Gilles de Hollander

University of Zurich | UZH ·  Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research - SNS Lab

In my PhD thesis I used Ultra-High Field 7 Tesla MRI to better understand the functional neuroanatomy of the human subthalamic nucleus.

Ultra-high field MRI can functionally image the cerebral cortex of human subjects at the submillimeter scale of cortical columns and laminae. Here, we investigate both in concert, by imaging ocular dominance columns (ODCs) in primary visual cortex (V1) across different cortical depths. We ensured that putative ODC patterns in V1 (a) are stable acro...

The subthalamic nucleus (STN) is a small, subcortical brain structure. It is a target for deep brain stimulation, an invasive treatment that reduces motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease. Side effects of DBS are commonly explained using the tripartite model of STN organization, which proposes three functionally distinct subregions in the STN specia...

The pupil provides a rich, non-invasive measure of the neural bases of perception and cognition, and has been of particular value in uncovering the role of arousal-linked neuromodulation, which alters both cortical processing and pupil size. But pupil size is subject to a multitude of influences, which complicates unique interpretation. We measured...

The Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) established community consensus on the organization of data and metadata for several neuroimaging modalities. Traditionally, BIDS had a strong focus on functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) datasets and lacked guidance on how to store multimodal structural MRI datasets. Here, we present and describe the...

The pupil provides a rich, non-invasive measure of the neural bases of perception and cognition. It can particularly inform about the role of arousal-linked neuromodulation, which alters both cortical processing and pupil size. But a multitude of factors influence pupil size, which complicates interpretation. We measured pupil signals accompanying...

Ultra-high field MRI can functionally image the cerebral cortex of human subjects at the submillimeter scale of cortical columns and laminae. Here, we investigate both in concert, by, for the first time, imaging ocular dominance columns (ODCs) in primary visual cortex (V1) across different cortical depths. We ensured that putative ODC patterns in V...

The subthalamic nucleus (STN) is successfully used as a surgical target for deep brain stimulation in the treatment of movement disorders. Interestingly, the internal structure of the STN is still incompletely understood. The objective of the present study was to investigate three-dimensional (3D) immunoreactivity patterns for 12 individual protein...

The target article by Lee et al. (in review) highlights the ways in which ongoing concerns about research reproducibility extend to model-based approaches in cognitive science. Whereas Lee et al. focus primarily on the importance of research practices to improve model robustness, we propose that the transparent sharing of model specifications, incl...

The Target Article by Lee et al. (2019) highlights the ways in which ongoing concerns about research reproducibility extend to model-based approaches in cognitive science. Whereas Lee et al. focus primarily on the importance of research practices to improve model robustness, we propose that the transparent sharing of model specifications, including...

Studies that aim to understand the neural correlates of response conflicts commonly probe frontal brain areas associated with controlled inhibition and decision processes. However, untimely fast conflict errors happen even before these top-down processes are engaged. The dual-route model proposes that during conflict tasks, as soon as the stimulus...

Quantitative magnetic resonance imaging generates images of meaningful physical or chemical variables measured in physical units that allow quantitative comparisons between tissue regions and among subjects scanned at the same or different sites. Here, we show that we can acquire quantitative T1, T2*, and quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) i...

The subthalamic nucleus (STN) plays a crucial role in the surgical treatment of Parkinson’s disease (PD). Studies investigating optimal protocols for STN visualization using state of the art magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques have shown that susceptibility weighted images, which display the magnetic susceptibility distribution, yield bette...

The basal ganglia (BG) form a network of subcortical nuclei. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in the BG could provide insight in its functioning and the underlying mechanisms of Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS). However, fMRI of the BG with high specificity is challenging, because the nuclei are small and variable in their anatomical locati...

The human subcortex is a densely populated part of the brain, of which only 7% of the individual structures are depicted in standard MRI atlases. In vivo MRI of the subcortex is challenging owing to its anatomical complexity and its deep location in the brain. The technical advances that are needed to reliably uncover this ‘terra incognita’ call fo...

The human subcortex is a densely populated part of the brain, of which only 7% of the individual structures are depicted in standard MRI atlases. In vivo MRI of the subcortex is challenging owing to its anatomical complexity and its deep location in the brain. The technical advances that are needed to reliably uncover this 'terra incognita' call fo...

In perceptual decision-making tasks, people balance the speed and accuracy with which they make their decisions by modulating a response threshold. Neuroimaging studies suggest that this speed-accuracy tradeoff is implemented in a cortico-basal ganglia network that includes an important contribution from the pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA)....

Cognitive neuroscientists sometimes apply formal models to investigate how the brain implements cognitive processes. These models describe behavioral data in terms of underlying, latent, variables linked to hypothesized cognitive processes. A goal of model-based cognitive neuroscience is to link these variables to brain measurements, which can adva...

In perceptual decision-making tasks, participants are usually assumed to apply only a single cognitive strategy throughout the course of a task. Variability in observed behavior (e.g., reaction times) is explained as the result of variability in the same cognitive process that gave rise to the

The past 10 years have seen a surge of studies that try to link computational, formal models of cognition, rooted in behavioral fields such as mathematical psychology and reinforcement learning, to neural measurements in humans. This is usually done with fMRI and has been called “model-based neuroimaging”. The model-based neuroimaging approach prov...

The substantia nigra (SN) and subthalamic nucleus (STN) are thought to be important, distinct nodes in a cortico-basal ganglia loop implementing cognitive functions such as perceptual decision-making and cognitive control. The STN is the main target of deep brain stimulation (DBS), a popular and effective treatment of Parkinson’s Disease. This trea...

Our understanding of the complex interplay between structural and functional organisation of brain networks is being advanced by the development of novel multi-modal analyses approaches. The Age-ility Project (Phase 1) data repository offers open access to structural MRI, diffusion MRI, and resting-state fMRI scans, as well as resting-state EEG rec...

The subthalamic nucleus and the directly adjacent substantia nigra are small and important structures in the basal ganglia. Functional magnetic resonance imaging studies have shown that the subthalamic nucleus and substantia nigra are selectively involved in response inhibition, conflict processing, and adjusting global and selective response thres...

Traditionally, fMRI data are analyzed using statistical parametric mapping approaches. Regardless of the precise thresholding procedure, these approaches ultimately divide the brain in regions that do or do not differ significantly across experimental conditions. This binary classification scheme fosters the so-called imager's fallacy, where resear...

The subthalamic nucleus (STN) is an important node of the cortico-basal ganglia network and the main target of deep brain stimulation (DBS) in Parkinson's disease. Histological studies have revealed an inhomogeneous iron distribution within the STN, which has been related to putative subdivisions within this nucleus. Here, we investigate the iron d...

The subthalamic nucleus (STN) is an important node of the cortico-basal ganglia network and the main target of deep brain stimulation (DBS) in Parkinson’s disease. Histological studies have revealed an inhomogeneous iron distribution within the STN, which has been related to putative sub- divisions within this nucleus. Here, we investigate the iron...

Traditionally, fMRI data are analyzed using statistical parametric mapping approaches. Regardless of the precise thresholding procedure, these approaches ultimately divide the brain in regions that do or do not differ significantly across experimental conditions. This binary classification scheme fosters the so-called imager's fallacy, where resear...

A Multivariate Pattern Analysis-or MVPA-approach to the analysis of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)-data in small subcortical nuclei was developed and applied to two existing datasets of Van Maanen et al. (2011) and Winkel et al. (2012). This was done to investigate the involvement of the Subthalamic Nucleus (STN) in modulating respons...

In this study parsimonious language models were used to construct word clouds of the proceedings of the European Parliament. Multiple design choices had to be made and are discussed. Important features are stemming during tokenization, including bigrams into the word cloud and multilingualism. Also, the original parsimonious language models were ex...

In this paper knowledge from sociology, cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence is integrated to develop a cognitively grounded social research approach to study changes in people's views during social interaction. To illustrate this approach a study is described that tests the 'thesis of harmonization'. This thesis states that the cogniti...