectories of brain states associated with changes in consciousness, yet this mapping and its pro...