Leonie Kausel

• PhD
• Assistant Professor at Diego Portales University

The concept of neurodiversity has gained strength in the last years to highlight the value of individual differences based on relevant variations in brain functioning. Inclusive education has embraced neurodiversity to promote a culture centered on valuing diversity, in response to clinical models based on deficits or disorders. This theoretical-cr...

Patients recovering from COVID-19 commonly exhibit cognitive and brain alterations, yet the specific neuropathological mechanisms and risk factors underlying these alterations remain elusive. Given the significant global incidence of COVID-19, identifying factors that can distinguish individuals at risk of developing brain alterations is crucial fo...

Introduction: Attention and working memory are key cognitive functions that allow us to select and maintain information in our mind for a short time, being essential for our daily life and, in particular, for learning and academic performance. It has been shown that musical training can improve working memory performance, but it is still unclear if...

Patients recovering from COVID-19 commonly exhibit cognitive and brain alterations, yet the specific neuropathological mechanisms and risk factors that underlie these alterations remain elusive. Given the significant global incidence of COVID-19, identifying factors that can distinguish individuals at risk of developing medium or long-term brain al...

Multimodal integration is crucial for human interaction, in particular for social communication, which relies on integrating information from various sensory modalities. Recently a third visual pathway specialized in social perception was proposed, which includes the right superior temporal sulcus (STS) playing a key role in processing socially rel...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition that exhibits a widely heterogeneous range of social and cognitive symptoms. This feature has challenged a broad comprehension of this neurodevelopmental disorder and therapeutic efforts to address its difficulties. Current therapeutic strategies have focused primarily on treating beh...

The aim of the current research was to explore whether we can improve the recognition of cross-cultural freely-expressed emotional faces in British participants. We tested several methods for improving the recognition of freely-expressed emotional faces, such as different methods for presenting other-culture expressions of emotion from individuals...

The aim of the current research was to explore whether we can improve the recognition of cross-cultural freely expressed emotional faces in British participants. We tested several methods for improving the recognition of freely expressed emotional faces, such as different methods for presenting other-culture expressions of emotion from individuals...

Background Self-regulation is a complex capacity that favors the modification of behavior in accordance with environmental demands. Objective This article aims to review the scientific literature that conceptualizes self-regulation, analyze its potential latent dimensions, identify the instruments used to measure this construct and the empirical f...

In the last decades, novel neurotechnologies are enabling the collecting and analyzing of neuronal data as well as the targeted alteration of brain activity. While this progress has the potential to help many patients with neurological or mental diseases, it also raises significant ethical and societal consequences, putting the mental privacy, iden...

The theory of universal emotions suggests that certain emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise and happiness can be encountered cross-culturally. These emotions are expressed using specific facial movements that enable human communication. More recently, theoretical and empirical models have been used to propose that universal emot...

Attention and working memory (WM) are core components of executive functions, and they can be enhanced by training. One activity that has shown to improve executive functions is musical training, but the brain networks underlying these improvements are not well known. We aimed to identify, using functional MRI (fMRI), these networks in children who...

Executive functions (EFs) are cognitive functions needed for adaptive and targeted behavior. Music aptitude is the potential or capacity for musical achievement. A key element of music aptitude is audiation, defined as the process through which sound becomes music and meaning is attributed to that music. In this paper, we report on the association...

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a common neuropsychiatric disorder in which children present prefrontal cortex (PFC) related functions deficit. Proactive cognitive control is a process that anticipates the requirement of cognitive control and crucially depends on the maturity of the PFC. Since this process is important to ADHD sy...

The dialects theory of cross-cultural communication suggests that due to culture-specific characteristics in the expression of emotion, we can recognise own-culture emotional expressions more accurately than other-culture emotional expressions. This effect is suggested to occur due to the nonconvergent social evolution that takes place in different...

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is the most common neuropsychiatric disorder in childhood and is characterized by a delay of cortical maturation in frontal regions. In order to investigate interference control, which is a key function of frontal areas, a functional MRI study was conducted on 17 ADHD boys and 17 typically developing...

While rural living protects from asthma and allergies in many countries, results are conflicting in Latin America. We studied the prevalence of asthma and asthma symptoms in children from urban, semiurban, and rural sectors in south Chile. A cross-sectional questionnaire study was conducted in semiurban and rural sectors in the province of Valdivia...

Childhood asthma has a high prevalence in South America--a region of the world currently undergoing a thorough modernization and transition process. Asthma in South America is mainly associated with poor urban environment, which actually may challenge the role of the hygiene hypothesis. We systematically assessed the impact of environmental factors...

Asthma in children is an emerging public health problem in South America. So far, research in this part of the world is limited. This paper presents the methodology and description of the data acquisition of an asthma case-control study conducted in the Central South of Chile. A hospital-based case-control study about asthma (188 cases, 294 control...