Thalia Fernandez

Thalia Fernandez
National Autonomous University of Mexico | UNAM · Departamento de Neurobiología Conductual y Cognitiva

PhD

About

236
Publications
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Introduction
I study brain function during rest and cognitive tasks, using MRI and, mainly, EEG. I am currently studying children with learning disorders and healthy older adults with EEG risk of cognitive impairment (theta excess), and apply 2 neurofeedback treatments: in children, theta/alpha ratio reduction, and in healthy older adults, theta reduction. I am currently working on the NFB effects on cognition, assessed through qEEG, ERPs, or fMRI. I am also interested in the methodological study of the NFB.

Publications

Publications (236)
Article
Full-text available
The electroencephalogram (EEG) is a fundamental diagnostic procedure that explores brain function. This manuscript describes the characteristics of a sample of healthy at-term infants. One hundred and three (103) infants from Mexico between 15 days and 12.5 months of age were recorded during physiological sleep. Referential EEG recordings were obta...
Article
Full-text available
Reading learning disability (RLD) is characterized by a specific difficulty in learning to read that is not better explained by an intellectual disability, lack of instruction, psychosocial adversity, or a neurological disorder. According to the domain-general hypothesis, a working memory deficit is the primary problem. Working memory in this popul...
Article
Full-text available
Children with learning disorders (LD children) often have heterogeneous cognitive impairments that affect their ability to learn and use basic academic skills. A proposed cause for this variability has been working memory (WM) capacity. Altered patterns of event-related potentials (ERPs) in these children have also been found in the N400 component...
Article
Full-text available
Children with learning disorders (LDs) often have a lower self-concept than their typically developing peers. Neurofeedback (NFB) treatments seem to improve the cognitive and academic performance of these children, but the effects on self-concept have not been studied. In this exploratory study, 34 right-handed children (8–11 y.o.) with LD and dela...
Article
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Background: Preterm birth is one of the world's critical health problems, with an incidence of 5% to 18% of living newborns according to various countries. White matter injuries due to preoligodendrocytes deficits cause hypomyelination in children born preterm. Preterm infants also have multiple neurodevelopmental sequelae due to prenatal and peri...
Article
Full-text available
La cooperación tiene sus costos, pero también sus beneficios. En una tarea de rastreo visual de objetos con tres niveles de dificultad (4, 5 y 6 objetivos a rastrear respectivamente) se comparó el rendimiento de cada individuo en dos condiciones: rendimiento individual vs. rendimiento del individuo como parte de una díada. El propósito del estudio...
Article
Full-text available
Electroencephalograms (EEGs) of children with reading disorders (RDs) are characterized by a higher theta and a lower alpha than those of typically developing children. Neurofeedback (NFB) may be helpful for treating learning disorders by reinforcing a reduction in the theta/alpha ratio. Several studies have suggested that NFB may lead to EEG power...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction Age is the main risk factor for the development of neurocognitive disorders, with Alzheimer's disease being the most common. Its physiopathological features may develop decades before the onset of clinical symptoms. Quantitative electroencephalography (qEEG) is a promising and cost-effective tool for the prediction of cognitive decline...
Article
Full-text available
CITATION Ferrari-Díaz M, Bravo-Chávez RI, Silva-Pereyra J, Fernández T, García-Peña C and Rodríguez-Camacho M (2022) Verbal intelligence and leisure activities are associated with cognitive performance and resting-state electroencephalogram. Cognitive reserve (CR) is the adaptability of cognitive processes that helps to explain differences in the s...
Preprint
Full-text available
By event-related potentials (ERP) during a counting Stroop task it was shown that the elderly with excess in theta activity in their electroencephalogram (EEG) are at risk of cognitive decline and have a higher neuronal activity during stimulus categorization than the elderly with a normal EEG. It was suggested that this increased neuronal activity...
Article
Background Previous work showed that elderly with excess in theta activity in their resting state electroencephalogram (EEG) are at higher risk of cognitive decline than those with a normal EEG. By using event-related potentials (ERP) during a counting Stroop task, our prior work showed that elderly with theta excess have a large P300 component com...
Article
Introduction The maturation of electroencephalogram (EEG) effective connectivity in healthy infants during the first year of life is described. Methods Participants: A cross-sectional sample of 125 healthy at-term infants, from 0 to 12 months of age, underwent EEG in a state of quiet sleep. Procedures: The EEG primary currents at the source were d...
Article
Full-text available
Background: In healthy older adults, excess theta activity is an electroencephalographic (EEG) predictor of cognitive impairment. In a previous study, neurofeedback (NFB) treatment reinforcing reductions theta activity resulted in EEG reorganization and cognitive improvement. Objective: To explore the clinical applicability of this NFB treatment...
Article
Full-text available
Reading is a complex cognitive process that requires multisensory processing, graphical phonological codification, short- and long-term memory, executive functions, and motor and cognitive responses. Children with reading learning disability (RLD) show a specific deficit in learning to read, along with motor, rhythmic and visual difficulties. The p...
Preprint
Full-text available
Electroencephalograms (EEGs) of children with reading disorder (RD) are characterized by higher power and coherence in slow frequencies (delta and theta bands) and lower power and coherence in the alpha band compared to EEGs of typically developed children. Neurofeedback (NFB) is useful for treating learning disorders by reinforcing the reduction o...
Article
Full-text available
Learning disorders (LDs) are diagnosed in children impaired in the academic skills of reading, writing and/or mathematics. Children with LDs usually exhibit a slower resting-state electroencephalogram (EEG), corresponding to a neurodevelopmental lag. Frequently, children with LDs show working memory (WM) impairment, associated with an abnormal task...
Preprint
Full-text available
Learning disorders (LD) are diagnosed in children impaired in the academic skills of reading, writing and/or mathematics. Children with LD usually show a slower resting-state electroencephalogram (EEG), with EEG patterns corresponding to a neurodevelopmental lag. LD-children also show a consistent cognitive impairment in working memory (WM), includ...
Article
Background: Neurocognitive disorders (NCDs) are characterized by cognitive decline. Most genetic studies of NCDs have been focused on single-nucleotide polymorphism; other genetic variations, such as copy number variants (CNV), have been less explored. The aim of the present study was to explore CNVs associated with NCDs in a small sample of Mexica...
Article
Background: Neurocognitive disorders (NCDs) are characterized by cognitive decline. Most genetic studies of NCDs have been focused on single-nucleotide polymorphism; other genetic variations, such as copy number variants (CNV), have been less explored. The aim of the present study was to explore CNVs associated with NCDs in a small sample of Mexica...
Poster
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The poster focuses on the effect of two reading and rhythmic training games in virtual reality in children with Reading Learning Disabilities.
Article
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This study aims to examine how two levels of cognitive reserve, as evidenced by reading syntactic skill, modify performance and neural activity in a two-load-level (high vs. low) working memory (WM) task. Two groups of participants with different reading skills, high and low, were obtained from clustering analysis. We collected the P300 event-relat...
Article
Full-text available
Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have a psycholinguistic profile evincing multiple syntactic processing impairments. Spanish-speaking children with DLD struggle with gender agreement on clitics; however, the existing evidence comes from offline, elicitation tasks. In the current study, we sought to determine whether converging ev...
Article
Background Neurocognitive disorders (NCDs) are characterized by cognitive decline. Most genetic studies of NCDs have been focused on single-nucleotide polymorphism; other genetic variations, such as copy number variants (CNV), have been less explored. The aim of the present study was to explore CNVs associated with NCDs in a small sample of Mexican...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction Dyscalculia is a specific learning disorder affecting the ability to learn certain math processes, such as arithmetic data recovery. The group of children with dyscalculia is very heterogeneous, in part due to variability in their working memory (WM) deficits. To assess the brain response to arithmetic data recovery, we applied an arit...
Article
Full-text available
These authors contributed equally to this work. All other authors are listed in reverse alphabetical order. Neurofeedback has begun to attract the attention and scrutiny of the scientific and medical mainstream. Here, neurofeedback researchers present a consensus-derived checklist that aims to improve the reporting and experimental design standards...
Article
Full-text available
Learning disorders (LDs) are diagnosed in children whose academic skills of reading, writing or mathematics are impaired and lagging according to their age, schooling and intelligence. Children with LDs experience substantial working memory (WM) deficits, even more pronounced if more than one of the academic skills is affected. We compared the task...
Article
Full-text available
Older adults have difficulties in sentence comprehension when working memory (WM) load increases (e.g., multiple embedded clauses). Structured physical activity has been related to improvements in cognition; however, incidental physical activity (PA, i.e., unstructured daily physical activities), particularly incidental vigorous activity has been p...
Preprint
Full-text available
Learning disorders (LD) are diagnosed in children whose academic skills of reading, writing or mathematics are impaired and lagged according to their age, schooling and intelligence. Children with LD experience substantial working memory (WM) deficits, even more pronounced if more than one of the academic skills is affected. We compared the task-re...
Article
Full-text available
Successful aging depends upon several internal and external factors that influence the overall aging process. Objective and subjective socioeconomic status emerge as potential psychosocial factors in the ethiopathophysiology of aging-related disorders. Presumably, low socioeconomic status can act as a psychosocial stressor that can affect humans' p...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction: Neuroimaging studies in adults and children of school age have described the role of parietal and frontal cortices in orienting attention. However, this activity has not been reported in infants in the first year of life. Objective: To describe changes in cerebral oxygenated hemoglobin (HbO) in the parietal and frontal cortex during...
Article
Full-text available
Neurofeedback has begun to attract the attention and scrutiny of the scientific and medical mainstream. Here, neurofeedback researchers present a consensus-derived checklist that aims to improve the reporting and experimental design standards in the field.
Preprint
Full-text available
To examine the effects of cognitive reserve (CR) and working memory (WM) load on the cognitive performance of young adults, we performed two event-related potential (ERP) experiments. The first experiment aims to show how high CR influences young adult performance as a function of two levels of working memory load (high vs. low) during a Sternberg...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Sparse inverse methods have provided a high level of spatial specificity in detecting the neural causes of MEG/EEG potentials during rest or task[1-3], and their spectral composition conveys relevant information of altered brain activity. Quantitative EEG studies have identified that enhanced EEG theta power is strongly associated with Learning Dis...
Article
Full-text available
Background: To evaluate the outcome at age five years or older for children with perinatal brain injury who received Katona neurohabilitation therapy or neurodevelopmental therapy (Bobath therapy) at birth, a blinded evaluation of the infant groups was performed by an expert neuropediatrician. Methods: Twenty-two infants with a gestational age (GA)...
Article
Full-text available
Objective: To examine the effects of working memory (WM) load and gender agreement on sentence processing as a function of the electroencephalographic risk (i.e., abnormally high values of theta absolute power) of cognitive decline in older adults. Methods: Event-related potentials (ERPs) were collected from Spanish speakers (22 older adults bel...
Preprint
Full-text available
This checklist is intended to encourage robust experimental design and clear reporting for clinical and cognitive-behavioural neurofeedback experiments.
Preprint
Full-text available
This checklist is intended to encourage robust experimental design and clear reporting for clinical and cognitive-behavioural neurofeedback experiments. Available at https://psyarxiv.com/nyx84
Article
Background A high percentage of patients with multiple sclerosis present cognitive alterations. Because 4-aminopyridine improves nerve conduction and efficient synaptic connection could improve cognitive dysfunction. Objective To evaluate the efficacy on cognitive performance and safety of 4-aminopyridine administered to patients with relapsing-re...
Article
Full-text available
INTRODUCTION: In Mexico, the prevalence of neurocognitive disorders (NCDs) has increased in parallel with the increase in life expectancy. The E4 allele of the gene that encodes apolipoprotein E (APOE) is the main genetic risk factor for cognitive impairment. OBJECTIVE: To replicate the association of APOE-E4 allele with neurocognitive impairment...
Article
Full-text available
Introduction: In Mexico, the prevalence of neurocognitive disorders (NCDs) has increased in parallel with the increase in life expectancy. The E4 allele of the gene that encodes apolipoprotein E (APOE) is the main genetic risk factor for cognitive impairment. Objective: To replicate the association of APOE-E4 allele with neurocognitive impairmen...
Poster
Full-text available
Dyscalculia (Dy) affects academic performance and daily life, a characteristic of this disorder is the difficulty to identify if the result of an arithmetic operation is correct or not. Studies of Event-Related Potential (ERP) report that, unlike children with Dy, normal children show N400 and P600 components in the incorrect probe of an arithmetic...
Poster
Full-text available
Dyscalculia (Dy) affects academic performance and daily life, a characteristic of this disorder is the difficulty to identify if the result of an arithmetic operation is correct or not. Studies of Event-Related Potential (ERP) report that, unlike children with Dy, normal children show N400 and P600 components in the incorrect probe of an arithmetic...
Article
Full-text available
Cognitive changes in aging include working memory (WM) decline, which may hamper language comprehension. An increase in WM demands in older adults would probably provoke a poorer sentence processing performance in this age group. A way to increase the WM load is to separate two lexical units in an agreement relation (i.e., adjective and noun), in a...
Article
Full-text available
Resumen Introducción Se considera la reserva cognitiva (RC) como la optimización de los recursos cerebrales al emplear redes neuronales y estrategias cognitivas alternativas. Se piensa que la RC es una explicación plausible a un mecanismo potencial que permite al cerebro compensar deficiencias, ya sean causadas por el deterioro cerebral o por el d...
Article
Full-text available
High levels of physical activity seem to positively influence health and cognition across the lifespan. Several studies have found that aerobic exercise enhances cognition and likely prevents cognitive decline in the elderly. Nevertheless, the association of incidental physical activity (IPA) with health and cognition during aging has not been stud...
Article
Full-text available
In this paper, we present a novel methodology to solve the classification problem, based on sparse (data-driven) regressions, combined with techniques for ensuring stability, especially useful for high-dimensional datasets and small samples number. The sensitivity and specificity of the classifiers are assessed by a stable ROC procedure, which uses...
Article
Full-text available
During healthy aging, inhibitory processing is affected at the sensorial, perceptual, and cognitive levels. The assessment of event-related potentials (ERPs) during the Stroop task has been used to study age-related decline in the efficiency of inhibitory processes. Studies using ERPs have found that the P300 amplitude increases and the N500 amplit...
Article
Full-text available
The sensorimotor rhythm (SMR) is an electroencephalographic rhythm associated with motor and cognitive development observed in the central brain regions during wakefulness in the absence of movement, and it reacts contralaterally to generalized and hemibody movements. The purpose of this work was to characterize the SMR of 4-month-old infants, born...
Poster
Full-text available
The results suggest that the arithmetic-N400 effect which is associated to arithmetic incongruency process and LPC effect which is associated to re-evaluating of the solution process are delayed in children with DYS. Probably, this is because these children use strategies of solve-problems more immature and inefficient than children with NAP.
Poster
Full-text available
Cognitive changes in aging include working memory (WM) decline, which may affect language comprehension. If WM demands in older adults (OA) are increased, it would be highly probable that they would show a decline in performance of sentence processing. One way to increase the WM load is to separate the adjective from the noun in a sentence. To test...
Article
Full-text available
Objective: To use quantitative electroencephalography (qEEG) to assess the impact of iron-deficiency anemia on central nervous system maturation in the first year of life. Method: Twenty-five infants (3-12 months old) presenting ferropenic anemia (IDA) and 25 healthy controls (CTL1), matched by age/gender with the former, were studied in two sta...
Article
Electroencephalographic alterations have been reported in subjects with learning disorders, but there is no consensus on what characterizes their electroencephalogram findings. Our objective was to determine if there were subgroups within a group of scholars with not otherwise specified learning disorders and if they had specific electroencephalogr...
Article
Full-text available
Electroencephalographic alterations have been reported in subjects with learning disorders, but there is no consensus on what characterizes their electroencephalogram findings. Our objective was to determine if there were subgroups within a group of scholars with not otherwise specified learning disorders and if they had specific electroencephalogr...
Poster
Full-text available
Dyscalculia (Dy) affects academic performance and daily life, a characteristic of this disorder is the difficulty to identify if the result of an arithmetic operation is correct or not. Studies of Event-Related Potential (ERP) report that, unlike children with Dy, normal children show N400 and P600 components in the incorrect probe of an arithmetic...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
El exceso de actividad theta en el EEG (EEGt) es un predictor de riesgo de deterioro cognitivo en el envejecimiento. Por otro lado, el deterioro en la memoria de trabajo puede repercutir en la comprensión del lenguaje; se ha observado que a mayor carga de memoria de trabajo (cMT), mayor costo en el procesamiento de oraciones. Se piensa que a mayor...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Utilizando técnicas psicofisiológicas, se han reportado diferencias en amplitud y latencia del componente N400 de potenciales relacionados con eventos (PREs), asociado a procesamiento semántico, entre adultos jóvenes y mayores, así como entre sujetos sanos y con demencia. Por otro lado, se ha encontrado que un exceso de actividad theta del electroe...
Article
Electroencephalographic alterations have been reported in subjects with learning disorders, but there is no consensus on what characterizes their electroencephalogram findings. Our objective was to determine if there were subgroups within a group of scholars with specific learning disorders in two or more domains and if they had specific electroenc...