Federico Gallo

National Research University Higher School of Economics | HSE · Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience

Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic impacted public health and our lifestyles, leading to new social adaptations such as quarantine, social distancing, and facial masks. Face masks, covering extended facial zones, hamper our ability to extract relevant socio-emotional information from others’ faces. In this fMRI study, we investigated how face masks...

Background. Obstetric brachial plexus palsy (OBPP) is an injury-related disease in newborns, usually originating from nerve tearing during a difficult vaginal delivery, leading to paralysis of one of the upper limbs. Even though modern treatment methods can guarantee almost full reinnervation of the limb, some patients still show poor motor functio...

To better explain various neurocognitive consequences of bilingualism, recent investigations have adopted continuous measures of bilingual experience, as opposed to binary bi/monolin-gual distinctions. However, few studies have considered whether bilingualism's effects on cog-nition are modulated by the linguistic distance (LD) between L1 and L2, a...

Introduction: In this study we examine whether social health markers measured at baseline are associated with differences in cognitive capability and in the rate of cognitive decline over an 11-to-18-year period among older adults and compare results across studies. Methods: We applied an integrated data analysis approach to 16,858 participants...

This study investigates bilingualism-induced neuroplastic and cognitive-reserve effects in the Caudate Nucleus (CN), a structure believed to support both bilingual language control and domain-general executive functioning. We computed a generalized bilingualism index incorporating several dimensions of bilingual experience in a sample of bilingual...

The umbrella term cognitive reserve-enhancing factors refers to those experiential and lifestyle factors (such as intellectual activities, regular physical exercise, healthy nutrition, educational attainment, etc.) that may help individuals to compensate for age-related neural deterioration, thus enabling them to maintain relatively stable cognitiv...

We often refer to space when we talk about time. To support this, studies show that we tend to associate the past with the left and the future with the right, space. However, there is little research that compares the spatial mapping of individual time units within the same methodological framework. Here, we used the same line-bisection paradigm to...

We examined associations between structural and functional aspects of social health, and subsequent trajectories of cognitive capability (memory, executive functioning, and processing speed). Using data from 16,858 participants (mean age 65.8 years; 56% female) from the National Survey for Health and Development (NSHD), the English Longitudinal Stu...

Converging behavioral and neuroimaging evidence suggests parallel activation of native (L1) and second (L2) language codes in bilinguals, with the modulation of the N400 as the most likely neural correlate of such L1-L2 interplay at lexico-semantic level. However, this relatively late effect may reflect secondary controlled processes, in contrast t...

As a result of advances in healthcare, the worldwide average life expectancy is steadily increasing. However, this positive trend has societal and individual costs, not least because greater life expectancy is linked to higher incidence of age-related diseases, such as dementia. Over the past few decades, research has isolated various protective “h...

We investigated the contribution of bilingual experience to the development of cognitive reserve (CR) when compared with other, traditionally more researched, CR proxies, in a sample of cognitively healthy senior (60 +) bilingual speakers. Participants performed in an online study where, in addition to a wide inventory of factors known to promote C...

The decay in the proficiency of the native language (L1), known as first language attrition, is one of the least understood phenomena associated with the acquisition of a second language (L2). Indeed, the exact cause for the deterioration in L1 performance, be that either the interference from L2 acquisition or the less frequent use of L1, still re...

This review aims at clarifying the concept of first language attrition by tracing its limits, identifying its phenomenological and contextual constraints, discussing controversies associated with its definition, and suggesting potential directions for future research. We start by reviewing different definitions of attrition as well as associated in...

Background It is difficult to determine the nature of the association between social relationships(SR) and cognitive capability, as different aspects of the former likely have different effects on the latter. Moreover, whether SRs are associated solely with cognitive performance or also with rate of decline remains unclear. We aim to examine associ...

Background and Objectives Cognitive reserve (CR) is meant to account for the mismatch between brain damage and cognitive decline or dementia. Generally, CR has been operationalized using proxy variables indicating exposure to enriching activities ( activity-based CR). An alternative approach defines CR as residual variance in cognition, not explain...

The use of language as a universal tool for communication and interaction is the backbone of human society. General sociocultural milieu and specific contextual factors can strongly influence various aspects of linguistic experience, including language acquisition and use and the respective internal neurolinguistic processes. This is particularly r...

In bilingualism research, there is a rapidly growing interest towards potential neuroprotective mechanisms against age-related cognitive decline, supported by dual and multiple language use. In this brief review, we discuss existing evidence, which generally suggests that bilingualism may foster neuroplastic changes resulting in beneficial conseque...

There is an ongoing debate on potential neuroprotective effects of bilingualism against cognitive decline during healthy aging. In this paper, we consider the neural and cognitive mechanisms through which these protective effects may operate. We review the evidence suggesting that bilingualism can act as a booster of neuroplasticity and/or as a bra...

Dual/multiple language use has been shown to affect cognition and its neural substrate, although the replicability of such findings varies, partially due to neglecting the role of inter-individual variability in bilingual experience. To address this, we operationalized the main bilingual experience factors as continuous variables, investigating the...

Evidence that bilingualism protects against age-related neurocognitive decline is mixed. One relatively consistent finding is that bilingual seniors have greater grey matter volume (GMV) in regions implicated in executive control (EC) and language processing. Here, we compare the neuroplastic effects of bilingual experience on the EC network of you...