Roma Siugzdaite

Ghent University | UGhent

The quality of the social and physical environments that children experience, and are exposed to, is a key to educational attainment. Even if parental income and education do not necessarily determine children’s educational outcomes, but they shape the environments in which children live and learn. Children from deprived areas usually perform worse...

Acceptance and reappraisal are considered adaptive emotion regulation strategies. While previous studies have explored the neural underpinnings of these strategies using task-based fMRI and sMRI, a gap exists in the literature concerning resting-state functional brain networks’ contributions to these abilities, especially regarding acceptance. Anot...

Acceptance and reappraisal are both considered adaptive emotion regulation strategies. While a few studies have explored the neural underpinnings of acceptance and reappraisal in task-based fMRI and sMRI, there is a gap in the literature regarding the resting state functional brain networks associated with the individual differences to apply these...

The human eye scans visual information through scan paths, series of fixations. Analogous to these scan paths during the process of actual “seeing,” we investigated whether similar scan paths are also observed while subjects are “rehearsing” stimuli in visuospatial working memory. Participants performed a continuous recall task in which they rehear...

The quality of a child’s social and physical environment is a key influence on brain development, educational attainment and mental wellbeing. However, there still remains a mechanistic gap in our understanding of how environmental influences converge on changes in the brain’s developmental trajectory. In a sample of 145 children with structural di...

Previous morphometric studies of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) reported inconsistent alterations in cortical and subcortical areas. However, these studies have investigated the brain at the voxel level using mass univariate methods or region of interest approaches, which are subject to several artifacts and do not enable detection of more c...

Although implicit emotion regulation is thought to be critical for psychosocial development and mental wellbeing, few studies have investigated the neural underpinnings of this form of emotion regulation in children. We used a modified emotional Go/NoGo block design fMRI task to explore the neural correlates of implicit emotion regulation and indiv...

The ability to experience, use and eventually control anger, is crucial to maintain well-being and build healthy relationships. Despite its relevance, the neural mechanisms behind individual differences in experiencing and controlling anger are poorly understood. To elucidate these points, we employed an unsupervised machine learning approach based...

As the field of educational neuroscience continues to grow, questions have emerged regarding the ecological validity and applicability of this research to educational practice. Recent advances in mobile neuroimaging technologies have made it possible to conduct neuroscientific studies directly in naturalistic learning environments. We propose that...

Unlabelled: A child's socio-economic environment can profoundly affect their development. While existing literature focusses on simplified metrics and pair-wise relations between few variables, we aimed to capture complex interrelationships between several relevant domains using a broad assessment of 519 children aged 7-9 years. Our analyses compr...

The formation of large-scale brain networks, and their continual refinement, represent crucial developmental processes that can drive individual differences in cognition and which are associated with multiple neurodevelopmental conditions. But how does this organization arise, and what mechanisms drive diversity in organization? We use generative n...

Attentional biomarkers in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are difficult to detect using only behavioural testing. We explored whether attention measured by a low-cost EEG system might be helpful to detect a possible disorder at its earliest stages. The GokEvolution application was designed to train attention and to provide a measure to ide...

Objective The behavioral and emotional profiles underlying adolescent self-harm, and its developmental risk factors, are relatively unknown. We aimed to identify subgroups of young people who self-harm (YPSH) and longitudinal risk factors leading to self-harm. Method Participants were from the Millennium Cohort Study (n=10,827). A clustering algor...

Bipolar disorder is an affective disorder characterized by rapid fluctuations in mood ranging from episodes of depression to mania, as well as by increased impulsivity. Previous studies investigated the neural substrates of bipolar disorder mainly using univariate methods, with a particular focus on the neural circuitry underlying emotion regulatio...

Abstract The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is not only a threat to physical health but is also having severe impacts on mental health. Although increases in stress-related symptomatology and other adverse psycho-social outcomes, as well as their most important risk factors have been described, hardly anything is known about potential protective factors. Resi...

Objective There has been widespread concern that so-called lockdown measures, including social distancing and school closures, could negatively impact children’s mental health. However, there has been little direct evidence of any association due to the paucity of longitudinal studies reporting mental health before and during the lockdown. This pre...

Background The behavioural and emotional profiles underlying adolescent self-harm, and its developmental risk factors, are relatively unknown. We aimed to identify sub-groups of young people who self-harm (YPSH) and longitudinal predictors leading to self-harm. Methods Participants were from the Millennium Cohort Study (n=10,827). A clustering alg...

Background There has been widespread concern that so-called ‘lockdown’ measures, including social distancing and school closures, could negatively impact children’s mental health. However, there has been little direct evidence of this impact due to the paucity of longitudinal studies reporting mental health before and during lockdown. This present...

Childhood learning difficulties and developmental disorders are common, but progress toward under- standing their underlying brain mechanisms has been slow. Structural neuroimaging, cognitive, and learning data were collected from 479 children (299 boys, ranging in age from 62 to 223 months), 337 of whom had been referred to the study on the basis...

Background There is a well-established link between allergies and mental health. While both atopic and food allergies are associated with increased levels of depression and anxiety, it is unclear what the mechanism behind this relationship is. Several theories touch upon potential psychological mechanisms, but until now putative cognitive mechanism...

A child’s socio-economic status has been independently associated with poorer educational outcomes, slower cognitive development, and mental ill-health. However, while these factors clearly do not operate in a vacuum, testing all within a single study is challenging, and their interrelations thus remain largely unclear. We aimed to close this knowl...

Emotion regulation plays a crucial role in individuals’ well-being, as it is known that deficits in regulating emotions can lead to psychological and psychiatric diseases. Cognitive reappraisal is widely considered as an adaptive and effective emotion regulation strategy. People are more or less able to apply it, but it is still not clear how reapp...

Chronic pain is known to alter the brain's network dynamics. These dynamics are often demonstrated by identifying alterations in the brain network topology. A common approach used for this purpose is graph theory. To date, little is known on how these potentially altered networks in chronic pain relate to the symptoms reported by these patients. He...

Background: Experience of childhood maltreatment significantly increases the risk for the development of psychopathology and is associated with impairments in socio-cognitive skills including theory-of-mind (ToM). In turn, neural alterations in ToM processing might then influence future interpersonal interaction and social-emotional understanding....

Introduction: Despite the traditional consideration of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder as separate diagnostic categories, the validity of such categorical approach is now highly controversial. In recent years, the hypothesis of a psychotic continuum for which exist a common pathophysiologic mechanism related to psychotic functioning, has been pr...

Despite the traditional view of Schizophrenia (SZ) and Bipolar disorder (BD) as separate diagnostic categories, the validity of such a categorical approach is challenging. In recent years, the hypothesis of a continuum between Schizophrenia (SZ) and Bipolar disorder (BD), postulating a common pathophysiologic mechanism, has been proposed. Although...

Evidence Accumulation has been characterised and modelled extensively in adult humans and animal models (e.g. Gold and Shadlen, 2001; Wyart et al., 2012), however it’s development in children, and it’s role in school attainment & cognition has been little studied. Here we present an iPad-based assessment-game, which could easily provide a rich meas...

A common altered network in SZ and BD when compared to healthy controls, involving medial parietal and temporal areas, the cerebellum and the middle frontal gyrus. On the other hand, two fronto-parietal networks resulted as reduced in SZ when directly compared to BD, possibly reflecting the greater cognitive impairment of the former.

Our brain is a complex organ with different levels of interaction and therefore can be thought as a complex network. In high level interactions, the brain network is formed by interconnected areas called nodes and their connections are the links. Hubs play a key role in information processing in the brain. Brain networks can be extracted using seve...

Background: Early life stressful events, such as childhood maltreatment, significantly increase risk for the development of psychopathology and are associated with impairments in socio-cognitive skills including theory-of-mind (ToM). However, to date, no study has examined the resting-state activity of the ToM network in adults with maltreatment hi...

Cognitive lateralization is an important organizational principle of the brain believed to result in more efficient processing. In this study we aimed to investigate how brain network organization relates to lateralization of cognitive functions and behavioral performance. For this purpose, we analyzed resting state fMRI data of 13 participants wit...

Magnetic resonance imaging was used to investigate brain structural and functional asymmetries in 15 participants with complete visceral reversal (situs inversus totalis, SIT). Language-related brain structural and functional lateralization of SIT participants, including peri-Sylvian gray and white matter asymmetries and hemispheric language domina...

Preparing for a mentally demanding task calls upon cognitive and motivational resources. The underlying neural implementation of these mechanisms is receiving growing attention because of its implications for professional, social, and medical contexts. While several fMRI studies converge in assigning a crucial role to a cortico-subcortical network...

Accepted poster at EWCN Bressanone 2018, January 21-26

In the last twenty years, many attempts have been made to provide neurobiological models of autism. Functional, structural and connectivity analyses have highlighted reduced responses in key social areas, such as amygdala, medial prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex, and superior temporal sulcus. However, these studies present discrepant results and...

Preparing for a mentally demanding task calls upon cognitive and motivational resources. The underlying neural implementation of these mechanisms is receiving growing attention, given the implications for professional, social, and medical contexts. While several fMRI studies converge in assigning a crucial role to a cortico-subcortical network incl...

Replication of fMRI study using fNIRS. We showed that DLPFC activity increased during preparation for a hard task as compared to an easy task.

Background To apply effective connectivity by means of nonlinear Granger Causality (GC) and brain networking analysis to basal EEG and under visual stimulation by checkerboard gratings with 0.5 and 2.0 cpd as spatial frequency in migraine with aura (MA) and without aura (MO), and to compare these findings with Blood Oxygen Level Dependent (BOLD) si...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder that develops throughout life characterized by social deficits. Recent evidence from neuroimaging supports the hypothesis that ASD deficits may be related to abnormalities in a specific fronto-temporal network. To see whether these results extend to younger children and to better chara...

Significance Since birth, infants begin to learn a myriad of sounds. Yet our knowledge of their abilities to remember specific sounds is primarily based on habituation studies that presented them with massive repetitions of single sounds. The present work opens vistas on the study of language acquisition and memory development by suggesting that th...

In adults, cognitive control is supported by several brain regions including the limbic system and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) when processing emotional information. However, in adolescents, some theories hypothesize a neurobiological imbalance proposing heightened sensitivity to affective material in the amygdala and striatum within...

A recent paper (Vingerhoets et al., 2013) provided evidence for the existence of a common and co-lateralized network underlying the production of complex learned movements, whether it be speech or tool use. The study investigated healthy subjects with typical (n=10) or atypical (n=10) language dominance and explored correlations of lateralization i...

In everyday life we constantly experience emotions and engage in necessary regulatory processes in order to successfully interact with others. From this stems the importance of being able to regulate our emotions. One unsolved issue in affective neuroscience is how individual differences characterize our ability to regulate our emotions and how thi...

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by deficits in social interactions, communication skills and repetitive behavior and interests. The diagnosis of autism is increasing: according to World Health Organization, the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder is 1 child in 160. Evidences from the literature support the hypothesis that t...

Background: The total reversal of internal organs is a congenital condition called situs inversus totalis (SIT). Though with the exception of the reversed frontal and occipital petalia observed using anatomical MRI techniques, the left hemisphere dominance for language in SIT was still found similar to controls (Sun et al 2006, Ihara et al 2010). T...

Diagnosing autism with neural markers: a Source-Based Morphometry study.

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder that mainly affects social interaction and communication. Evidence from behavioral and functional MRI studies supports the hypothesis that dysfunctional mechanisms involving social brain structures play a major role in autistic symptomatology. However, the investigation of anatomical abnormalities in the brai...

The present study explored the longitudinal stability and variability of effectiv connections within resting state networks (RSNs). Therefore an extensive single-subject dataset was analyzed containing longitudinal fMRI data acquired during rest and task performance. Spectral dynamic causal modelling (spDCM) was used to infer effective connectivity...

Autism is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by poor social abilities, communication deficiency and restricted behavioural patterns. Recently, scolars started to consider the possibility of detecting biological markers for better and faster diagnosing autism. This problem has been approached from different perspectives considering biochemi...

Background. Autism spectrum disorder is a neurodevelopmental disorder, marked by impairment in social communication and restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities. Accumulating data suggests that alterations in functional connectivity might contribute to these deficits. Whereas functional connectivity in resting state fMR...

Background. Autism spectrum disorder is a neurodevelopmental disorder, marked by impairment in social communication and restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities. Accumulating data suggests that alterations in functional connectivity might contribute to these deficits. Whereas functional connectivity in resting state fMR...

Autism is characterized by deficits of social interaction, difficulties in communication and stereotyped behavior and interests (Kanner, 1943). MRI investigations in ASD showed dissimilarities in grey-matter (e.g. in social areas), but research about anatomical abnormalities produced incomplete results. In our study, we aim: 1) to understand if cog...

In the present study, we report results from an experiment inquiring behavioral and neural differences related to the ability to regulate social (RES) and non-social emotions (RENS). To date, we still do not know if RES and RENS are overlapping in terms of psychological and brain mechanisms, or whether they are independent. The present study was ai...

Effective connectivity during both resting state and cognitive tasks has been the topic of many studies. A widely used technique to infer effective connectivity, and context-related changes thereof, is dynamic causal modelling (DCM; Friston, Harrison, & Penny, 2003). The purpose of the present study was to investigate the changes in effective conne...

Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are a category of pervasive developmental disorders (PDD) that affect 1 in 150 children, and whose causes are still mostly unknown. Autistic symptomatology is characterized by severe impairments that mainly affect social interaction, while spare basic cognitive skills and do not imply emotional disturbance. Widesprea...

An innovative method that uses Independent Component Analysis known as Source-Based Morphometry (SBM) was applied for the first time to detect maximally independent networks of gray matter in autistic adults and matched controls. SBM is a multivariate and data-driven approach that pools information across different voxels and identifies unpredicted...

Observation of others' actions evokes a subliminal motor resonant response, which reflects the motor program encoding observed actions. The possibility that actions located in the peripheral field of vision may also activate motor resonant responses has not been investigated. We examine the excitability modulation of motor pathways in response to g...

The purpose of this article is to review some of the psychological and neural mechanisms behind mindfulness practice in order to explore the unique factors that account for its positive impact on emotional regulation and health. After reviewing the psychological and neural mechanisms of mindfulness and its effects on clinical populations we will co...

Individuals with non-specific low back pain (NSLBP) show a decreased sit-to-stand-to-sit performance. This dynamic sensorimotor task requires integration of sensory and motor information in the brain. Therefore, better understanding of the underlying central mechanisms of impaired sensorimotor control and the presence of NSLBP is needed. The aims o...