Julià L Amengual RoigFrench National Centre for Scientific Research | CNRS · Institute de sciences cognitives
Julià L Amengual Roig
PhD in Neuroscience
About
42
Publications
21,259
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Introduction
Mathematician, MSc in Artificial Intelligence, Ph.D. in Neuroscience
How can we change our life by changing our brain?
I am interested in brain plasticity, specifically in how it is possible to modulate brain activity to interact with different aspects of human cognition, either enhancing cognitive boost, either as a therapeutic intervention to ameliorate symptoms from neuropsychiatric diseases. Using invasive and non-invasive methods of brain stimulation and brain activity recording, I focus my research in the physiological aspects of human oscillatory entrainment, local and inter-regional brain dynamics and its impact in cognition.
Additional affiliations
February 2018 - present
Institute des sciences cognitives Marc Jeannerod
Position
- PostDoc Position
December 2016 - December 2017
INSERM
Position
- PostDoc Position
December 2014 - November 2016
Education
August 2010 - December 2013
September 2009 - June 2010
September 1999 - June 2006
Publications
Publications (42)
The commission of an error triggers cognitive control processes dedicated to error correction and prevention. Post-error adjustments leading to response slowing following an error ("post-error slowing"; PES) might be driven by changes in excitability of the motor regions and the corticospinal tract. The time-course of such excitability modulations...
Novel rehabilitation interventions have improved
motor recovery by induction of neural plasticity in individuals
with stroke. Of these, Music-supported therapy (MST) is
based on music training designed to restore motor deficits.
Music training requires multimodal processing, involving
the integration and co-operation of visual, motor, auditory,
aff...
In the context of visual attention, it has been classically assumed that missing the response to a target or erroneously selecting a distractor occurs as a consequence of the (miss)allocation of attention in space. In the present paper, we challenge this view and provide evidence that, in addition to encoding spatial attention, prefrontal neurons a...
Response inhibition is a fundamental brain function that must be flexible enough to incorporate proactive goal-directed demands, along with reactive, automatic and well consolidated behaviors. However, whether proactive inhibitory processes can be explained by response competition, rather than by active top-down inhibitory control, remains still un...
We demonstrate real-time high spatial and temporal resolution access to attention, a high-level cognitive function, from both multi-unit neuronal activity and local field potentials. We show that this prefrontal attention spotlight is rhythmic at multiple time scales, its location being predictive of behavior. Last, when using this attentional trac...
In the context of visual attention, it has been classically assumed that missing the response to a target or erroneously selecting a distractor occurs as a consequence of the (miss)allocation of attention in space. In the present paper, we challenge this view and provide evidence that, in addition to encoding spatial attention, prefrontal neurons a...
Persistent activity has been observed in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), in particular during the delay periods of visual attention tasks. Classical approaches based on the average activity over multiple trials have revealed that such an activity encodes the information about the attentional instruction provided in such tasks. However, single-trial ap...
As routine and lower demand cognitive tasks are taken over by automated assistive systems, human operators are increasingly required to sustain cognitive demand over long periods of time. This has been reported to have long term adverse effects on cardiovascular and mental health. However, it remains unclear whether prolonged cognitive activity res...
Converging evidence indicates that response inhibition may arise from the interaction of effortful proactive and reflexive reactive mechanisms. However, the distinction between the neural basis sustaining proactive and reactive inhibitory processes is still unclear. To identify reliable neural markers of proactive inhibition, we examined the behavi...
Correlational evidence in non-human primates has reported increases of fronto-parietal high-beta (22–30 Hz) synchrony during the top-down allocation of visuo-spatial attention. But may inter-regional synchronization at this specific frequency band provide a causal mechanism by which top-down attentional processes facilitate conscious visual percept...
A crucial aspect when learning a language is discovering the rules that govern how words are combined in order to convey meanings. Because rules are characterized by sequential co-occurrences between elements (e.g., "These cupcakes are unbelievable"), tracking the statistical relationships between these elements is fundamental. However, purely bott...
Correlational evidence in non-human primates has reported evidence of increased fronto-parietal high-beta band (22-30 Hz) synchrony during the endogenous allocation of visuospatial attention. But may the engagement of inter-regional synchrony at this specific frequency band provide the causal mechanism by which top-down processes are engaged and th...
Prior evidence supports a critical role of oscillatory activity in visual cognition, but are cerebral oscillations simply correlated or causally linked to our ability to consciously acknowledge the presence of a target in our visual field? Here, EEG signals were recorded on humans performing a visual detection task, while they received brief patter...
Theoretical and experimental evidence suggest that the induction of oscillatory activity by an external rhythmic source on a specific brain area is maximally efficient if the input pattern matches its so-called ‘natural’ frequency, defined as the predominant neural rhythm at which the activity of this area tends to fluctuate spontaneously. Based on...
Prior evidence supports the critical role of oscillatory activity in cognitive function, but are cerebral oscillations simply correlated or causally linked to specific aspects of visual cognition? Here, EEG signals were recorded on humans performing a conscious visual detection task, while they received brief rhythmic or random noninvasive stimulat...
Non-invasive brain stimulation methods, such as Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS), are widely used worldwide to make causality-based inferences about brain-behavior interactions. TMS-based clinical applications have been shown promising to treat neurological or psychiatric diseases. TMS works by inducing non-invasively electric currents in lo...
We here report paradoxical hand function recovery in a 61-year-old male tetra-paretic chronic patient following a stroke of the brainstem (with highly degraded right and abolished left-hand finger flexion/extension disabling him to manipulate objects) who experienced insidious auditory hallucinations (AHs) 4 years after such event. Symptomatic trea...
Introduction
The frequency of local oscillations and inter-regional synchrony has been correlated with the engagement of cognitive operations. Notwithstanding, adding causality to these associations requires the direct manipulation of brain rhythms Noninvasive stimulation with single pulses of TMS coupled to scalp-EEG recordings has provided eviden...
Question
Correlational evidence in monkeys has reported increased synchrony of high-beta (22–34 Hz) cortical oscillations between frontal and parietal attentional regions during visual tasks engaging an endogenous capture of attention (Buschmann and Miller, Science, 2007). However, these results lack causality. We aim to demonstrate that this frequ...
In a quest for direct evidence of oscillation entrainment, we analyzed intracerebral electroencephalographic recordings obtained during intracranial electrical stimulation in a cohort of three medication-resistant epilepsy patients tested pre-surgically. Spectral analyses of non-epileptogenic cerebral sites stimulated directly with high frequency e...
Introduction
Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) are perception-like experiences that occur without an external stimulus. AVHs can occur following a stroke. Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (rTMS) is a tool used to induce brain plasticity in local and remote areas of the brain that may be used for AVHs treatment. Here, we report the c...
Background:
The presence of non-suicidal self-injury acts in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is very prevalent. These behaviors are a public health concern and have become a poorly understood phenomenon in the community. It has been proposed that the commission of non-suicidal self-injury might be related to a failure in the brain network re...
Relevant data which complement the findings described in manuscript.
Medication prescription of BPD patients (Table A). Comorbidity in the BPD group (Tabe B). Behavioral data (Figure A).
(DOCX)
A cortical visuomotor reaching network, comprising the medial intraparietal sulcus (mIPS) and the dorsal premotor area (PMd), encodes the sensorimotor transformations required for the on-line control of reaching movements. How information is transmitted between these two regions and which pathways are involved, is less clear. Here, we use a multimo...
Human sensory and motor systems provide the natural means for the exchange of information between individuals, and, hence, the basis for human civilization. The recent development of brain-computer interfaces (BCI) has provided an important element for the creation of brain-to-brain communication systems, and precise brain stimulation techniques ar...
The study of the movement related brain potentials (MRPBs) needs accurate technical approaches to disentangle the specific patterns of bran activity during the preparation and execution of movements. During the last forty years, synchronizing the electromyographic activation (EMG) of the muscle with electrophysiological recordings (EEG) has been co...
Playing a musical instrument demands the engagement of different neural systems. Recent studies about the musician's brain and musical training highlight that this activity requires the close interaction between motor and somatosensory systems. Moreover, neuroplastic changes have been reported in motor-related areas after short and long-term musica...
Background
Several recently developed therapies targeting motor disabilities in stroke sufferers have shown to be more effective than standard neurorehabilitation approaches. In this context, several basic studies demonstrated that music training produces rapid neuroplastic changes in motor-related brain areas. Music-supported therapy has been rec...
We report the case of a chronic stroke patient (62 months after injury) showing total absence of motor activity evoked by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of spared regions of the left motor cortex, but near-to-complete recovery of motor abilities in the affected hand.
Multimodal investigations included detailed TMS based motor mapping, moto...
Music-supported therapy (MST) has been developed recently to improve the use of the affected upper extremity after stroke. MST uses musical instruments, an electronic piano and an electronic drum set emitting piano sounds, to retrain fine and gross movements of the paretic upper extremity. In this paper, we first describe the rationale underlying M...
Music-Supported Therapy (MST) has been developed recently in order to improve the use of the affected upper extremity after stroke. This study investigated the neuroplastic mechanisms underlying effectiveness in a patient with chronic stroke.
MST uses musical instruments, a midi piano and an electronic drum set emitting piano sounds, to retrain fin...
A variational Bayesian formulation for a manifold-constrained Hidden Markov Model is used in this paper to segment a set of multivariate time series of electromyographic recordings corresponding to stroke patients and control subjects. An index of variability associated to this model is defined and applied to the robust detection of the silent peri...
Questions
Questions (4)
I am doing the analysis of intracortical EEG data and I want to test my results by predicting my own signal based in Kuramoto models to be sure that my results are correct. I would like to use the structural connectivity data as a coupling strength between the nodes (brain regions based on an atlas), but I do not have DTI data from all this patients. I would like to know from where can I have access to public DTI data to get this parameters.
Thanks in advance!
I know 'from somewhere' that the Binomial test is a 'very conservative test', for instance testing whether or not the number of correct responses in a forced choice response task is below or above chance level. Is there any reference or study supporting that?
I have a data set of EEG data acquired during the performance of multi-joint self-paced elbow extension movements, and I would like to know whether it is possible to quantify the amount of noisy information during the onset and further movement performance in channels C3, C4 and Cz, possibly produced by head or shoulder movement. I did not measure the head location or the EMG of the neck muscles during recording, so I only have the EEG data to do that.
I wonder if there is any measure, maybe based on power-spectrum or entropy to do that?
I am starting a project concerning learning musical sequences, and I would like to classify correctly this procedimental learning between implicit or explicit. I wonder if several learning parameters (as correct pitch repetition) might be considered as explicit, and others (such as rhythm) might be implicit. All opinions are welcomed.
