Montserrat Zurrón

• PhD
• Head of Department at University of Santiago de Compostela

Previous research has revealed patterns of brain atrophy in subjective cognitive decline, a potential preclinical stage of Alzheimer’s disease. However, the involvement of myelin content and microstructural alterations in subjective cognitive decline have not previously been investigated. This study included three groups of participants recruited f...

Functional connectivity studies to detect neurophysiological correlates of amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), a prodromal stage of Alzheimer’s disease, have generated contradictory results in terms of compensation and deterioration, as most of the studies did not distinguish between the different aMCI subtypes: single-domain aMCI (sd-aMCI)...

Background Apolipoprotein E ε4 allele (APOEε4) is considered the major genetic risk factor of Alzheimer´s Disease (AD). Structural magnetic resonance imaging (sMRI) studies demonstrated that, compared to APOEε4 non‐carriers, APOEε4 carriers display structural changes in lateral and medial temporal lobe (MTL). However, the knowledge about the impact...

IntroductionSubjective Cognitive Decline (SCD) can progress to mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) dementia and thus may represent a preclinical stage of the AD continuum. However, evidence about structural changes observed in the brain during SCD remains inconsistent.Materials and methodsThis cross-sectional study aimed to...

Experiments on event-related electroencephalographic oscillations in aged people typically include blocks of cognitive tasks with a few minutes of interval between them. The present exploratory study tested the effect of being engaged on cognitive tasks over the resting state cortical arousal after task completion, and whether it differs according...

Cognitive Reserve (CR) is considered as one protective factor during the aging process. However, although CR is a multifactorial construct, it has been operationalised in a unitary way (years of formal education or IQ). In the present study, a validated measure to categorize CR holistically (Cognitive Reserve Index Questionnaire) was used to evalua...

Introduction This study aimed to evaluate, in adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI), the brain atrophy that may distinguish between three AT(N) biomarker-based profiles, and to determine its clinical value. Methods Structural MRI (sMRI) was employed to evaluate the volume and cortical thickness differences in MCI patients with different AT(N...

Evidence suggests that aging-related dysfunctions of adipose tissue and metabolic disturbances increase the risk of diabetes and metabolic syndrome (MtbS), eventually leading to cognitive impairment and dementia. However, the neuroprotective role of adipocytokines in this process has not been specifically investigated. The present study aims to ide...

The present fMRI study aimed to characterize the performance and the brain activity changes related to episodic memory retrieval in adults with single domain aMCI (sdaMCI), relative to cognitively unimpaired adults. Participants performed an old/new recognition memory task with words while BOLD signal was acquired. The sdaMCI group showed lower hit...

Working memory (WM) is a keystone of our cognitive abilities. Increasing load has been shown to dampen its performance and affect oscillatory neural activity in different frequency bands. Nevertheless, mixed results regarding fast frequencies activity and a lack of research on WM load modulations of cross-frequency phase-amplitude coupling mechanis...

Background Mild cognitive impairment (MCI), clinically considered an intermediate state between the cognitive changes of normal aging and early dementia (Petersen, 2016), progress frequently to Alzheimer´s clinical syndrome. Alzheimer Disease (AD) biomarkers are used to evaluate the etiology and progression of MCI. In this study, we evaluated wheth...

In the present study we used the event-related brain potentials (ERP) technique and eLORETA (exact low-resolution electromagnetic tomography) method in order to characterize and compare the performance and the spatiotemporal pattern of the brain electrical activity related to the immediate episodic retrieval of information (words) that is being lea...

We summarize here the findings of several studies in which we analyzed the event-related brain potentials (ERPs) elicited in participants with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and in healthy controls during performance of executive tasks. The objective of these studies was to investigate the neural functioning associated with executive processes in...

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 84 adults (51 to 87 years old) with the aim of exploring the effects of aging (middle-aged and older groups) and cognitive status (healthy or with amnestic mild cognitive impairment, aMCI) on the neural functioning associated with stimulus and response processing in a Stroop color-word task. An int...

Age-related decline in cognitive capacities has been attributed to a generalized slowing of processing speed and a reduction in working memory (WM) capacity. Nevertheless, it is unclear how age affects visuospatial WM recognition and its underlying brain electrical activity. Whether age modulates the effects of memory load or information maintenanc...

Memory capacity suffers an age-related decline, which is supposed to be due to a generalized slowing of processing speed and to a reduced availability of processing resources. Information encoding in memory has been demonstrated to be very sensitive to age-related changes, especially when carried out through self-initiated strategies or under high...

Aging-related decline in short-term memory (STM) capacity seems to be caused by deficient balancing of task-related and resting state brain networks activity. The exact neural mechanism underlying this deficit remains elusive, however. Here, we studied brain oscillatory activity in healthy young and old adults during visual information maintenance...

We examined the event-related brain potentials elicited by color-word stimuli in a Stroop task in which healthy participants (young and old) had to judge whether the meaning and the color of the stimulus were congruent or incongruent. The Stroop effect occurred in both age groups, with longer reaction times in the older group than in the young grou...

Working memory (WM) involves three cognitive events: information encoding, maintenance, and retrieval; these are supported by brain activity in a network of frontal, parietal and temporal regions. Manipulation of WM load and duration of the maintenance period can modulate this activity. Although such modulations have been widely studied using the e...

Although there is evidence for preferential perceptual processing of written emotional information, the effects of attentional manipulations and the time course of affective processing require further clarification. In this study, we attempted to investigate how the emotional content of words modulates cerebral functioning (event-related potentials...

It has been suggested that changes in some event-related potential (ERP) parameters associated with controlled processing of stimuli could be used as biomarkers of amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI). However, data regarding the suitability of ERP components associated with automatic and involuntary processing of stimuli for this purpose are...

With the aim of establishing the temporal locus of the semantic conflict in color-word Stroop and emotional Stroop phenomena, we analyzed the Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) elicited by nonwords, incongruent and congruent color words, colored words with positive and negative emotional valence, and colored words with neutral valence. The incongruent...

Different cortical dynamics of alpha oscillations (8–13 Hz) have been associated with increased working memory load, which have been mostly interpreted as a neural correlate of functional inhibition. This study aims at determining whether different manifestations of load-dependent amplitude and phase dynamics in the alpha band can coexist over diff...

Working memory is composed by encoding, maintenance and retrieval processes. These processes share the same parietal-frontal network for visuospatial stimulation. Recently, some neuroimaging studies compared brain activation in encoding and retrieval processes, but only one (Miller et al., 2008) compared the ERP waveforms in both of them, and refer...

Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) elicited by congruent and incongruent colour-word stimuli of a Stroop paradigm, in a task in which participants were required to judge the congruence/incongruence of the two dimensions of the stimuli, were recorded in order to study the timing of the semantic conflict. The reaction time to colour-word incongruent sti...

Subjects with high and low scores on Eysenck's extraversion scale were presented with a block of 500 tones which was then divided into five subblocks. The subjects' task was to identify a higher-pitched tone (target tones) in a series of lower-pitched tones (standard tones), and to quickly press a button when they were sure that the tone they had h...

An evaluation was made of whether stimulus intensity affects changes of P300 amplitude in response to repeated presentation of the target stimulus in a standard auditory oddball task. P300 latency values were also evaluated. Three samples were selected, one for each intensity used: 65, 85 and 105 dB SPL (sound pressure level). Five hundred tones (5...

This study evaluated whether P300 amplitude declines in response to repeated presentation of the target in a standard auditory oddball task; to what extent the decrease is affected by the number of targets presented, interrupted by an interblock interval (IBI, 3 min) and consistent. We also aimed to identify factors inducing P300 amplitude decrease...

Short-, middle-and long-latency auditory evoked potentials (SAEPs, MAEPs and LAEPs) were examined in 12 subjects with Down's syndrome and in 12 age-matched normal subjects. In comparison with the normal subjects, Down subjects showed shorter latencies for SAEP peaks II, Ill, IV and V (and correspondingly shorter interpeak intervals l-|I and i-lII)...

In this work we studied the relationship between IQ scores on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) and the latencies of Brainstem AEPs (BAEPs; AEP = Auditory Evoked Potential), Middle-latency AEPs (MAEPs) and Long-latency AEPs (LAEPs) in 28 healthy subjects aged 9–15 years (mean WISC full-scale IQ 96); LAEPs were elicited in both pas...

This article provides a critical review of the literature on auditory evoked potentials (AEPs) in the mentally retarded, followed by a description of our own research on short (or brainstem) and middle latency AEPs (BAEPs and MAEPs) and on long latency AEPs in oddball tasks (ERPs) in three groups of subjects with mental retardation (MR) of differen...

Auditory event-related potentials were recorded from subjects performing an active and/or a passive oddball task. The subjects belonged to three groups: 27 nonretarded (NR) subjects; 39 "discriminating" retarded (DR) subjects; and 12 "nondiscriminating" retarded (NDR) subjects. With respect to NR subjects, DR subjects had significantly longer laten...

Brainstem, middle-latency, and long-latency auditory evoked potentials (BAEPs, MAEPs, and LAEPs) and visual evoked potentials (VEPs) were recorded from subjects without mental retardation (control subjects) and from subjects with organic mental retardation or cultural-familial mental retardation. Both mentally retarded groups had smaller mean VEP a...

Short-, middle- and long-latency auditory evoked potentials (SAEPs, MAEPs and LAEPs) were examined in 12 subjects with Down's syndrome and in 12 age-matched normal subjects. In comparison with the normal subjects, Down subjects showed shorter latencies for SAEP peaks II, III, IV and V (and correspondingly shorter interpeak intervals I-II and I-III)...

Se analizan aquellos artículos que estudian registros de potenciales evocados auditivos de latencia corta (PEALC) en sujetos con síndrome de Down (S.D.). A diferencia de lo que ocurre con otras poblaciones clínicas, encontramos una gran concordancia entre los resultados obtenidos por los distintos autores, lo cual nos permite señalar la existencia...