Helena Melero

Helena Melero
Complutense University of Madrid | UCM · Department of Psychobiology

PhD in Neuroscience

About

53
Publications
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Publications

Publications (53)
Article
Full-text available
Grapheme-color synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which viewing achromatic letters/numbers leads to automatic and involuntary color experiences. In this study, voxel-based morphometry analyses were performed on T1 images and fractional anisotropy measures to examine the whole brain in associator grapheme-color synesthetes. These analyses p...
Article
Full-text available
INTRODUCTION. Synesthesia is a neural phenomenon in which stimulation in one sensory or cognitive stream leads to associated experiences in a second, unstimulated stream. These activations occur involuntarily, automatically and consistently over time. AIM. To estimate the relative frequency of the different modalities of the phenomenon in a Spanish...
Article
Full-text available
Synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon whose nature and etiology remain unknown. In this paper, I apply the neurophenomenological perspective to refect on the very nature of inducers and concurrents, including their perceptual and conceptual dimensions and their stability over time. Additionally, I analyze the role of attention and its infuen...
Article
Full-text available
Imagine que un día, hablando con un grupo de amigos, descubre que ellos no saben que la A es roja. Que no pueden ver el color morado de los violines del concierto para piano y orquesta n.º 2 de Rachmaninov. Que para ellos el lunes ni es azul ni está más abajo que el domingo ni a la izquierda del martes. Los demás le miran realmente sorprendidos. Y...
Article
Full-text available
The default mode network (DMN) is a singular pattern of synchronization between brain regions, usually observed using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) and functional connectivity analyses. In comparison to other brain networks that are primarily involved in attentional-demanding tasks (such as the frontoparietal network...
Article
Full-text available
Background Both childhood adversity (CA) and first-episode psychosis (FEP) have been linked to alterations in cortical thickness (CT). The interactive effects between different types of CAs and FEP on CT remain understudied. Methods One-hundred sixteen individuals with FEP (mean age = 23.8 ± 6.9 years, 34% females, 80.2% non-affective FEP) and 98...
Preprint
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This randomized controlled trial aims to evaluate the efficacy of a cognitive training program using video games in improving neuropsychological, neurological, immunological, and inflammatory parameters in childhood cancer survivors. This study will recruit 56 patients aged 8-17 years who have completed cancer treatment 1-7 years prior to enrollmen...
Preprint
In the past few decades, researchers have established synesthesia as a genuine phenomenon, identified its characteristics (in particular, its automatic, specific and consistent nature), and developed “gold standard” inclusion criteria for research: synesthetes are participants that self-report synesthetic experiences and have consistent (beyond a “...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction Childhood cancer survivors have neurocognitive sequelae that in most survivor follow-up programs are underdiagnosed and for which there is usually no treatment plan. Video games have demonstrated various psychological and neurocognitive benefits in different subpopulations, such as patients with organic neurological deficits or childre...
Article
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Introduction Children who have undergone an oncological process and have received treatment with chemotherapy or radiotherapy on the central nervous system may have significant neurocognitive sequelae. Some video games have shown neurocognitive benefits in people with impairments in different areas, such as attention or memory. Objectives This wor...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction Paediatric cancer survivors have a risk for neuropsychological impairment due to the disease and the treatment received. These affections have been neglected in the follow-up of these patients. It is important to identify the most valid outcomes in the evaluation of neurocognitive sequelae in childhood cancer survivors. Objectives Thi...
Article
Background Radiologically isolated syndrome (RIS) patients might have psychiatric and cognitive deficits, which suggests an involvement of major resting-state functional networks. Notwithstanding, very little is known about the neural networks involved in RIS. Objective To examine functional connectivity differences between RIS and healthy control...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
For decades, the study of the neural basis of the so-called "universal emotions" has not been fully integrated with our knowledge about the neural networks that underpin the relational, communicative, and cultural aspects of the self; nor, paradoxically, with the processes of multisensory integration that characterize human experience. Nevertheless...
Book
Esta edición del Congreso Internacional de Sinestesia, Ciencia y Arte 2022, por primera vez, presenta un tema novedoso, sin excluir las líneas de investigación y estudio que siempre se ofrecen en nuestros congresos, con el fin de profundizar en los estudios sobre la sinestesia siguiendo una clave común específica: El reto digital/físico Sin duda,...
Article
Full-text available
White matter bundle segmentation using diffusion MRI fiber tractography has become the method of choice to identify white matter fiber pathways in vivo in human brains. However, like other analyses of complex data, there is considerable variability in segmentation protocols and techniques. This can result in different reconstructions of the same in...
Article
Full-text available
White matter bundle segmentation using diffusion MRI fiber tractography has become the method of choice to identify white matter fiber pathways in vivo in human brains. However, like other analyses of complex data, there is considerable variability in segmentation protocols and techniques. This can result in different reconstructions of the same in...
Article
Full-text available
Grapheme-color synesthetes experience graphemes as having a consistent color (e.g., “N is turquoise”). Synesthetes’ specific associations (which letter is which color) are often influenced by linguistic properties such as phonetic similarity, color terms (“Y is yellow”), and semantic associations (“D is for dog and dogs are brown”). However, most s...
Preprint
Full-text available
Background: Higher plasma concentration of neurofilament light (pNfL) is associated with neurodegeneration. However, to our knowledge, up to now, there are no data in HIV patients with infection due to vertical transmission. This is the first study to report pNfL in a cohort of HIV perinatally infected (PHIV) young adults compared with non-HIV (HIV...
Article
Full-text available
Brain atrophy has been observed in perinatally HIV-infected patients (PHIV) despite initiation on combined antiretroviral treatment (cART), but neuroimaging studies are limited. We aimed to evaluate cortical thickness (CT) and subcortical gray matter (GM) volumes of PHIV youths with stable immunovirological situation and with a normal daily perform...
Article
Full-text available
Over the past few years, neuroimaging studies have been performed in young adults with perinatally acquired HIV (PHIV) to study the impact of HIV infection on the central nervous system (CNS), but no recent review have been published. This review aims to identify brain areas where PHIV eems to have greater impact taking into account demographic, be...
Article
The relationship between psychotic symptoms and global measures of functioning has been widely studied. No previous study has assessed so far the interplay between specific clinical symptoms and particular areas of functioning in first-episode psychosis (FEP) using network analysis methods. A total of 191 patients with FEP (age 24.45±6.28 years, 64...
Preprint
Full-text available
Grapheme-color synesthetes experience graphemes as having a consistent color (e.g., “N is turquoise”). Synesthetes’ specific associations (which letter is which color) are influenced by linguistic properties (letter frequency, phonetic similarity, etc.), and plausibly reveal the characteristics of underlying letter representations. Despite their cl...
Article
Full-text available
White matter bundle segmentation using diffusion MRI fiber tractography has become the method of choice to identify white matter fiber pathways in vivo in human brains. However, like other analyses of complex data, there is considerable variability in segmentation protocols and techniques. This can result in different reconstructions of the same in...
Preprint
Full-text available
White matter bundle segmentation using diffusion MRI fiber tractography has become the method of choice to identify white matter fiber pathways in vivo in human brains. However, like other analyses of complex data, there is considerable variability in segmentation protocols and techniques. This can result in different reconstructions of the same in...
Article
Full-text available
Data analysis workflows in many scientific domains have become increasingly complex and flexible. Here we assess the effect of this flexibility on the results of functional magnetic resonance imaging by asking 70 independent teams to analyse the same dataset, testing the same 9 ex-ante hypotheses¹. The flexibility of analytical approaches is exempl...
Article
Auditory hallucinations (AH) are one of the core symptoms of schizophrenia (SZ) and constitute a significant source of suffering and disability. One third of SZ patients experience pharmacology-resistant AH, so an alternative/complementary treatment strategy is needed to alleviate this debilitating condition. In this study, real-time functional Mag...
Article
Auditory hallucinations (AHs) are one of the most distressing symptoms of schizophrenia (SZ) and are often resistant to medication. Imaging studies of individuals with SZ show hyperactivation of the default mode network (DMN) and the superior temporal gyrus (STG). Studies in SZ show DMN hyperconnectivity and reduced anticorrelation between DMN and...
Preprint
Full-text available
Data analysis workflows in many scientific domains have become increasingly complex and flexible. To assess the impact of this flexibility on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) results, the same dataset was independently analyzed by 70 teams, testing nine ex-ante hypotheses. The flexibility of analytic approaches is exemplified by the fac...
Article
Full-text available
Essential tremor (ET) is a neurological disease with both motor and nonmotor manifestations; however, little is known about its underlying brain basis. Furthermore, the overall organization of the brain network in ET remains largely unexplored. We investigated the topological properties of brain functional network, derived from resting‐state functi...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction Olfactory dysfunction is an early marker of neurological disease and a common symptom in psychotic disorders. Previous anatomical and functional research suggests that sex effects may be crucial in the assessment of the olfactory system. Nonetheless, the neural mechanisms through which the factor sex impacts olfactory perception are st...
Article
Full-text available
Background/objective: Two functional networks are proposed as neuronal support for the complex processes of memory: the anterior temporal and the medial posterior systems. We examined the atrophy of hippocampus (HC) and of those areas constituting the two functional memory systems in multiple sclerosis (MS) patients with low disability. Methods:...
Article
Robust identification and tracking of the pupil provides key information that can be used in several applications such as controlling gaze-based HMIs (human machine interfaces), designing new diagnostic tools for brain diseases, improving driver safety, detecting drowsiness, performing cognitive research, among others. We propose a deep convolution...
Presentation
Full-text available
In 1928, the French composer Maurice Ravel composed his most famous musical composition. Ravel's Boléro can induce many synaesthetic experiences: visual, kinesthetic, haptic and even taste or smell. A simple workshop facilitated by Ninghui XIONG supported by the Congress Committee, attendees of the VI International Congress Synaesthesia, Science an...
Poster
Full-text available
In 1928, the French composer Maurice Ravel composed his most famous musical composition. Ravel's Boléro can induce many synaesthetic experiences: visual, kinesthetic, haptic and even taste or smell. A simple workshop facilitated by Ninghui XIONG supported by the Congress Committee, attendees of the VI International Congress Synaesthesia, Science an...
Article
Grapheme-color synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which viewing a grapheme elicits an additional, automatic, and consistent sensation of color. Color-to-letter associations in synesthesia are interesting in their own right, but also offer an opportunity to examine relationships between visual, acoustic, and semantic aspects of language. Re...
Preprint
Full-text available
El proyecto pretende demostrar, mediante el diseño e implementación de nuevas unidades didácticas participativas: “Experiencias somatosensoriales auditivas”, sondeo simple de posibles sinestésicos y test de creatividad, entre el alumnado de Bellas Artes, Ciencias de la Educación, Psicología y Música, que el pensamiento holístico creativo resulta ef...
Conference Paper
Neuroimaging experiments on grapheme-color synesthesia have provided evidence of structural and functional peculiarities in the synesthetic brain and several explanatory models have been proposed. Nevertheless, data from other modalities are needed in order to test their predictions. For the first time, we investigated brain activity in response to...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Kinetic inducers and concurrents are infrequent. Nonetheless, the association between music (sound) and dance (movement) occurs naturally, and sometimes involuntarily. Curiously, dance-as a complex symbolic language of the body which we use to express our emotions-acts as an inducer of color synesthesias. The neuroscientific analysis of this comple...
Article
Full-text available
Objetivos. Desarrollar el Test de las Anillas (TA), que es un nuevo instrumento de cribado para la evaluación neuropsicológica de las Funciones Ejecutivas en adultos. Procedimiento. La muestra está constituida por 348 adultos sin alteraciones neurológicas (174 varones y 174 mujeres). La edad media del grupo total es de 43,37 años (D.T. 21,14). El...
Article
Objectives. To develop the ring test (RT), a new screening instrument for the neuropsychological assessment of executive functions in adults. Procedure. The sample was made up of 348 adults with no neurological disorders (174 men and 174 women). The mean age of the total group was 43.37 years (SD 21.14). The RT consists of building 15 growing diffi...

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