
Michelle McKerralUniversité de Montréal | UdeM · Department of Psychology
Michelle McKerral
Professor
About
84
Publications
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Introduction
Our work at the R3 LAB, founded/directed by Dr. Michelle McKerral, focuses on enhancing rehabilitation effectiveness (implementation of evidenced-based cognitive/interdisciplinary interventions) and monitoring recovery of cognitive function/social participation (mixed methods: neuropsychological, electrophysiological brain imaging, outcomes reported by clinicians/patients/caregivers) in adults with traumatic brain injury or stroke, to positively influence their short- and long-term outcomes.
Publications
Publications (84)
BACKGROUND
Physical activity as one of the major lifestyle-related health determinants is partially addressed by the Montreal Walking Exoskeleton Satisfaction and Perspectives-Questionnaire (MWESP-Q).
OBJECTIVE
To document satisfaction of people with chronic spinal cord injury after the completion of a 10 to 16 weeks of the wearable robotic exoske...
Purpose:
To examine the perspectives of wheelchair users with spinal cord injury (WUSCI) regarding their participation in a 16-week walking program using a wearable robotic exoskeleton (WRE); and explore concerns and expectations regarding potential use of this device and intervention in the context of a home or community-based adapted physical ac...
Objective
A non-negligeable proportion of individuals who have sustained a mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) are at risk of developing persistent symptoms. The impact of persistent post-mTBI symptoms can be profound, causing significant disruptions in well-being, functioning and quality of life (Agtarap, et al., 2021). Reduced social participation...
Objective
Social participation (SP) represents a key goal in TBI rehabilitation, as it allows the individual to return to active and purposeful roles in the community. However, studies on predictors of SP specific to post-acute universally accessible specialized rehabilitation pathways following TBI are scarce. Our objectives were thus to 1) charac...
Objective
To explore the use of Immediate Post-Concussion Assessment and Cognitive Testing (ImPACT) and Heart Rate Variability (HRV) tests in the follow-up of concussions among college athletes. To provide a foundation for interpreting changes following a concussion by exploring the effects of self reported biological sex at birth on ImPACT and HRV...
Finding reliable biomarkers to assess concussions could play a pivotal role in diagnosis, monitoring, and predicting associated risks. The present study aimed to explore the use of heart rate variability (HRV) in the follow-up of concussions among college athletes and to investigate the relationships between biological sex, symptomatology, and HRV...
Introduction
Stroke is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, placing an immense burden on patients and the health system. Timely access to rehabilitation services can improve stroke survivors’ quality of life. The use of standardised outcome measures is endorsed for optimising patient rehabilitation outcomes and improving clinical d...
Social participation (SP) is one of many objectives in the rehabilitation of patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI). Studies on predictors of SP specific to post-acute universally accessible specialized rehabilitation pathways following TBI are scarce. Our objectives were to: 1) characterize SP, as well as a set of pre-injury, injury-related, a...
Motor control deficits outlasting self-reported symptoms are often reported following mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). The exact duration and nature of these deficits remains unknown. The current study aimed to compare postural responses to static or dynamic virtual visual inputs and during standard clinical tests of balance in 38 children betwe...
Objectives
This study evaluated the impact of a 12-week, 24-session multimodal group cognitive rehabilitation intervention, the Cognitive Enrichment Program (CEP), on executive functioning and resumption of daily activities after traumatic brain injury (TBI) in older individuals as compared with an active control group that received individual holi...
Objectives:
This study aimed to evaluate the impact of a 12-week, 24-session multimodal group cognitive intervention, the Cognitive Enrichment Program (CEP), on episodic memory in older adults with traumatic brain injury (TBI) compared to an active control group that received usual care in the form of individual holistic rehabilitation.
Methods:...
Purpose
Validate the factor structure and establish internal consistency reliability of the French-Canadian version of the Mayo-Portland Adaptability Inventory (MPAI-4), using a Canadian sample of adults with traumatic brain injury (TBI) receiving post-acute rehabilitation services.
Materials and methods
Psychometric analysis of French-Canadian MP...
A bstract
Objectives
This study aimed to evaluate the impact of a multimodal cognitive intervention, the Cognitive Enrichment Program (CEP), on episodic memory in traumatic brain injured (TBI) older adults, as compared to an active control group that received usual care in the form of holistic rehabilitation.
Methods
The CEP’s Memory module consi...
Objective
To validate the factor structure and establish internal consistency reliability of the French-Canadian version of the Mayo-Portland Adaptability Inventory (MPAI-4), using a Canadian sample of adults with traumatic brain injury (TBI) receiving post-acute rehabilitation services.
Design
Psychometric analysis of prospectively collected Fren...
A bstract
Objectives
This study evaluated the impact of a multimodal cognitive rehabilitation intervention, the Cognitive Enrichment Program (CEP), on executive functioning (EF) and resumption of daily activities following traumatic brain injury (TBI) in older individuals, in comparison to an active control group having received holistic rehabilit...
Background:
In wheelchair users with a spinal cord injury (WUSCI), prolonged non-active sitting time and reduced physical activity-typically linked to this mode of mobility-contribute to the development or exacerbation of cardiorespiratory, musculoskeletal, and endocrine-metabolic health complications that are often linked to increased risks of ch...
BACKGROUND
In wheelchair users with a spinal cord injury (WUSCI), prolonged non-active sitting time and reduced physical activity—typically linked to this mode of mobility—contribute to the development or exacerbation of cardiorespiratory, musculoskeletal, and endocrine-metabolic health complications that are often linked to increased risks of chro...
Objective:
Attentional problems are amongst the most commonly reported complaints following mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), including difficulties orienting and disengaging attention, sustaining it over time, and dividing attentional resources across multiple simultaneous demands. The objective of this study was to track, using a single novel...
The present study aimed to measure neural information processing underlying emotional recognition from facial expressions in adults having sustained a mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) as compared to healthy individuals. We thus measured early (N1, N170) and later (N2) event-related potential (ERP) components during presentation of fearful, neutra...
Introduction: Driving an automobile is an important activity for the social participation of individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI). Return to safe driving is usually addressed during rehabilitation, but we know little about driving behaviors in the years following TBI rehabilitation.
Objective: To explore self-reported and objective (offici...
Evidence-based neurorehabilitation must be informed by the values, expectations, and goals of individuals with acquired brain injury (ABI). The Client’s Intervention Priorities (CIP)© is a person-centered tool for defining rehabilitation priorities according to self-perceived functioning. The use of the CIP tool is encouraged to promote self-determ...
Introduction/Background
Of major importance for the social participation of adults with traumatic brain injury (TBI) is the possibility to drive. Return to safe driving is usually addressed during rehabilitation, but we know little about driving abilities and behaviours in the years following TBI. The aim of this study was to evaluate if individual...
Introduction:
Clinicians need to understand the heterogeneity of sexual problems following traumatic brain injury (TBI) for their adequate identification and treatment.
Objective:
To systematically identify groups of individuals with TBI showing similar patterns of sexual functioning.
Methods:
Forty-two individuals with TBI with a mean age of...
El test MoCA (Montreal Cognitive Assessment) es un test de tamizaje que ha sido concebido para valorar la integridad cognitiva de personas mayores. Sin embargo, ha sido validado con una población altamente escolarizada (Nasreddine et al., 2005). Nasreddine et al. (2015) desarrollaron el MoCA-Basic para la evaluación de personas con baja o nula esco...
Objectives: To assess emotion recognition from dynamic facial, vocal and musical expressions in sub-groups of adults with traumatic brain injuries (TBI) of different severities and identify possible common underlying mechanisms across domains.
Methods: Forty-one adults participated in this study: 10 with moderate–severe TBI, nine with complicated m...
Little is known about the long-term consequences of traumatic brain injury (TBI) regarding risky sexual behaviour. The objectives of the study were (1) to compare risky sexual behaviour in a sample of individuals with TBI having received interdisciplinary rehabilitation with that of healthy controls, and (2) to explore the relationships between ris...
Objective
. To explore differences according to sex in sociosexuality and infidelity in individuals with TBI and in healthy controls.
Participants
. Forty-two individuals with mild, moderate, and severe TBI having completed a postacute TBI rehabilitation program, at least six months after injury, and 47 healthy controls.
Main Measures
. Sociosexual...
Objective:
To explore the experiences, attitudes, and needs related to service delivery regarding sexuality issues in individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI).
Methods:
Community-dwelling individuals with TBI having completed a post-acute TBI rehabilitation program. The TBI sample consisted of 16 men (42.1%) and 22 women (57.9%), with an av...
To date, very little is known about the normal development trajectory of visual texture segregation, or how it is affected by preterm birth. The goal of this study was to characterize the development of visual texture segregation using texture segregation visual evoked potentials (tsVEPs) in children born full-term and children born preterm without...
Mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) has subtle effects on several brain functions that can be difficult to assess and follow-up. We investigated the impact of mTBI on the perception of sine-wave gratings defined by first-and second-order characteristics. Fifteen adults diagnosed with mTBI were assessed at 15 days, 3 months and 12 months after injury...
The aim of this semilongitudinal study was to investigate the development of central visual pathways in children born preterm but without major neurologic impairments and to establish their cognitive and behavioral profile at school age. Ten children born preterm were assessed at 6 months and at school age, using visual evoked potentials at both ti...
Sexual quality of life involves the impact of sexual dysfunction on general quality of life. Postconcussion symptoms are frequent after traumatic brain injury (TBI) but their relationship with sexual quality of life remains unexplored. The current study aimed to: (a) compare sexual quality of life in a sample of individuals with TBI and healthy con...
In the past decades, multiple studies have been interested in developmental patterns of the visual system in healthy infants. During the first year of life, differential maturational changes have been observed between the Magnocellular (P) and the Parvocellular (P) visual pathways. However, few studies investigated P and M system development in inf...
We investigated the impact of mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) on visuomotor processing of first and second order contrast using flickering or motion defined sinusoidal gratings. Spatial frequency was 0.5 cpd and temporal frequency was 2 Hz. Flicker consisted in contrast inversion, and motion drifted right or left. Contrast was 12.5% for first an...
According to the complexity-specific hypothesis, the efficacy with which individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) process visual information varies according to the extensiveness of the neural network required to process stimuli. Specifically, adults with ASD are less sensitive to texture-defined (or second-order) information, which necessit...
During child development, physiological changes occur in the auditory cortex, which are reflected by differences in the electrophysiological signals. This study aimed to examine the age-related changes of the Mismatch Negativity component (MMN) in response to speech and non-speech stimuli in a cross-sectional design. Results revealed distinct patte...
Brain injury can directly and indirectly affect important aspects related to sexuality and sexual function. In this critical review of the literature, traumatic brain injury (TBI) and sexuality are examined. A general review of the concept of sexuality and the neurological correlates of sexual function are proposed as a framework to understand the...
Over the last two decades, the hypothesis of a magnocellular deficit in dyslexia has raised considerable interest and controversy. Using an electrophysiological procedure (visual evoked potentials, VEP), we compared magnocellular and parvocellular contrast and spatial frequency-response functions between phonological dyslexics (n = 16) and a typica...
Individuals who have sustained a mild brain injury (e.g., mild traumatic brain injury or mild cerebrovascular stroke) are at risk to show persistent cognitive symptoms (attention and memory) after the acute postinjury phase. Although studies have shown that those patients perform normally on neuropsychological tests, cognitive symptoms remain prese...
Background / Purpose:
Most of the studies that have focused on the development of the visual system in children using visual evoked potentials (VEPs) have used stimuli soliciting only one level of visual processing. However, the perception of a visual scene requires a multitude of analytical processes ranging from the encoding of various characte...
This study examined how MTBI concomitants such as pain variables, depression, and anxiety were related to attentional functioning at different stages of recovery. Participants having sustained a MTBI who were in the earlier phase of recovery showed, compared to controls, slower reaction times and larger intra-individual variability on a Computerize...
Impact of chronic pain on cognition and concomitant psychological factors
This review article examines the current state of knowledge of the impact of chronic pain (CP) on cognitive/neuropsychological functioning, with a particular focus of the effect of psychological concomitants. A first section focuses on the neuropsychological functioning of pa...
Emotional recognition appears to play a key role in relationships. Indeed, the ability to interpret emotions in the environment allows individuals to anticipate certain intentions or situations, and to respond to them in an appropriate fashion. Difficulties in psychosocial functioning (e.g., job loss, disruption of intimate relationships, reduced s...
Background: Low-level visual perception in adult individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is different from that of neurotypical individuals. For example, sensitivity to luminance-defined spatial information has been demonstrated to be superior in ASD, whereas sensitivity to texture-defined information is less efficiently perceived (Bertone...
Preterm births (≤ 37 gestational weeks) have been identified as one of the most important cause of perinatal mortality in industrialized societies. With improvement in pre- peri- and post-natal care, it is now possible to save these children at significantly lower weight and gestational age than previously. With increasing survival rates, more and...
An important challenge for researchers working with electrophysiological measures is the reduction of ocular artifacts and more specifically, the blinking phenomenon. Despite the fact that most experiments include a “do not blink” instruction in their protocol, very few studies have investigated its impact on cerebral activity, and more precisely o...
Background: Whereas local luminance perception relies mainly on primary visual cortex (V1) functioning, texture perception implicates recurrent neural interactions between V1 and higher visual areas (V2, V3). Recent studies on low-level visual perception in autism have revealed processing strengths for local luminance changes across an image, conco...
The goal of the present study was to assess the impact of mild traumatic brain injury (MTBI) on episodic memory performance in relation to attentional and executive control processes in young adults.
A verbal memory paradigm manipulating attentional load (full attention or divided attention) and semantic congruency between pairs of category-target...
Cet article presente la facon dont l’outil interdisciplinaire Priorites d’intervention du client (PIC) fait appel a la resilience et a l’autodetermination soutenant le client dans le choix de ses objectifs d’intervention. Le PIC a ete developpe en contexte de readaptation pour des personnes ayant un traumatisme craniocerebral. Il s’agit toutefois d...
To evaluate low-level to complex information processing using visual electrophysiology and to examine the latter's prognostic value in regards to vocational outcome in persons having sustained a mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI).
Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to pattern-reversal, simple motion, texture segregation and cognitive odd...
Orientation is one of the visual dimensions that subserve figure-ground discrimination. A spatial gradient in orientation leads to "texture segregation", which is thought to be concurrent parallel processing across the visual field, without scanning. In the visual-evoked potential (VEP) a component can be isolated which is related to texture segreg...
There are important developmental changes occurring during infancy in visual cortical structures that underlie higher-order perceptual abilities. Using high-density electrophysiological recording techniques, the present study aimed to examine the development of visual mechanisms, during the first year of life, associated with texture segregation. F...
Beyond issues of MTBI etiology, a key question remains the characterization and early identification of those individuals at risk of poor functional outcome. Using a retrospective analysis, the current study aimed at identifying the specific indicators related to return to work in adults with both symptomatic MTBI and functional impacts, having com...
Previous studies have suggested that compared to first-order (FO) motion stimuli, second-order (SO) motion stimuli required more cortical time to be processed. The purpose of this study was: 1- to verify this claim with Visual Evoked Potential (VEP) and eye-hand Reaction Time (RT) measurements and 2- examine if the VEP and RT responses are similarl...
Visual evoked potentials (VEPs) were recorded to textures segregated by gradients in orientation or motion. Recordings were obtained in traumatic brain-injured (TBI) subjects and in normal controls. We analyzed both the low-level VEPs (llVEPs) evoked by homogenous stimuli, as well as the components associated with texture segregation (tsVEP) obtain...
Purpose: With the use of the pattern reversal visual evoked potential and the motor reaction time, we sought to differentiate anisometropic amblyopia from strabismic amblyopia on the basis of the visual transmission time. Methods: Pattern reversal visual evoked potentials and motor reaction times were obtained in nine normal subjects, eight anisome...
Purpose: In humans, Visual Evoked Potentials (VEPs) are obtained to a variety of stimuli, some of which are relatively complex. The purpose of this study was to examine if the processing of more complex stimuli yields a measurable increase in retino-cortical timing. Methods: Visual evoked potentials (VEPs) and eye-hand reaction times (RT) for lumin...
In an attempt to explain the existing discrepancies regarding the relationship between electrophysiological and psychophysical measurements of visual transmission time we compared, in humans, the response characteristics of the normal retino-cortical pathways with simultaneously obtained pattern visual evoked potentials (PVEP) and simple motor reac...
With the use of the pattern reversal visual evoked potential and the motor reaction time, we sought to differentiate anisometropic amblyopia from strabismic amblyopia on the basis of the visual transmission time.
Pattern reversal visual evoked potentials and motor reaction times were obtained in nine normal subjects, eight anisometropic and seven s...
We report on a family where four of the eleven children presented with reduced visual acuities, a red-green deficit at the
Farnsworth-Munsel FM 100-hue test, normal appearing fundi and unexpected electroretinographic findings. Light- (photopic)
and dark- (scotopic) adapted electroretinograms (ERG) and oscillatory potentials (OPs) were obtained foll...
With the use of the simple motor reaction time (RT), we examined the contribution of the hemiretinas to the timing of the pattern reversal visual evoked potential (PVEP). RTs were obtained to the reversal of a progressively dimmer check falling either on the central, nasal, temporal, superior or inferior retina. Results were correlated with the pea...
Purpose. Results presented last year (McKerral et al., ARVO 1996) suggested that the eye-hand Reaction Time (RT) appeared to travel preferentially along the M-pathway while neither M nor P bias could be demonstrated with the Pattern Visual Evoked Potential (PVEP) stimuli used. The purpose of our study was to examine if the two means of measuring th...
The contribution of each monocular pathway to the timing of the binocular pattern visual evoked potential was assessed in situations where a significant interocular timing discrepancy was observed. Monocular and binocular pattern visual evoked potentials to 0.5 degree checks were recorded from normal subjects, normal subjects in whom one eye was bl...
We investigated the effect of reduced luminance and increased scatter on the pattern visual evoked potential and eye-hand reaction time evoked to a check size of 0.5 degrees in 10 normal subjects. Data analysis indicated that a reduction in luminance as well as an increase in scatter caused a statistically significant increase in the peak time of t...