Nemanja Vaci

The University of Sheffield | Sheffield · Department of Psychology (Faculty of Science)

Background Marital status and living status are components of social isolation (SI), a modifiable factor thought to impact cognitive resilience, which has the potential to impact cognition throughout the course of Alzheimer’s and related dementia (ADRD) diagnosis. Electronic health records (EHRs) offer access to large scale clinical data, capable o...

Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have made significant strides in recent years, often supplementing rather than replacing human performance. The extent of their assistance at the highest levels of human performance remains unclear. We analyse over 11.6 million decisions of elite chess players, a domain commonly used as a testbed for AI and...

Introduction: Quantifying signals in large, sparse datasets is challenging, as noise and redundant features often obscure informative patterns. Chess middlegames, with their dynamic complexity and endless possibilities, provide a testbed for exploring such challenges. Building on 12 studies that identified three categories of chess complexity—diffi...

The scientific potential of digital game studies in psychology is limited by the observational nature of the data that they investigate. However, digital environments present us with a perfect opportunity to incorporate experimental paradigms in complex interactive and multivariate worlds where each decision made by participants can be tracked and...

The Home Advantage (HA) phenomenon, where teams perform better in front of their fans, has garnered increased interest during the COVID-19 pandemic, which provided a unique opportunity to study HA without crowd presence. Despite the presence of useful conceptual frameworks, most previous research has focused on investigating isolated individual fac...

The Covid-19 pandemic has significantly altered the way sporting events are observed. With the absence or limited presence of spectators in stadiums, the traditional advantage enjoyed by home teams has diminished considerably. This underscores the notion that the support of home fans can often be considered a key factor of the home advantage (HA) p...

Neurodevelopmental disorders are difficult to diagnose, requiring expert clinicians and subjective judgements. Consequently, there has been interest in finding quantitative biomarkers for some disorders using resting state electroencephalogram (EEG) data. Here, we focus on resting state EEG biomarkers of autism. Although many previous reports have...

Mental health conditions are difficult to diagnose, requiring expert clinicians and subjective judgements. There has been interest in finding quantitative biomarkers using resting state electroencephalogram (EEG) data. Here, we focus on resting state EEG biomarkers of autism. Although many previous reports have pointed to differences between autist...

Insight problems are likely to trigger an initial, incorrect mental representation, which needs to be restructured in order to find the solution. Despite the widespread theoretical assumption that this restructuring process happens suddenly, leading to the typical “Aha!” experience, the evidence is inconclusive. Among the reasons for this lack of c...

Home Advantage (HA) is a robust phenomenon in which sport teams or individuals are more successful when they play in front of their fans. There are a number of causes of HA, but most theories assume that the crowd support spurs home players to better performance and biases referees, and that these two factors in turn influence the result. The inter...

Observational studies are being used more and more in psychology and medicine since they provide a wealth of data for real-world issues. Their biggest drawback is the lack of falsification due to the control mechanisms of control conditions being unavailable. However, the Covid-19 pandemic and the isolation policies related to it have provided an e...

The current pandemic has changed how we watch sporting events. With the complete or partial absence of fans in stadiums, the advantage that home teams normally enjoy has been considerably reduced. This has confirmed that the home fans’ support is the main cause of the home advantage (HA) phenomenon, where teams perform better in front of their supp...

Background Donepezil, galantamine, rivastigmine and memantine are potentially effective interventions for cognitive impairment in dementia, but the use of these drugs has not been personalised to individual patients yet. We examined whether artificial intelligence-based recommendations can identify the best treatment using routinely collected patie...

Gaming is a domain of profound skill development. Players’ digital traces create data that track the development of skill from novice to expert levels. We argue that existing work, although promising, has yet to take advantage of the potential of game data for understanding skill acquisition, and that to realize this potential, future studies can u...

UK Biobank (UKB) is widely employed to investigate mental health disorders and related exposures; however, its applicability and relevance in a clinical setting and the assumptions required have not been sufficiently and systematically investigated. Here, we present the first validation study using secondary care mental health data with linkage to...

The fans’ importance in sports is acknowledged by the term ‘the 12th man’, a figurative extra player for the home team. Sport teams are indeed more successful when they play in front of their fans than when they play away. The supposed mechanism behind this phenomenon, termed Home Advantage (HA), is that fans’ support spurs home players to better p...

The fans’ importance in sports is acknowledged by the term ‘the 12th man’, a figurative extra player for the home team. Sport teams are indeed more successful when they play in front of their fans than when they play away. The supposed mechanism behind this phenomenon, termed Home Advantage (HA), is that fans’ support spurs home players to better p...

Background: Understanding adolescents' mental health during lockdown and identifying those most at risk is an urgent public health challenge. This study surveyed school pupils across Southern England during the first COVID-19 school lockdown to investigate situational factors associated with mental health difficulties and how they relate to pupils...

Gamers invest many hours exploring digital environments in which simple rules can generate a complex space of action, response and interaction with other players. As well as being an industry with greater revenue than the global music and film industries combined, gaming is also a domain of profound skill development. Players' digital traces create...

Bipolar disorder (BD) and borderline personality disorder (BPD) are two chronic mental health conditions that clinicians find challenging to distinguish based on clinical interviews, due to their overlapping symptoms. In this work, we investigate the automatic detection of these two conditions by modelling both verbal and non-verbal cues in a set o...

Electronic health record systems are ubiquitous and the majority of patients’ data are now being collected electronically in the form of free text. Deep learning has significantly advanced the field of natural lanuage processing and the self-supervised representation learning and the transfer learning have become the methods of choice in particular...

Bipolar disorder (BD) and borderline personality disorder (BPD) are two chronic mental health conditions that clinicians find challenging to distinguish based on clinical interviews, due to their overlapping symptoms. In this work, we investigate the automatic detection of these two conditions by modelling both verbal and non-verbal cues in a set o...

Background Selected cardiovascular factors, APOE ε4 allele carriership and family history of dementia (FHD) are robust risk factors for late‐onset dementia. While it is recognised that cardiovascular factors exert their influence from mid‐age, it is unclear whether APOE ε4 carriership and a future FHD impact the process. Here we test the hypothesis...

In this work we addressed the problem of capturing sequential information contained in longitudinal electronic health records (EHRs). Clinical notes, which is a particular type of EHR data, are a rich source of information and practitioners often develop clever solutions how to maximise the sequential information contained in free-texts. We propose...

In this work we addressed the problem of capturing sequential information contained in longitudinal electronic health records (EHRs). Clinical notes, which is a particular type of EHR data, are a rich source of information and practitioners often develop clever solutions how to maximise the sequential information contained in free-texts. We propose...

In speed-based sports that require fast reactions, the most accurate predictions are made once the players have seen the ball trajectory. However, waiting for the ball trajectory does not leave enough time for appropriate reactions. Expert athletes use kinematic information which they extract from the opponent’s movements to anticipate the ball tra...

Background The efficacy of acetylcholinesterase inhibitors and memantine in the symptomatic treatment of Alzheimer's disease is well-established. Randomised trials have shown them to be associated with a reduction in the rate of cognitive decline. Aims To investigate the real-world effectiveness of acetylcholinesterase inhibitors and memantine for...

The Too-Much-Talent Effect (TMT, Swaab et al., 2014) challenges the common belief that teams’ performance is directly proportional to the talent of its members and aligns among various Too Much of a Good Thing (TMGT) phenomena. Although the assumption holds up to a point, the authors argue, beyond that point, talent becomes detrimental to performan...

Purpose The contribution of social and behavioural factors in the development of mental health conditions and treatment effectiveness is widely supported, yet there are weak population level data sources on social and behavioural determinants of mental health. Enriching these data gaps will be crucial to accelerating precision medicine. Some have s...

Background Oxford Mental Illness and Suicide tool (OxMIS) is a brief, scalable, freely available, structured risk assessment tool to assess suicide risk in patients with severe mental illness (schizophrenia-spectrum disorders or bipolar disorder). OxMIS requires further external validation, but a lack of large-scale cohorts with relevant variables...

We describe three different methods that are appropriate to analyze various types of psycholinguistic data. We discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of each and their suitability according to characteristics of the data. Methods include analysis of variance (ANOVA), linear mixed-effects modeling (LME) and generalized additive mixed models (G...

Objective: To test the hypothesis that among cognitively healthy individuals, distinct groups exist in terms of amyloid and phosphorylated-tau accumulation rates; that if rapid accumulator groups exist, their membership can be predicted by Alzheimer's disease (AD) risk factors, and that time points of significant increase in AD protein accumulatio...

The field of clinical natural language processing has been advanced significantly since the introduction of deep learning models. The self-supervised representation learning and the transfer learning paradigm became the methods of choice in many natural language processing application, in particular in the settings with the dearth of high quality m...

Background Utilisation of routinely collected electronic health records from secondary care offers unprecedented possibilities for medical science research but can also present difficulties. One key issue is that medical information is presented as free-form text and, therefore, requires time commitment from clinicians to manually extract salient i...

Insight problems are likely to trigger an initial, inappropriate mental representation, which needs to be restructured in order to find the solution. Despite the widespread theoretical assumption that this restructuring process happens suddenly, which leads to the typical Aha! experience, the evidence is inconclusive. Among the reasons for this lac...

Introduction: The ROADMAP project aimed to provide an integrated overview of European real-world data on Alzheimer's disease (AD) across the disease spectrum. Methods: Metadata were identified from data sources in catalogs of European AD projects. Priority outcomes for different stakeholders were identified through systematic literature review,...

The relative importance of different factors in the development of human skills has been extensively discussed. Research on expertise indicates that focused practice may be the sole determinant of skill, while intelligence researchers underline the relative importance of abilities at even the highest level of skill. There is indeed a large body of...

Researchers interested in changes that occur as people age are faced with a number of methodological problems, starting with the immense time scale they are trying to capture, which renders laboratory experiments useless and longitudinal studies rather rare. Fortunately, some people take part in particular activities and pastimes throughout their l...

Objectives/aims The importance of identifying emerging rather than widespread amyloid pathology is highlighted by evidence showing that rapid amyloid accumulation associates with cortical atrophy, cognitive deficits and tau deposition even where individuals are in the ‘amyloid negative’ range. The study aimed to test the hypothesis that among cogni...

The game of chess has often been used for psychological investigations, particularly in cognitive science. The clear-cut rules and well-defined environment of chess provide a model for investigations of basic cognitive processes, such as perception, memory, and problem solving, while the precise rating system for the measurement of skill has enable...

Age-related decline may not be as pronounced in complex activities as it is in basic cognitive processes, but ability deterioration with age is difficult to deny. However, studies disagree on whether age is kinder to more able people than it is to their less able peers. In this article, we investigated the "age is kinder to the more able" hypothesi...

According to the embodied cognition framework, comprehension of language involves activation of the same sensorimotor areas of the brain that are activated when entities and events described by language structures (e.g., words, sentences) are actually experienced (Barsalou 1999). Previous work on the comprehension of sentences showed support for th...

The aim of this study was to examine robustness of methods for estimating regression parameters using reaction time latencies. Previous studies are showing that reaction times violate most of the preconditions required by general linear models. First, distribution is skewed, i.e., non-Gaussian. Second, response latencies are autocorrelated. Third,...

span>Cilj ovog članka je da ilustruje modelovanje vremena reakcije korišćenjem linearnih mešovitih efekata. Ova analiza je ponuđena kao alternativa standardnoj obradi tehnikama iz porodice generalnih linearnih modela. Detaljno su prikazane karakteristike vremena reakcije, kao najčešće korišćene zavisne varijable u različitim psihološkim eksperiment...

The aim of this article is to illustrate the modeling of response times using linear mixed-effects model technique, offered as an alternative to standard analyses from the general linear models family. Characteristics of response times, used as the main dependent variable in many psychological experiments, are analyzed in detail. This measure often...