Robert Bilder

University of California, Los Angeles | UCLA · Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and Psychology

Experimental cognitive tests are designed to measure particular cognitive domains, although evidence supporting test validity is often limited. The Consortium for Neuropsychiatric Phenomics test battery administered 23 experimental and traditional neuropsychological tests to a large sample of community volunteers ( n = 1,059) and patients with psyc...

There are few studies of impacts of arts on recovery in schizphrenia, on audience mood and social connection. We developed a pilot evaluation of opera performances in a university setting on Elyn Saks’ journey from psychosis, teaching law and falling in love, coupled with pre-opera workshop on approaches to resilience. Using surveys, primary outcom...

Objective Individuals with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) exhibit deficits in reward-based learning, which have important implications for behavioral regulation. Prior research has shown that these individuals show altered patterns of risky decision-making, which may be partially explained as a function of dysfunctional reactivity...

Objective Interpretation of neuropsychological (NP) tests depends on the quality of the normative standards available for the tests. Co-norming across tests is necessary when interpreting differences between scores on different tests. The relevance of specific norms for an individual examinee further depends on multiple design features of the stand...

Risky decision-making is a common, heritable endophenotype seen across many psychiatric disorders. Its underlying genetic architecture is incompletely explored. We examined behavior in the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), which tests risky decision-making, in two independent samples of European ancestry. One sample (n = 1138) comprised healthy pa...

Objective: Most neuropsychological tests were developed without the benefit of modern psychometric theory. We used item response theory (IRT) methods to determine whether a widely used test - the 26-item Matrix Reasoning subtest of the WAIS-IV - might be used more efficiently if it were administered using computerized adaptive testing (CAT). Meth...

The associative theory posits that creativity relates to people’s ability to connect remote associations to form new ideas, based on the structure of their semantic memory. This theory has spurred several recent studies connecting semantic memory structure and associative thinking to creativity, capitalizing on advances in computational methods. To...

Cognitive screening instruments (CSI) have variable sensitivity and specificity to the cognitive changes associated with dementia syndromes, and the most recent systematic review found insufficient evidence to support the benefit of cognitive screening tools in older adults residing within the community. Consequently, there is a critical need to im...

Cognitive disorders are prevalent in people with HIV (PWH) despite antiretroviral therapy. Given the heterogeneity of cognitive disorders in PWH in the current era and evidence that these disorders have different etiologies and risk factors, scientific rationale is growing for using data-driven models to identify biologically defined subtypes (biot...

Existing research has consistently supported a relationship between creative achievement and specific personality traits (e.g., openness to experience). However, such work has largely focused on univariate associations, potentially obscuring complex interactions among multiple personality factors, rendering an incomplete picture of the creative per...

Democracies are increasingly under siege. Beyond direct external (e.g., warfare) and internal (e.g., populism, extremism) threats to democratic nations, multiple democracy-weakening factors are converging in our modern world. Brain health challenges, including mental, neurologic, and substance use disorders, social determinants of health, long COVI...

COVID-19 research has relied heavily on convenience-based samples, which—though often necessary—are susceptible to important sampling biases. We begin with a theoretical overview and introduction to the dynamics that underlie sampling bias. We then empirically examine sampling bias in online COVID-19 surveys and evaluate the degree to which common...

Risky decision-making is a common, heritable endophenotype seen across many psychiatric disorders. Its underlying genetic architecture is incompletely explored. We examined behavior in the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART), which tests risky decision-making, in two independent samples of European ancestry. One sample (n=1138) comprised healthy part...

Few studies have assessed the impact of operas on audience engagement in social issues and psychological well-being. This study evaluated a streaming opera’s effects on measures of audience engagement important to Veterans’ recovery from posttraumatic stress and unstable housing. Among 185 attendees, 137 completed at least part of the pre- or posto...

Objectives The combination of d-methylphenidate and guanfacine (an alpha adrenergic 2A agonist) may be an effective alternative to either monotherapy in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). This study is the first to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying medication effects using cortical-source analysis of electroen...

Objective The combination of d-methylphenidate and guanfacine (an alpha-2A agonist) has emerged as a potential alternative to either monotherapy in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but it is unclear what predicts response to these treatments. This study is the first to investigate pre-treatment clinical and electroence...

Objective: Major obstacles to data harmonization in neuropsychology include lack of consensus about what constructs and tests are most important and invariant across healthy and clinical populations. This study addressed these challenges using data from the National Neuropsychology Network (NNN). Method: Data were obtained from 5,000 NNN partici...

Objective: In this position article, we highlight the importance of considering cultural and linguistic variables that influence neuropsychological test performance and the possible moderating impact on our understanding of brain/behavior relationships. Increasingly, neuropsychologists are realizing that cultural and language differences between c...

Brain mechanisms underlying creativity are largely unknown and few studies have involved exceptionally creative individuals. We examined functional MRI (fMRI) connectivity in a “smart comparison group” (SCG; n = 24), and in exceptionally creative (“Big C”) visual artists (VIS; n = 21) and scientists (SCI; n = 21). Groups were matched on age, sex, a...

The Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative aims to organize research according to domains of brain function. Dysfunction within these domains leads to psychopathology that is classically measured with rating scales. Examining the correspondence between the specific measures assessed within rating scales and RDoC domains is necessary to assess t...

Introduction Studying neuro‐structural markers of intellectual giftedness (IG) will inform scientific understanding of the processes helping children excel academically. Methods Structural and diffusion‐weighted MRI was used to compare regional brain shape and connectivity of 12 children with average to high average IQ and 18 IG children, defined...

Objetivos: el Comité de Práctica Inter Organizacional (IOPC) convocó a un grupo de trabajo para brindar una guía rápida sobre teleneuropsicología (TeleNP) en respuesta a la pandemia de COVID-19. Métodos: un panel colaborativo de expertos de las principales organizaciones profesionales de USA desarrolló una guía provisional para la práctica de neuro...

Working memory (WM) has been defined as the active maintenance and flexible updating of goal-relevant information in a form that has limited capacity and resists interference. Complex measures of WM recruit multiple subprocesses, making it difficult to isolate specific contributions of putatively independent subsystems. The present study was design...

Broad-based cognitive deficits are an enduring and disabling symptom for many patients with severe mental illness, and these impairments are inadequately addressed by current medications. While novel drug targets for schizophrenia and depression have emerged from recent large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of these psychiatric disorde...

Objective.: The National Neuropsychology Network (NNN) is a multicenter clinical research initiative funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH; R01 MH118514) to facilitate neuropsychology's transition to contemporary psychometric assessment methods with resultant improvement in test validation and assessment efficiency. Method: The...

Objective: The Inter Organizational Practice Committee (IOPC) convened a workgroup to develop guidance on models to provide neuropsychological (NP) care during the COVID-19 pandemic while minimizing risks of novel coronavirus transmission as lockdown orders are lifted and ambulatory clinical services resume. Method: A collaborative panel of experts...

Objective: The Inter Organizational Practice Committee (IOPC) convened a workgroup to develop guidance on models to provide neuropsychological (NP) care during the COVID-19 pandemic while minimizing risks of novel coronavirus transmission as lockdown orders are lifted and ambulatory clinical services resume. Method: A collaborative panel of expe...

Objective: This paper presents a theory-based brief resilience scale, the Resilience Resources Scale (RRS), and evidence for its factor structure, reliability, and validity in two studies of undergraduate students. Participants: Study 1 sampled 295 students and Study 2 sampled 244 students. Methods: Study 1 participants completed the RRS and other...

Objective Researchers reported that bilinguals have an advantage in visual task-shifting (VTS) and associated this advantage with executive functions (EF). We found self-reported monolinguals were faster than bilinguals when comparing switch (SW) and no-switch (NSW) incongruent trials on VTS, and that memory and age were significant predictors, not...

Objective We used canonical correlation analysis (CCA) to examine the relationship between performance on cognitive neuroscience measures of sustained attention, deterministic reversal learning (DRLT), and visual task-shifting (VTS). We evaluated whether DRLT and VTS predicted performance on the Continuous Performance Test-II (CPT-II). Method Part...

Objective The Inter Organizational Practice Committee (IOPC) convened a workgroup to provide rapid guidance about teleneuropsychology (TeleNP) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Method A collaborative panel of experts from major professional organizations developed provisional guidance for neuropsychological practice during the pandemic. The st...

Objective: The Inter Organizational Practice Committee convened a workgroup to provide rapid guidance about teleneuropsychology (TeleNP) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Method: A collaborative panel of experts from major professional organizations developed provisional guidance for neuropsychological practice during the pandemic. The stake...

Changes in neurovascular coupling are associated with both Alzheimer’s disease and vascular dementia in later life, but this may be confounded by cerebrovascular risk. We hypothesized that hemodynamic latency would be associated with reduced cognitive functioning across the lifespan, holding constant demographic and cerebrovascular risk. In 387 adu...

Levels of Analysis in Psychopathology - edited by Kenneth S. Kendler April 2020

Levels of Analysis in Psychopathology - edited by Kenneth S. Kendler April 2020

Background Cognitive traits demonstrate significant genetic correlations with many psychiatric disorders and other health-related traits. Many neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders are marked by cognitive deficits. Therefore, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of general cognitive ability might suggest potential targets for nootropic...

Large-scale studies spanning diverse project sites, populations, languages, and measurements are increasingly important to relate psychological to biological variables. National and international consortia already are collecting and executing mega-analyses on aggregated data from individuals, with different measures on each person. In this research...

Susceptibility to schizophrenia is inversely correlated with general cognitive ability at both the phenotypic and the genetic level. Paradoxically, a modest but consistent positive genetic correlation has been reported between schizophrenia and educational attainment, despite the strong positive genetic correlation between cognitive ability and edu...

The idea that psychopathology is associated with exceptional creativity has persisted despite a paucity of corroborating or disconfirming evidence. The authors measured psychopathology, including schizotypal personality traits, social responsiveness/autism spectrum traits, and lifetime incidence of mental disorders, along with lab-based tests of cr...

Inhibitory control deficits represent one of many core cognitive deficits in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Neuroimaging studies suggest that individuals with ADHD exhibit atypical engagement of neural systems during response inhibition, but the exact nature of this phenotype is obscured by mixed findings. We tested whether drug-f...

Background Attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with working memory (WM) deficits. However, WM is a multiprocess construct that can be impaired through several pathways, leaving the source of WM impairments in ADHD unresolved. In this study, we aim to replicate, in an independent sample, previously reported deficits in comp...

Liability to schizophrenia is inversely correlated with general cognitive ability at both the phenotypic and genetic level. Paradoxically, a modest but consistent positive genetic correlation has been reported between schizophrenia and educational attainment, despite the strong positive genetic correlation between cognitive ability and educational...

The Jacksonian theory of hierarchical control has had a clear impact on the development of modern neuroscience. Hughlings Jackson’s concepts of hierarchical control pertained to the structural organization of the central nervous system rather than to cognitive constructs. Perseverations occupy a special place within the rich phenomenologic domain o...

Objective: This article reviews current approaches to neuropsychological assessment, identifies opportunities for development of new methods using modern psychometric theory and advances in technology, and suggests a transition path that promotes application of novel methods without sacrificing validity. Methods: Theoretical/state-of-the-art rev...

Working memory (WM) is a central construct in cognitive neuroscience because it comprises mechanisms of active information maintenance and cognitive control that underpin most complex cognitive behavior. Individual variation in WM has been associated with multiple behavioral and health features including demographic characteristics, cognitive and p...

Background: In Los Angeles County, the rates of sexually transmitted infections and diseases among African Americans represent a significant public health disparity. Older African American women are at particular risk as they are more likely to engage in high-risk sexual behaviors and report social isolation and loneliness than their younger count...

Excessive smartphone use has been associated with a number of negative consequences for the individual and the environment. Some similarities can be observed between excessive smartphone usage and several behavioural addictions, and continual usage constitutes one of several characteristics included in addiction. In the extreme high end of the dist...

Hill (Twin Research and Human Genetics, Vol. 21, 2018, 84–88) presented a critique of our recently published paper in Cell Reports entitled ‘Large-Scale Cognitive GWAS Meta-Analysis Reveals Tissue-Specific Neural Expression and Potential Nootropic Drug Targets’ (Lam et al., Cell Reports , Vol. 21, 2017, 2597–2613). Specifically, Hill offered severa...

Intelligence is highly heritable 1 and a major determinant of human health and well-being 2 . Recent genome-wide meta-analyses have identified 24 genomic loci linked to variation in intelligence3-7, but much about its genetic underpinnings remains to be discovered. Here, we present a large-scale genetic association study of intelligence (n = 269,86...

General cognitive function is a prominent and relatively stable human trait that is associated with many important life outcomes. We combine cognitive and genetic data from the CHARGE and COGENT consortia, and UK Biobank (total N = 300,486; age 16-102) and find 148 genome-wide significant independent loci (P < 5 × 10-8) associated with general cogn...

Genetic risk variants for schizophrenia have been linked to many related clinical and biological phenotypes with the hopes of delineating how individual variation across thousands of variants corresponds to the clinical and etiologic heterogeneity within schizophrenia. This has primarily been done using risk score profiling, which aggregates effect...

Objective: Common genetic variation spans schizophrenia, schizoaffective and bipolar disorders, but historically, these syndromes have been distinguished categorically. A symptom dimension shared across these syndromes, if such a general factor exists, might provide a clearer target for understanding and treating mental illnesses that share core b...