Raquel Viejo-Sobera

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya | UOC · Faculty of Health Sciences

The Stroop Color-Word Test is a useful tool to evaluate executive attention and speed of processing. Recent studies have provided norms for different populations of healthy individuals to avoid misinterpretation of scores due to demographic and cultural differences. In addition, clinical norms may improve the assessment of cognitive dysfunction sev...

Theta burst stimulation (TBS) protocols hold high promise in neuropsychological rehabilitation. Nevertheless, their ability to either decrease (continuous, cTBS) or increase (intermittent, iTBS) cortical excitability in areas other than the primary motor cortex, and their consistency modulating human behaviors with clinically relevant tasks remain...

Human neuroimaging studies have consistently reported changes in cerebellar function and integrity in association with obesity. To date, however, the nature of this link has not been studied directly. Emerging evidence suggests a role for the cerebellum in higher cognitive functions through reciprocal connections with the prefrontal cortex. The pur...

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a non-invasive brain stimulation technique able to modulate cortical excitability. This modulation may influence areas and networks responsible for specific cognitive processes, and the repetition of the induced temporary changes can produce long-lasting effects. TMS effectiveness may be enhanced when used...

Background An increase in lifespan in our society is a double-edged sword that entails a growing number of patients with neurocognitive disorders, Alzheimer’s disease being the most prevalent. Advances in medical imaging and computational power enable new methods for the early detection of neurocognitive disorders with the goal of preventing or red...

Cannabis is being legalized for medical and recreational purposes all around the world. However, the understanding of the psychological effects of cannabis is still limited, and it has been previously linked to mental disorders such as schizophrenia. Lately, new scales have been created and adapted to measure its psychological effects. The aim of t...

Preparatory control in task-switching has been suggested to rely upon a set of distributed regions within a frontoparietal network, with frontal and parietal cortical areas cooperating to implement switch-specific preparation processes. Although recent causal evidences using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) have generally supported this mode...

Hemispatial neglect is one of the most frequent attention disorders after stroke. The presence of neglect is associated with longer hospital stays, extended rehabilitation periods, and poorer functional recovery. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a new technique with promising results in neglect rehabilitation; therefore, the object...

Background: Social cognition abilities such as empathy and the Theory of Mind (ToM) have been shown to be impaired in neuropsychiatric conditions such as psychotic, autistic, and bipolar disorders. The endocannabinoid system (ECS) seems to play a role in social behavior and emotional processing while it also seems to play a role in those neuropsych...

Background: Although δ-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main cannabinoid from the cannabis plant, is responsible for the psychotomimetic effects of cannabis, cannabidiol (CBD), the second most abundant cannabinoid in the cannabis plant, does not show any psychotomimetic effect. Cannabidiol has even been proposed to be antipsychotic and to counter...

Background: Increase in life-span in our society is a double-edged sword that entails a growing number of patients with neurocognitive disorders, Alzheimer’s disease being the most prevalent. Advances in medical imaging and computational power, enable new methods for early detection of neurocognitive disorders with the goal of preventing or reducin...

Increase in life-span in our society is a double-edged sword that entails a growing number of patients with neurocognitive disorders, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) being the most prevalent. Advances in medical imaging and computational power, enable new methods for early detection of neurocognitive disorders with the goal of preventing or reducing cogni...

Objective: Alzheimer's disease is a major health problem in our society. To date, pharmacological treatments have obtained poor results and there is a growing interest in finding non-pharmacological interventions for this disease. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a non-invasive technique that is able to induce changes in brain activity a...

Cognitive rehabilitation in patients and cognitive enhancement in healthy people is a recurrent goal in neuroscience research. To date two newly developed methods have shown positive results in this regard: noninvasive brain stimulation and the use of commercial videogames. Specifically transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) has shown promising re...

Background: Video gaming is an increasingly popular activity in contemporary society, especially among young people, and video games are increasing in popularity not only as a research tool but also as a field of study. Many studies have focused on the neural and behavioral effects of video games, providing a great deal of video game derived brain...

In neuroscientific research, neuro-enhancement is seldom considered as a stand-alone goal, but it is, nevertheless, a desired effect in non-invasive brain-stimulation which can provide valuable information about the underlying neural mechanisms which regulate cognitive functioning. Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) is a non-invasive stimulati...

We aim to sumarizethe main findings of non-invasive brain stimulation studies in decision making process. Lesion and neuroimaging studies have pointed out a variety of cortical and subcortical areas involved in decision making. Recently, non-invasive brain stimulation techniques such as tDCSor TMS, have provided a new source of information about th...

After brain injury, cortical excitability and function may be altered, affecting neural networks due to decreased activation in the location of the lesion and resulting in an imbalance in interhemispheric interactions. TMS could be a therapeutic tool that can help brain plasticity processes through neuromodulation modifying cortical excitability, i...

Emotion has often been compared to a 'double‐edged sword', as it can either improve or hinder various characteristics of behavior and cognition. Different studies have shown that emotional information tends to impair working memory (WM) maintenance, whereas emotional information tends to be better remembered in long‐term episodic memory (EM). Funct...

La neuropsicología analiza la relación existente entre los diferentes procesos psicológicos, fundamentalmente cognitivos, y el funcionamiento cerebral. Es una disciplina en auge vinculada estrechamente a los avances que se realizan en otras áreas y disciplinas de las neurociencias, como la neurología, la neuroradiología, la neurobiología o la neuro...