Artur Marchewka

Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology | NENCKI · Laboratory of Brain Imaging (LOBI)

The principles that guide large-scale cortical reorganization remain unclear. In the blind, several visual regions preserve their task specificity; ventral visual areas, for example, become engaged in auditory and tactile object-recognition tasks. It remains open whether task-specific reorganization is unique to the visual cortex or, alternatively,...

Selecting appropriate stimuli to induce emotional states is essential in affective research. Only a few standardized affective stimulus databases have been created for auditory, language, and visual materials. Numerous studies have extensively employed these databases using both behavioral and neuroimaging methods. However, some limitations of the...

Strong evidence suggests that memory for emotional information is much better than for neutral one. Thus, one may expect that forgetting of emotional information is difficult and requires considerable effort. The aim of this item-method directed forgetting functional magnetic resonance imaging study was to investigate this hypothesis both at behavi...

Multi-centre data repositories like the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) offer a unique research platform, but pose questions concerning comparability of results when using a range of imaging protocols and data processing algorithms. The variability is mainly due to the non-quantitative character of the widely used structural T1-w...

Musical training has been linked to enhanced interoceptive abilities and increased resting-state (RS) functional connectivity (FC) within the interoceptive brain network. We aimed to replicate and extend these findings with a unique cross-sectional and longitudinal study design. Professional musicians and matched individuals with no prior musical e...

Music is a universal human phenomenon, and can be studied for itself or as a window into the understanding of the brain. Few neuroimaging studies investigate actual playing in the MRI scanner, likely because of the lack of available experimental hardware and analysis tools. Here, we offer an innovative paradigm that addresses this issue in neuromus...

Climate change is widely recognized as an urgent issue, and the number of people concerned about it is increasing. While emotions are among the strongest predictors of behaviour change in the face of climate change, researchers have only recently begun to investigate this topic experimentally. This may be due to the lack of standardised, validated...

Prediction error (PE) is the mismatch between a prior expectation and reality, and it lies at the core of associative learning about aversive and appetitive stimuli. Human studies on fear learning have linked the amygdala to aversive PEs. In contrast, the relationship between the amygdala and PE in appetitive settings and stimuli unlike those that...

The Triple-Code Model stipulates that numerical information from different formats and modalities converges on a common magnitude representation in the Intraparietal Sulcus (IPS). To what extent the representations of all numerosity forms overlap remains unsolved. It has been postulated that the representation of symbolic numerosities (for example,...

Musical training has been linked to enhanced interoceptive abilities and increased resting-state (RS) functional connectivity (FC) within the interoceptive brain network. We aimed to replicate and extend these findings with a unique cross-sectional and longitudinal study design. Professional musicians and matched individuals with no prior musical e...

Alexithymia, difficulty in recognizing and naming emotions, is common among people who abuse alcohol. Currently, alexithymia is usually measured with questionnaire tools, in which the respondents themselves declare to what extent speaking about or naming emotions causes them difficulties in everyday life. However, there is growing evidence that peo...

Learning to play the piano is a complex task, integrating multiple sensory modalities and higher-order cognitive functions. With increasing expertise, the task should become easier as learners’ focus shifts away from basic technique while playing. We hypothesise this shift reflects a functional reorganisation observable via neuroimaging methods in...

Bodily sensations are one of the major building blocks of emotional experience. However, people differ in their ability to recognise and name their emotions, especially those in response to complex phenomena such as climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, we investigated whether the bodily sensation maps (BSMs) approach can be employed...

Our past experiences are stored in autobiographical memory (AM). Previous studies showed multiple brain regions involved in AM recall in healthy populations, including limbic and occipital cortices. AM recall may be disturbed in clinical disorders, such as depression (MDD) or borderline personality disorder (BPD) in which self-processing is already...

It is now widely accepted that we are in a climate emergency, and the number of people who are concerned about this problem is growing. Yet, qualitative, in-depth studies to investigate the emotional response to climate change were conducted either in high-income, western countries, or in low-income countries particularly vulnerable to climate chan...

Reporting results from a qualitative study with 40 polish people concerned about climate change.

There is a growing research interest in the affective aspects of climate change and their links with pro-climate engagement as well as with health and wellbeing. Yet, psychometrically valid instruments assessing the wide panorama of climate change emotions are limited. Here, we report on the development and validation of the Inventory of Climate Em...

Background: Alexithymia, difficulty in recognizing and naming emotions, is common among people who abuse alcohol. Currently, alexithymia is usually measured with questionnaire tools, in which the respondents themselves declare to what extent speaking about/naming emotions causes them difficulties in everyday life. However, there is growing evidence...

Humans often benefit from social cues when learning about the world. For instance, learning about threats from others can save the individual from dangerous first-hand experiences. Familiarity is believed to increase the effectiveness of social learning, but it is not clear whether it plays a role in learning about threats. Using functional magneti...

The piano is a popular instrument in musical practice, but only a few MRI studies investigate the neuronal mechanisms underlying playing it. MRI-compatible piano requires adaptations for size and materials used. Moreover, study designs often sacrifice ecological validity for experimental controllabillity. We present open-source, proof-of-concept ex...

In this article we present extended results obtained on the multidomain dataset of Polish text reviews collected within the Sentimenti project. We present preliminary results of classification models trained and tested on 7,000 texts annotated by over 20,000 individuals using valence, arousal, and eight basic emotions from Plutchik’s model. Additio...

Previous behavioural and neuroimaging studies have consistently reported that memory is enhanced for associations congruent or incongruent with the structure of prior knowledge, termed as schemas. However, it remains unclear if similar effects arise with emotion-related associations, and whether they depend on the type of emotions. Here, we address...

Studies within the last decade have reported neural and behavioral differences in cognitive control between men with the pedophilic disorder who commit (CSO+) and do not commit (CSO-) child sexual abuse. Prior studies reported a higher number of errors in Go/Nogo task and lower activity of the prefrontal cortex in NoGo trials, in CSO + compared wit...

Bodily sensations are one of the major building blocks of emotional experience. However, people differ in their ability to recognise and name their emotions, especially those in response to complex phenomena such as climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, we investigated whether the bodily sensation maps (BSMs) approach can be employed...

Cognitive-attentional syndrome (CAS) is in the self-regulatory executive function model a set of cognitive and behavioural strategies aimed at regulating cognition and emotion originating from maladaptive metacognitive beliefs. Investigating the brain structure of people with high levels of CAS enables a better understanding of the syndrome and bri...

Previous behavioural and neuroimaging studies have consistently reported that our memory is enhanced for associations congruent or incongruent with the structure of our prior knowledge, termed as schemas. However, it remains unclear if similar effects exist if encoded associations are emotional. Do emotional schemas also facilitate learning and sub...

Current models of episodic memory posit that retrieval involves the reenactment of encoding processes. Recent evidence has shown that this reinstatement process – indexed by subsequent encoding-retrieval similarity of brain activity patterns - is related to the activity in the hippocampus during encoding. However, we tend to re-experience emotional...

Emotion lexicons are useful in research across various disciplines, but the availability of such resources remains limited for most languages. While existing emotion lexicons typically comprise words, it is a particular meaning of a word (rather than the word itself) that conveys emotion. To mitigate this issue, we present the Emotion Meanings data...

Musicians use auditory feedback, e.g. sound pitch, to monitor their performance for errors and facilitate learning. The aim of this project is to investigate the processing of errors, understood as a mismatch between the expected and perceived auditory feedback, in musicians. For this purpose, we developed a highly ecological, MRI-compatible keyboa...

It has been proposed that the auditory cortex in the deaf humans might undergo task-specific reorganization. However, evidence remains scarce as previous experiments used only two very specific tasks (temporal processing and face perception) in visual modality. Here, congenitally deaf/hard of hearing and hearing women and men were enrolled in an fM...

Humans often benefit from social cues when learning about the world. For instance, learning about threats from others can save the individual from dangerous first-hand experiences. Familiarity is believed to increase the effectiveness of social learning, but it is not clear whether it plays a role in learning about threats. Using functional magneti...

he white matter (WM) architecture of the human brain changes in response to training, though fine-grained temporal characteristics of training-induced white matter plasticity remain unexplored. We investigated white matter microstructural changes using diffusion tensor imaging at 5 different time points in 26 sighted female adults during 8-months t...

Learning to play a musical instrument is a complex task that integrates multiple sensory modalities and higher-order cognitive functions. Therefore, musical training is considered a useful framework for the research of training-induced plasticity. Cross-sectional studies identified structural and functional differences between the brains of musicia...

Early sensory deprivation, such as deafness, shapes brain development in multiple ways. Deprived auditory areas become engaged in the processing of stimuli from the remaining modalities and in high-level cognitive tasks. Yet, structural and functional changes were also observed in non-deprived brain areas, which may suggest the whole-brain network...

It is unclear why some people learn faster than others. We performed two independent studies in which we investigated the neural basis of real-time strategy (RTS) gaming and neural predictors of RTS game skill acquisition. In the first (cross-sectional) study, we found that experts in the RTS game StarCraft® II (SC2) had a larger lenticular nucleus...

All writing systems represent units of spoken language. Studies on the neural correlates of reading in different languages show that this skill relies on access to brain areas dedicated to speech processing. Speech-reading convergence onto a common perisylvian network is therefore considered universal among different writing systems. Using fMRI, we...

Here we examine how exposure to blue (peaking at λ=470 nm), green (peaking at λ=505 nm) and red (peaking at λ=630 nm) light affects subsequent working memory performance measured with visual N-back tasks and associated functional brain responses in participants with extreme morning and extreme evening chronotype. We used within-subjects experimenta...

Introduction The pedophilic disorder is characterized by a sexual preference for children and leads to child sexual abuse (CSA) in half of the patients. Studies showed that pedophiles with a history of CSA (CSA+) are inferior, in inhibitory control, to those without (CSA-). Objectives Inhibitory control may be influenced by negative affectivity, w...

Learning to play a musical instrument is a complex task that integrates multiple sensory modalities and higher-order cognitive functions. Therefore, musical training is considered a useful framework for the research on training-induced neuroplasticity. However, the classical nature-or-nurture question remains, whether the differences observed betwe...

A growing body of empirical evidence supports the notion of diverse neurobiological processes underlying learning-induced plasticity changes in the human brain. There are still open questions about how brain plasticity depends on cognitive task complexity, how it supports interactions between brain systems and with what temporal and spatial traject...

Background and aims: Even though the Compulsive Sexual Behavior Disorder (CSBD) was added to the ICD-11 under the impulse control category in 2019, its neural mechanisms are still debated. Researchers have noted its similarity both to addiction and to Obssesive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). The aim of our study was to address this question by investi...

During foreign language acquisition neural representations of native language and foreign language assimilate. In the reading network, this assimilation leads to a shift from effortful processing to automated reading. Longitudinal studies can track this transition and reveal dynamics that might not become apparent in behavior. Here, we report resul...

There is strong evidence that neuronal bases for language processing are remarkably similar for sign and spoken languages. However, as meanings and linguistic structures of sign languages are coded in movement and space and decoded through vision, differences are also present, predominantly in occipitotemporal and parietal areas, such as superior p...

Despite dissimilarities among scripts, a universal hallmark of literacy in skilled readers is the convergent brain activity for print and speech. Little is known, however, whether this differs as a function of grapheme to phoneme transparency in beginning readers. Here we compare speech and orthographic processing circuits in two contrasting langua...

Abstract The cross-sex shift hypothesis predicts that gay men should perform more like heterosexual women on important neurocognitive tasks on which men score higher than women, such as mental rotation. Studies also suggest sex differences exist in the neural correlates of mental rotation. However, no studies have taken sexual orientation into acco...

The neural plasticity underlying language learning is a process rather than a single event. However, the dynamics of training-induced brain reorganization have rarely been examined, especially using a multimodal magnetic resonance imaging approach, which allows us to study the relationship between functional and structural changes. We focus on sign...

Presentation for the article: Propagation of emotions, arousal and polarity in WordNet using Heterogeneous Structured Synset Embeddings

Implicit forms of emotion regulation are of growing interest and have been shown to be efficient in controlling emotional responses despite the fact that they operate without conscious awareness of the ongoing regulatory process and deliberate attempts to influence emotional responding. Although such forms of affective modulation are considered nat...

Theory of mind plays a fundamental role in human social interactions. People generally better understand the mental states of members of their own race, a predisposition called the own-race bias, which can be significantly reduced by experience. It is unknown whether the ability to understand mental states can be similarly influenced by own-age bia...

Working memory (WM) is a limited-capacity cognitive system that allows the storage and use of a limited amount of information for a short period of time. Two WM processes can be distinguished: maintenance (i.e., storing, monitoring, and matching information) and manipulation (i.e., reordering and updating information). A number of studies have repo...

It is unclear why some people learn faster than others. We performed two independent studies in which we investigated the neural basis of real-time strategy (RTS) gaming and neural predictors of RTS games skill-acquisition. In the first (cross-sectional) study we found that experts in the RTS game StarCraft II (SC2) had a larger lenticular nucleus...

Objective Attention Training Technique (ATT) is a key therapeutic tool in metacognitive therapy. There are numerous studies on the behavioral effects of ATT, however the neural mechanisms at work in the training are yet to be uncovered. To date there have been no controlled fMRI studies of ATT. Method We conducted a randomized double-blind control...

Emotion research in children should make use of emotional stimuli ideally coming from children-rated databases. However, most of the works in this area use adult-rated stimuli databases or a collection of stimuli taken from the Internet or from unidentified sources without any standardization procedure or content control for children population. Th...

Backgrounds The classification of addictions and impulse control disorders is changing as reflected in the 11th version of International Classification of Disorders (WHO, 2018). However, studies focusing on direct comparison of structural brain differences in behavioral and substance addictions are limited. Aim Here, we contrast gray matter volume...

Our goal was to determine the influence of sex, age and the head/brain size on the compartmental brain volumes in the radiologically verified healthy population (96 subjects; 54 women and 42 men) from the Upper Silesia region in Poland. The MRI examinations were done using 3T Philips Achieva with the same T1-weighted and T2-weighted protocols. The...

BACKGROUNDS: The concepts of addictions and impulse control disorders are changing as reflected in the 11thversion of International Classification of Disorders (ICD-11, WHO, 2018). However, studies focusing on direct comparison of structural brain differences in behavioral and substance addictions are limited.AIM: Here we contrast gray matter volum...

Despite dissimilarities among scripts, a universal hallmark of literacy in adults is the convergent brain activity for print and speech. Little is known, however, how early it emerges. Here we compare speech and orthographic processing systems in two contrasting languages, Polish and English, in 100 7-year-old children performing identical fMRI tas...

Learning to read changes the brain language system. Phonological processing is the language domain most crucial for reading, but it is still unknown how reading acquisition modifies the neural phonological network in children who either develop dyslexia or are at risk of dyslexia. For the two first years of formal education, we followed 90 beginnin...

Many associative memory traces are charged with emotion that can either impair or enhance subsequent retrieval. Various factors may influence such emotion effects, including the nature of associations and type of emotions. We show that long-term recognition memory of very close verbal associations was enhanced for emotionally charged material, and...

Food-wasting has a profound negative social and environmental impact. Acknowledging that referring to moral judgment can motivate behavior change, the present study aimed to determine moral intuitions underlying the perception of food-wasting behavior. We developed a set of affective standardized scenarios and we used them to collect behavioral and...