Valérie Dormal

Université Catholique de Louvain - UCLouvain | UCLouvain · Psychological Sciences Research Institute

Malnutrition is a highly prevalent condition in older adults. It is associated with low muscle mass and function and increased occurrence of health problems. Maintaining an adequate nutritional status as well as a sufficient nutrient intake in older people is therefore essential to address this public health problem. For this purpose, protein suppl...

Background: Heart rate variability (HRV) is considered as an index of both physical and emotional health, and biofeedback aiming to increase the level of HRV has demonstrated extensive beneficial effects. Although HRV biofeedback is commonly and reliably applied in adults, the use of this technique, alone or in addition to other treatments, in chil...

Rationale: Attitudes towards alcohol constitute a central factor to predict future consumption. Previous studies showed that young adults with risky alcohol consumption present positive implicit and explicit attitudes towards alcohol. Objectives: It appears crucial to disentangle the relationship between specific consumption patterns (e.g., binge...

Background and rationale: Severe alcohol use disorder (SAUD) is a major public health concern, given its massive individual, interpersonal and societal consequences. The available prevention and treatment programs have proven limited effectiveness, as relapse rates are still high in this clinical population. Developing effective interventions reduc...

This study aimed to delineate the specific characteristics of binge drinking habits by capitalizing on data-driven network analysis. Such an approach allowed us to consider binge drinking as a network system of interacting elements, thus identifying the key variables involved in this phenomenon. A total of 1,455 university students with excessive d...

Binge drinking is a widespread alcohol consumption pattern commonly engaged by youth. Here, we present the first systematic review focusing on emotional processes related to binge drinking. Capitalizing on a theoretical model describing three emotional processing steps (emotional appraisal/identification, emotional response, emotional regulation) a...

Rationale: Severe alcohol use disorder (SAUD) is a psychiatric condition linked to cerebral and cognitive consequences. SAUD is notably characterized by an over-activation of the reflexive/reward system when confronted with alcohol-related cues. Such over-reactivity generates a preferential allocation of attentional resources towards these cues, la...

Rationale. Binge drinking (i.e., excessive episodic alcohol consumption) among young adults has been associated with deleterious consequences, notably at the cognitive and brain levels. These behavioural impairments and brain alterations have a direct impact on psychological and interpersonal functioning, but they might also be involved in the tran...

Objective: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) provides a way to modulate spatial attention by enhancing the ratio of neural activity between the left and right hemispheres, with a potential benefit for the rehabilitation of visual neglect. Methods: We tested the effect of bilateral tDCS in healthy individuals performing a visual dete...

The dual-process model, describing addictive disorders as resulting from an imbalance between increased automatic approach behaviors towards the substance and reduced abilities to control these behaviors, constitutes a sound theoretical framework to understand alcohol-use disorders. The present study aimed at exploring this imbalance at behavioral...

Background: Executive deficits have widely been reported in young binge drinkers over the last decade, but uncertainty remains regarding the specificity of these deficits and their variation across executive subcomponents. The current study aimed to offer a theoretically grounded and specific exploration of the differential deficits observed across...

Background: Binge drinking, characterized by alternations between intense alcohol intakes and abstinence periods, is the most frequent alcohol-consumption pattern among adolescents and is associated with cognitive impairments. Objectives: It appears crucial to disentangle the psychological factors involved in the emergence of binge drinking in adol...

Background: Each year, more than 300,000 university students take part in European exchange programs. Besides their positive educational and cultural impacts, these programs are also reputed to immerse students in a high-risk festive context where excessive alcohol consumption is strongly present. There is thus a crucial need to evaluate the actual...

Binge drinking is a widespread alcohol consumption pattern in youth that is linked to important behavioral and cerebral impairments, in both the short and the long term. From a critical review of the current literature on this topic, we conclude that binge drinkers display executive impairments, cerebral modifications, and problems with emotion-rel...

Binge drinking is an excessive pattern of alcohol use, highly prevalent in adolescents and young adults. Several studies have explored the cognitive impairments associated with binge drinking, and Carbia et al. (2018) recently proposed a systematic review of these impairments. Although this review offers an insightful and up-to-date synthesis of th...

Emotional crossmodal integration (i.e., multisensorial decoding of emotions) is a crucial process that ensures adaptive social behaviors and responses to the environment. Recent evidence suggests that in binge drinking—an excessive alcohol consumption pattern associated with psychological and cerebral deficits—crossmodal integration is preserved at...

Previous studies showed that the magnitude information conveyed by sensory cues, such as length or surface, influences the ability to compare the numerosity of sets of objects. However, the perceptual nature of this representation and how it interacts with the processes involved in numerical judgements remain unclear. This study aims to address the...

Background: Binge drinking (BD) is frequently observed in youth, with psychological and cognitive consequences, but its specific negative impact on quality of life has been scarcely explored. Methods: This study measured the relationship between BD and self-perceived quality of life among European students. Sociodemographic and alcohol consumption...

Distortions of duration perception provoked by emotion-induced arousal changes are explained by modifications of an internal clock pace. Yet, uncertainty still abounds regarding whether changes of arousal induced by physical exercise yield such temporal distortions. Here, we report two experiments aiming at test separately the impact of, on the one...

This study evaluated inhibition and performance monitoring abilities through the explicit processing of alcohol cues. Twenty-two binge drinkers and 22 control participants performed a speeded Go/No-Go task using pictures of alcohol and soft cans as Go and No-Go targets. This task measures inhibitory control and performance monitoring (i.e. task adj...

OBJECTIVE: Excessive alcohol drinking, particularly among college students, is a major health concern worldwide. The implicit associations between alcohol-related concepts and affective attributes has been repeatedly postulated as a reliable predictor of these drinking behaviors. The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is considered as one of the most...

Background: Alcohol-dependent individuals (ALC) simultaneously present decreased inhibitory control and increased attention towards alcohol-related cues. The dual-process models have proposed that these symptoms reflect an imbalance between prefrontal/reflective and limbic/automatic systems, respectively leading to cognitive dysfunctions in executi...

Numerous studies have tried to identify the core deficit of developmental dyscalculia (DD), mainly by assessing a possible deficit of the mental representation of numerical magnitude. Research in healthy adults has shown that numerosity, duration, and space share a partly common system of magnitude processing and representation. However, in DD, num...

Objective: Performance monitoring, which allows efficient behavioral regulation using either internal (error processing) or external (feedback processing) cues, has not yet been explored in binge drinking despite its adaptive importance in everyday life, particularly in the regulation of alcohol consumption. Capitalizing on a theoretical model of r...

Solving arithmetic problems has been shown to induce shifts of spatial attention, subtraction problems orienting attention to the left side, and addition problems to the right side of space. At the neurofunctional level, the activations elicited by the solving of arithmetical problems resemble those elicited by horizontal eye movements. Whether ove...

Binge drinking is an alcohol consumption pattern with various psychological and cognitive consequences. As binge drinking showed qualitatively comparable cognitive impairments to those reported in alcohol-dependence, a continuum hypothesis suggests that this habit would be a first step towards alcohol-related disorders. Besides these cognitive impa...

Objectives: Recent findings suggest that mental arithmetic involves shifting attention on a mental continuum in which numbers would be ordered from left to right, from small to large numbers, with addition and subtraction causing rightward or leftward shifts, respectively. Neuropsychological data showing that brain-damaged patients with left negle...

Behavioural and neurophysiological evidence suggest that vision plays an important role in the emergence and development of arithmetic abilities. However, how visual deprivation impacts on the development of arithmetic processing remains poorly understood. We compared the performances of early, late blind and sighted control individuals during vari...

Previous studies have shown that left neglect patients are impaired when they have to orient their attention leftward relative to a standard in numerical comparison tasks. This finding has been accounted for by the idea that numerical magnitudes are represented along a spatial continuum oriented from left to right with small magnitudes on the left...

Recent behavioural and brain imaging studies have provided evidence for rightward and leftward attention shifts while solving addition and subtraction problems respectively, suggesting that mental arithmetic makes use of mechanisms akin to those underlying spatial attention. However, this hypothesis mainly relies on correlative data and the causal...

Acknowledgements [1] Halligan, P. W., Fink, G. R., Marshall, J. C., & Vallar, G. (2003). Spatial cognition: Evidence from visual neglect. Trends in Cognitive Science, 7(3), 125–133. [2] Kinsbourne, M. (1970). The cerebral basis of lateral asymmetries in attention. Acta Psychologica, 33, 193–201. [3] Sparing, R., Thimm, M., Hesse, M. D., Kust, J., K...

Numerosity, length, and duration processing may share a common functional mechanism situated within the parietal cortex. A strong parallelism between the processing of these three magnitudes has been revealed by similar behavioral signatures (e.g., Weber-Fechner's law, the distance effect) and reciprocal interference effects. Here, we extend the be...

The existence of a possible continuum of automaticity for numerosity, length and duration processing was tested with a three-dimensional Stroop-like paradigm. Participants had to compare the numerosity, the length or the duration of two successive linear arrays of sequentially flashed dots in which the three dimensions were manipulated independentl...

Numerosity and duration processing have been modeled by a functional mechanism taking the form of an accumulator working under two different operative modes. Separate investigations of their cerebral substrates have revealed partly similar patterns of activation, mainly in parietal and frontal areas. However, the precise cerebral implementation of...

In humans, areas around the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) have been found to play a crucial role in coding nonsymbolic numerosities (i.e., number of elements in a collection). In the parietal cortex of monkeys, some populations of neurons were found to respond selectively to sequentially- or simultaneously-presented numerosities, whereas other populat...

Numerical and spatial magnitude processing have long been intimately associated, leading to the suggestion that they share a common system of magnitude representation. Although separate investigations on the cerebral areas involved in numerosity and spatial estimation point toward the parietal cortex, the precise anatomical overlap, if any, has not...

A possible dissociation of duration and numerosity processing was tested in an off-line repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) design. Participants had to compare the numerosity of flashed dot sequences or the duration of single dot displays before and after 15 min of 1 Hz rTMS over one of three sites (the left or right intraparietal s...

The existence of a common mechanism for length and numerosity processing was tested with a Stroop task. Participants compared the length or the numerosity of arrays of dots, for which the two variables were manipulated independently to create congruent, incongruent, or neutral pairs. Results showed that the spatial cues strongly interfered with the...

The existence of a possible common mechanism for duration and numerosity processing was tested with a Stroop task. Participants had to compare either the duration or the numerosity of sequences of flashing dots for which the duration and numerosity were independently manipulated to create congruent, incongruent or neutral pairs. Results show that t...