Guillaume Dumas

Université de Montréal | UdeM · Department of Psychiatry

Significance The human dynamic clamp (HDC) is proposed as a general paradigm for studies of elementary forms of social behavior in complex biological systems. HDC enables parametric control of real-time bidirectional interaction between humans and empirically grounded theoretical models of coordination dynamics. It thus provides necessary experimen...

Recent debates regarding the primacy of social interaction versus individual cognition appear to be caused by the lack of an integrative account of the multiple scales at play. We suggest that reconciling individual autonomy and dyadic interactive viewpoints requires the taking into account of different time scales (e.g. development, learning) and...

Much evidence suggests that dynamic laws of neurobehavioral coordination are sui generis: they deal with collective properties that are repeatable from one system to another and emerge from microscopic dynamics but may not (even in principle) be deducible from them. Nevertheless, it is useful to try to understand the relationship between different...

Recent work from our interdisciplinary research group has revealed the emergence of inter-brain synchronization across multiple frequency bands during social interaction.11. Dumas G, Nadel J, Soussignan R, Martinerie J, Garnero L. Inter-brain synchronization during social interaction. PLoS One 2010; 5:278 - 288 View all references Our findings resu...

During social interaction, both participants are continuously active, each modifying their own actions in response to the continuously changing actions of the partner. This continuous mutual adaptation results in interactional synchrony to which both members contribute. Freely exchanging the role of imitator and model is a well-framed example of in...

Background Repetitive and restricted behaviors and interests (RRBI) are core symptoms of autism with a complex entity and are commonly categorized into ‘motor-driven’ and ‘cognitively driven’. RRBI symptomatology depends on the individual’s clinical environment limiting the understanding of RRBI physiology, particularly their associated neuroanatom...

Over 30 years, research into the Mirror Neuron System (MNS) has flourished, but criticisms emerged in 2014 regarding its role in empathy, mind-reading, and psychiatric disorders. One would expect that these criticisms to be considered with a time lag in the field of psychiatry because they were not originally formulated in the field of psychiatry....

Background In light of recent retrospective studies revealing evidence of disparities in access to medical technology and of bias in measurements, this narrative review assesses digital determinants of health (DDoH) in both technologies and medical formulae that demonstrate either evidence of bias or suboptimal performance, identifies potential mec...

Over the past decade, hyperscanning has emerged as an important methodology to study neural processes underlying human interaction using fMRI, EEG, fNIRS, and MEG. However, many methodological decisions regarding preprocessing and analysis of hyperscanning data have not yet been standardized in the hyperscanning community, yet may affect inter-brai...

Purpose of Review: In this review, we embrace the emerging field of second-person neuroscience to address disorganization in schizophrenia. We argue that the focus of interest for disorganization is the interpersonal space where shared mental processes ('social mind') occur based on the bio-behavioural synchrony between two (or more) interacting p...

Purpose of review: In this review, we embrace the emerging field of second-person neuroscience to address disorganization in schizophrenia. We argue that the focus of interest for disorganization is the interpersonal space where shared mental processes ('social mind') occur based on the bio-behavioural synchrony between two (or more) interacting pe...

Objective: Copy number variants (CNVs) are well-known genetic pleiotropic risk factors for multiple neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders (NPDs), including autism (ASD) and schizophrenia. Little is known about how different CNVs conferring risk for the same condition may affect subcortical brain structures and how these alterations relate t...

Scientific Machine Learning (SciML) is a burgeoning field that synergistically combines domain-aware and interpretable models with agnostic machine learning techniques. In this work, we introduce GOKU-UI, an evolution of the SciML generative model GOKU-nets. GOKU-UI not only broadens the original model's spectrum to incorporate other classes of dif...

This paper focuses on predicting the occurrence of grokking in neural networks, a phenomenon in which perfect generalization emerges long after signs of overfitting or memorization are observed. It has been reported that grokking can only be observed with certain hyper-parameters. This makes it critical to identify the parameters that lead to grokk...

Background: Exploring neural network dynamics during social interaction could help to identify biomarkers of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). A cerebellar involvement in autism has long been suspected and recent methodological advances now enable studying cerebellar functioning in a naturalistic setting. Here, we investigated the electrophysiologi...

Attention has become a common ingredient in deep learning architectures. It adds a dynamical selection of information on top of the static selection of information supported by weights. In the same way, we can imagine a higher-order informational filter built on top of attention: an Attention Schema (AS), namely, a descriptive and predictive model...

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is defined by distinctive socio-cognitive behaviors that deviate from typical patterns. Notably, social imitation skills appear to be particularly impacted, manifesting early on in development. This paper compared the behavior and inter-brain dynamics of dyads made up of two typically developing (TD) participants with...

Research has shown that many copy number variations (CNVs) increase the risk of neurodevelopmental disorders (e.g., autism, ADHD, schizophrenia). However, little is known about the effects of CNVs on brain development and function. Resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) is a suitable method to study the disturbances of neuronal functioning in C...

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, over 14% of the US population practice mindfulness meditation. The effects of mindfulness training on physical and mental health have been consistently documented, but its effects on interpersonal relationships are not yet fully understood or investigated. Interpersonal relationships play...

Background. Repetitive and restricted behaviors and interests (RRBI) are core symptoms of autism with a complex entity and are commonly categorized into ‘motor-driven’ and ‘cognitively-driven’. RRBI symptomatology depends on the individual’s clinical environment limiting the understanding of RRBI physiology, particularly their associated neuroanato...

Diagnostic criteria used in autism research have undergone a shift towards the inclusion of a larger population, paralleled by increasing, but variable, estimates of autism prevalence across clinical settings and continents. A categorical diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder is now consistent with large variations in language, intelligence, comorb...

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (henceforth referred to as autism) display significant variation in clinical outcome. For instance, across age, some individuals’ adaptive skills naturally improve or remain stable, while others’ decrease. To pave the way for ‘precision-medicine’ approaches, it is crucial to identify the cross-sectional and...

While the underlying dynamics of active inference communication and cumulative culture have already been formalized, the emergence of novel cultural information from these dynamics has not yet been understood. In this paper, we apply an active Inference framework, informed by genetic speciation, to the emergence of innovation from a population of c...

Objectives Copy number variants (CNVs) are well-known genetic pleiotropic risk factors for multiple neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders (NPDs) including autism (ASD) and schizophrenia (SZ). Overall, little is known about how different CNVs conferring risk for the same condition may affect subcortical brain structures and how these alterati...

Conscious states (states that there is something it is like to be in) seem both rich or full of detail, and ineffable or hard to fully describe or recall. The problem of ineffability, in particular, is a longstanding issue in philosophy that partly motivates the explanatory gap: the belief that consciousness cannot be reduced to underlying physical...

Precision psychiatry has emerged as part of the shift to personalized medicine and builds on frameworks such as the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), multilevel biological "omics" data and, most recently, computational psychiatry. The shift is prompted by the realization that a one-size-fits all approach is i...

Background Attenuated social attention is a key marker of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Recent neuroimaging findings also emphasize an altered processing of sensory salience in ASD. The locus coeruleus–norepinephrine system (LC-NE) has been established as a modulator of this sensory salience processing (SSP). We tested the hypothesis that altered...

Background: Reward processing has been proposed to underpin the atypical social feature of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, previous neuroimaging studies have yielded inconsistent results regarding the specificity of atypicalities for social reward processing in ASD. Aims: Utilising a large sample, we aimed to assess reward processing in...

Background: Autism spectrum disorder (autism) is a complex neurodevelopmental condition with pronounced behavioral, cognitive, and neural heterogeneities across individuals. Here, our goal was to characterize heterogeneity in autism by identifying patterns of neural diversity as reflected in BOLD fMRI in the way individuals with autism engage with...

In this article, we analyse social interactions, drawing on diverse points of views, ranging from dialectics, second-person neuroscience and enactivism to dynamical systems, active inference and machine learning. To this end, we define interpersonal attunement as a set of multi-scale processes of building up and materializing social expectations—pu...

As an integral part of autism spectrum symptoms, sensory processing issues including both hypo and hyper sensory sensitivities. These sensory specificities may result from an excitation/inhibition imbalance with a poorly understood of their level of convergence with genetic alterations in GABA-ergic and glutamatergic pathways. In our study, we aime...

Background: Understanding how certain factors affect autism incidence can help to identify inequities in diagnostic access. We aimed to investigate the incidence of autism in England as a function of geography and sociodemographics, examining spatial distribution across health service boundaries. Methods: In this retrospective, longitudinal, sch...

Background Exploring neural network dynamics during social interaction could help to identify biomarkers of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Recently, the cerebellum, a brain structure that plays a key role in social cognition, has attracted growing interest. Here, we investigated the electrophysiological activity of the cortico-cerebrum network du...

Interoception—the perception of internal bodily signals—has recently emerged as an area of significant interest due to its potential implications in emotion and the prevalence of dysfunctional interoceptive processes across psychopathological conditions. Despite the importance of interoception in cognitive neuroscience and psychiatry, its experimen...

The transition to technologically-assisted communication has permeated all facets of human social life; yet, its impact on the social brain is still unknown and the effects may be particularly intense during periods of developmental transitions. Applying a two-brain perspective, the current preregistered study utilized hyperscanning EEG to measure...

The humanHuman pineal glandPineal glands regulates the day-night dynamics of multiple physiological processes, especially through the secretion of melatoninMelatonin. Recently, using mass spectrometry-based proteomics and dedicated analysis tools, we have identified regulated proteinsProteins and signaling pathwaysSignaling pathways that differ bet...

Several neuronal mechanisms have been proposed to account for the formation of cognitive abilities through postnatal interactions with the physical and sociocultural environment. Here, we introduce a three-level computational model of information processing and acquisition of cognitive abilities. We propose minimal architectural requirements to bui...

The use of EEG to simultaneously record multiple brains (i.e., hyperscanning) during social interactions has led to the discovery of inter-brain coupling (IBC). IBC is defined as the neural synchronization between people and is considered to be a marker of social interaction. IBC has previously been observed across different frequency bands, includ...

Successful communication is key to health in older age. This is true in the narrow sense of being able to gain critical information, e.g., from health care providers, but also more broadly in being able to maintain social ties and pursue meaningful activities, which, in turn, are central to maintaining health and well-being. Compared to younger adu...

Introduction: Reliance on sole reductionism, whether explanatory, methodological or ontological, is difficult to support in clinical psychiatry. Rather, psychiatry is challenged by a plurality of approaches. There exist multiple legitimate ways of understanding human functionality and disorder, i.e., different systems of representation, different...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by difficulties in social communication, but also great heterogeneity. To offer individualized medicine approaches, we need to better target interventions by stratifying autistic people into subgroups with different biological profiles and/or prognoses. We sought to vali...

This review article gives a high-level overview of the approaches across different scales of organization and levels of abstraction. The studies covered in this paper include fundamental models in computational neuroscience, nonlinear dynamics, data-driven methods, as well as emergent practices. While not all of these models span the intersection o...

The transition to technologically-assisted communication has permeated all facets of human social life; yet, its impact on the social brain is still unknown and the effects may be most notable during key developmental transitions. Applying a two-brain perspective, the current pre-registered study measured mother-child brain-to-brain synchrony using...

The use of digital technologies is constantly growing around the world. The wider-spread adoption of digital technologies and solutions in the daily clinical practice in psychiatry seems to be a question of when, not if. We propose a synthesis of the scientific literature on digital technologies in psychiatry and discuss the main aspects of its pos...

The substantial phenotypic heterogeneity in autism limits our understanding of its genetic etiology. To address this gap, here we investigated genetic differences between autistic individuals ( n max = 12,893) based on core and associated features of autism, co-occurring developmental disabilities and sex. We conducted a comprehensive factor analys...

This article introduces a three-axis framework indicating how AI can be informed by biological examples of social learning mechanisms. We argue that the complex human cognitive architecture owes a large portion of its expressive power to its ability to engage in social and cultural learning. However, the field of AI has mostly embraced a solipsisti...

Background: Understanding the development of the neuronal circuitry underlying autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is critical to shed light into its etiology and for the development of treatment options. Resting state EEG provides a window into spontaneous local and long-range neuronal synchronization and has been investigated in many ASD studies, but...

Successful communication is key to health in older age. This is true in the narrow sense of being able to gain critical information e.g., from health care providers, but also more broadly in being able to maintain social ties and pursue meaningful activities, which, in turn, are central to maintaining health and well-being. Compared to younger adul...

The use of EEG to simultaneously record multiple brains (i.e., hyperscanning) during social interactions has led to the discovery of inter-brain coupling (IBC). IBC is defined as the neural synchronization between people and is considered to be a marker of social interaction. IBC has previously been observed across different frequency bands, includ...

Objective: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a lifelong neurodevelopmental condition that is associated with significant difficulties in adaptive behavior and variation in clinical outcomes across the life span. Some individuals with ASD improve, whereas others may not change significantly, or regress. Hence, the development of "personalized medic...

This paper presents a version of neurophenomenology based on generative modelling techniques developed in computational neuroscience and biology. Our approach can be described as computational phenomenology because it applies methods originally developed in computational modelling to provide a formal model of the descriptions of lived experience in...

Machine learning models often fail to generalize well under distributional shifts. Understanding and overcoming these failures have led to a research field of Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization. Despite being extensively studied for static computer vision tasks, OOD generalization has been underexplored for time series tasks. To shine light o...

We aimed to describe epilepsy and EEG patterns related to vigilance states and age, in chromosome15-long-arm-duplication-syndrome (dup15q) children with epilepsy, in both duplication types: interstitial (intdup15) and isodicentric (idic15). Methods: Clinical data and 70 EEGs of 12 patients (5 intdup15, 7 idic15), followed from 4.5m.oto 17y4m (media...

Several neuronal mechanisms have been proposed to account for the formation of cognitive abilities through postnatal interactions with the physical and socio-cultural environment. Here, we introduce a three-level computational model of information processing and acquisition of cognitive abilities. We propose minimal architectural requirements to bu...

We are making the case that empirical results from social psychology and social neuroscience along with the framework of dynamics can be of inspiration to the development of more intelligent artificial agents. We specifically argue that the complex human cognitive architecture owes a large portion of its expressive power to its ability to engage in...

The principled design and discovery of biologically- and physically-informed models of neuronal dynamics has been advancing since the mid-twentieth century. Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) have accelerated this progress. This review article gives a high-level overview of the approaches across different scales of organization and...

Background The neurocognitive mechanisms underlying autism spectrum disorder (ASD) remain unclear. Progress has been largely hampered by small sample sizes, variable age ranges and resulting inconsistent findings. There is a pressing need for large definitive studies to delineate the nature and extent of key case/control differences to direct resea...

Rabies is a zoonotic disease caused by rabies virus (RABV). As rabies advances, patients develop a variety of severe neurological symptoms that inevitably lead to coma and death. Unlike other neurotropic viruses that can induce symptoms of a similar range, RABV-infected post-mortem brains do not show significant signs of inflammation nor the struct...

Maternal body odors serve as important safety-promoting and social recognition signals, but their role in human brain maturation is largely unknown. Utilizing ecological paradigms and dual- electroencephalography recording, we examined the effects of maternal chemosignals on brain-to-brain synchrony during infant-mother and infant-stranger interact...

Background. Sensory processing atypicalities are part of the core symptoms of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and could result from an excitation/inhibition imbalance. Yet, the convergence level of phenotypic sensory processing atypicalities with genetic alterations in GABA-ergic and glutamatergic pathways remains poorly understood. This study aimed...

Over the past decade, biomarker discovery has become a key goal in psychiatry to aid in the more reliable diagnosis and prognosis of heterogeneous psychiatric conditions and the development of tailored therapies. Nevertheless, the prevailing statistical approach is still the mean group comparison between “cases” and “controls,” which tends to ignor...

Objective: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is accompanied by highly individualized neuroanatomical deviations that potentially map onto distinct genotypes and clinical phenotypes. This study aimed to link differences in brain anatomy to specific biological pathways to pave the way toward targeted therapeutic interventions. Methods: The authors ex...