Nuria Paúl

Complutense University of Madrid | UCM · Department of Experimental Psychology

Background: This study aimed to explore the association between a verbal learning task that evaluates the potential mutual dependency between memory and executive functions (i.e., the Test of Memory Strategies, TMS) and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) Alzheimer's Disease (AD) biomarkers. Methods: A sample of 47 mild cognitive impairment (MCI) particip...

Background Social cognitive deficits are common after traumatic brain injury (TBI). The participant in this single-case experimental design (SCED) was 7 years old when he sustained a severe TBI. After 2 years in rehabilitation, he continues to show deficits in social cognition.Objective To determine the effectiveness of three interventions, each ai...

Objective: In this study, we aim to explore differences in executive functions, memory , and memory strategies, between healthy individuals with high and low levels of Cognitive Reserve (CR). Method: A total of 70 participants underwent neuropsychological assessment, 36 females and 34 males, aged between 50 and 85 years. The instruments administere...

Background Diagnostic research criteria for Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) recommend the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) as a sensible and validated biomarker to improve the accuracy of the prognosis regarding progression to dementia for people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Also, it has been established that episodic memory failure is a proxy for AD, w...

Background Previous literature has shown that executive functions (EF) are related to performance in memory (M) tasks. Nevertheless, there is a shortage of psychometric tests that examine these two constructs simultaneously. The Test of Memory Strategies (TMS; previously validated in Spain and Portugal) could be a useful verbal learning task that e...

Verbal fluency tests are easy and quick to use in neuropsychological assessments, so they have been counted among the most classical tools in this context. To date, several normative data for verbal fluency tests have been provided in different languages and countries. A systematic review was carried out with studies that provide normative data for...

Background Stroke is the second leading cause of death worldwide and it causes important long-term cognitive and physical deficits that hamper patients' daily activity. Neuropsychological rehabilitation (NR) has increasingly become more important to recover from cognitive disability and to improve the functionality and quality of life of these pati...

The objective of the present study was to evaluate whether declarative memory deficits are related to executive function deficits (EF), since they could be a consequence of a poor organization of the material to memorize. This interaction between both cognitive processes can be studied simultaneously in a single task such as the Test of Memory Stra...

The ability to generate memory strategies is a key factor in performance of episodic memory tests. There is evidence about the inefficient use of memory strategies in old adults. However, a question remains unresolved: Worse performance on memory test in the older people is due to an inability to mobilize cognitive strategies or to an episodic memo...

Objective: Previous literature has shown that executive functions (EF) are related to performance in memory tasks. The fact that there are no psychometric tests that evaluate these two constructs simultaneously led a group of researchers to develop the Test of Memory Strategies (TSM). Given the potential importance of this instrument for neuropsyc...

Brain plasticity is understood as the capacity of the brain to evolve, or recover after an aggression. Even in the adult brain, plasticity plays an important role in functional recovery after acquired brain injury, which might have significant relevance to the practice of neurorehabilitation. It is of special interest to identify the mechanisms und...

Una de las claves para entender cómo actúan las redes funcionales podría residir en el estudio de los mecanismos de plasticidad cerebral. Este es uno de los fenómenos que el modelo tradicional de la hiperespecialización funcional había explicado de forma más débil, y puede ser el mejor ejemplo de un sistema con un funcionamiento en red.

Predicting the evolution of individuals is a rather new mining task with applications in medicine. Medical researchers are interested in the progression of a disease and/or how do patients evolve or recover when they are subjected to some treatment. In this study, we investi- gate the problem of patients’ evolution on the basis of medical tests bef...

Predicting the evolution of individuals is a rather new mining task with applications in medicine. Medical researchers are interested in the progress of a disease and in the evolution of individuals subjected to treatment. We investigate the evolution of patients on the basis of medical tests before and during treatment after brain trauma: we want...

Clinicians could model the brain injury of a patient through his brain activity. However, how this model is defined and how it changes when the patient is recovering are questions yet unanswered. In this paper, the use of MedVir framework is proposed with the aim of answering these questions. Based on complex data mining techniques, this provides n...

Brain plasticity is understood as the capacity of the brain to evolve, or recover after an aggression. Even in the adult brain, plasticity plays an important role in functional recovery after acquired brain injury, which might have significant relevance to the practice of neurorehabilitation. It is of special interest to identify the mechanisms und...

Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of an individualized rehabilitation program (PRI) based on the ICF in stroke patients. Material and method: Thirty-six subjects with stroke underwent a PRI based on their preserved capacities, personal and contextual factors. Assessment was focused on different rehabilitation areas before and after the PRI w...

Cognitive processes require a functional interaction between specialized multiple, local and remote brain regions. Although these interactions can be strongly altered by an acquired brain injury, brain plasticity allows network reorganization to be principally responsible for recovery. The present work evaluates the impact of brain injury on functi...

Objetivo: Evaluar la eficacia de un programa de rehabilitación individualizado (PRI) basado en la CIF en pacientes con accidentes cerebrovasculares (ACV). Material y método: Treinta y seis pacientes con ACV fueron sometidos a PRI según sus capacidades preservadas y factores personales. Se evaluaron distintas áreas antes y después del PRI con la CIF...

Plasticity is the mechanism underlying the brain’s potential capability to compensate injury. Recently several studies have shown how functional connections among the brain areas are severely altered by brain injury and plasticity leading to a reorganization of the networks. This new approach studies the impact of brain injury by means of alteratio...

The ability to generate memory strategies is a key factor in the performance of episodic memory tasks. Whether the ability to generate memory strategies exerts an influence in the performance of memory tests in the elderly population is still a matter of debate. Here we present results from an experimental memory task (Test of Memory Strategies, TM...

The advent of new signal processing methods, such as non-linear analysis techniques, represents a new perspective which adds further value to brain signals' analysis. Particularly, Lempel-Ziv's Complexity (LZC) has proven to be useful in exploring the complexity of the brain electromagnetic activity. However, an important problem is the lack of kno...

It is still an open question whether subjective memory complaints (SMC) can actually be considered to be clinically relevant predictors for the development of an objective memory impairment and even dementia. There is growing evidence that suggests that SMC are associated with an increased risk of dementia and with the presence of biological correl...

Subjective memory complaints (SMCs) are frequently reported by elderly people with or without objective cognitive impairment (OMI) as assessed by neuropsychological tests. We investigate whether SMCs are associated with altered brain biomagnetic patterns even in the absence of OMI. We report spatio-temporal patterns of brain magnetic activity recor...

It has been reported that mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients, when compared with controls, show increased activity in different brain regions within the ventral pathway during memory tasks. A key question is whether this profile of increased activity could be useful to predict which patients will develop dementia. Herein, we present profiles...

Recovery after brain injury is an excellent platform to study the mechanism underlying brain plasticity, the reorganization of networks. Do complex network measures capture the physiological and cognitive alterations that occurred after a traumatic brain injury and its recovery? Patients as well as control subjects underwent resting-state MEG recor...

Cognitive processes require a functional interaction between specialized multiple, local and remote brain regions. Although these interactions can be strongly altered by an acquired brain injury, brain plasticity allows network reorganization to be principally responsible for recovery. The present work evaluates the impact of brain injury on functi...

The risk of cognitive decline after mesial temporal lobe (MTL) resection in the dominant hemisphere for treatment of epilepsy has been assessed with the intracarotid amytal procedure and functional neuroimaging. In this study we used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to analyze memory profiles in patients with left hippocampal sclerosis (HS). Biomagneti...

Objetives: The present work studies the possible ties among white matter, slowness of information processing and the deficits on attentional control, frequently impaired after TBI. Method: Fractional anisotropy (FA) values were measured in 15 TBI patients and 15 healthy controls. All sub- jects were also assessed using the Stroop Test and the Trail...

Un traumatismo craneoencefálico (TCE)ocurrido durante la infancia puede incidirnotablemente en el proceso de desarrollocerebral del niño y, como consecuencia,en su desarrollo cognitivo y conductual.Sin embargo, la evolución de las capacidadescognitivas y conductuales tras unTCE en la infancia no es siempre igual,sino que depende de una serie de fac...

Our purpose was to investigate the influence of several factors in the manifestation of impaired awareness following brain injury. We focused on the following factors, at one side the brain injury hemispheric side (right or left) and its neuroanatomical location, and on the other hand, the relation between initial severity and time post-injury. Par...

Las alteraciones de la atención forman parte de los principales problemas que surgen tras un trau- matismo craneoencefálico. Éstas pueden influir de forma directa en el funcionamiento de otros procesos cognitivos y en acti- vidades de la vida diaria, y dificultar así el progreso de la rehabilitación y el retorno al trabajo. La evaluación neuropsico...

ABSTRACT The occurrence of traumatic brain injury (TBI) during childhood may dis- rupt ongoing brain development and, consequently, the development of cogni- tive and behavioural skills. However, cognitive and behavioural outcome after TBI is variable, depend- ing upon morbid and psychosocial fac- tors. The interaction between these two main groups...

There was analyzed the presence of lack of conscience of the deficits after suffering a cerebral acquired damage. There was investigated the relation of the initial severity of the injury, in the later presence of lack of conscience. Also there was analyzed the role that plays the time passed af- ter the injury in the progressive recovery of an obj...

Se investigó la influencia de distintos factores en la manifestación de falta de conciencia de los déficit tras sufrir un daño cerebral. Los factores estudiados fueron localización hemisférica de la lesión (derecha e izquierda) y localización anatómica de la lesión, por un lado y la relación de la severidad inicial de la lesión y el tiempo transcur...

The first two decades of cognitive neuroimaging research have provided a constant increase of the knowledge about the neural organization of cognitive processes. Many cognitive functions (e.g.working memory) can now be associated with particular neural structures, and ongoing research promises to clarify this picture further, providing a new mappin...

Changes in spatiotemporal profiles of brain magnetic activity were investigated in healthy volunteers as a function of varying demands for phonological storage of spoken pseudowords. Greater activity for the phonological memory task was restricted to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in the left hemisphere. During performance of the memory...

Few studies have tested the correlation between traditional declarative memory scores and functional brain imaging measures of memory. We examined the predictable capabilities of magnetoencephalography-derived measures, scanned during a high-load encoding-memory task, in the immediate (LM-1) and delayed (LM-2) recall from the Wechsler memory scale....

Patients with brain injury suffer cognitive, physical and emotional impairments that interfere with their everyday activities. However, behavioral problems such as aggressiveness and irritability affect the normal integration of the patient in the family, and in social and vocational contexts. Given this, it is important to add a functional assessm...

Cognitive deficits following lesions in parieto occipital areas tend to cause, among others, visuospatial and visuoperceptive alterations. The aim of this article is to examine the influence of others possible deficit over its rehabilitation. We discuss several patients who present visuospatial impairment after different brain injuries, not only th...

We review the main aspects of functional recovery after brain injury as well as neuroimaging characteristics that make it relevant and useful to assess these changes. We also review some issues regarding recovery of motor and sensory functions, language and visuo spatial processes, and we discuss the methods used in this field, the difficulties fou...

Introduction and objective: Cognitive deficits following lesions in parieto-occipital areas tend to cause, among others, visuospatial and visuoperceptive alterations. The aim of this article is to examine the influence of others possible deficit over its rehabilitation. Patients and method: we discuss several patients who present visuospatial impai...

Tras un daño cerebral sobrevienen alteraciones cognitivas, físicas y emocionales que interfieren las actividades de la vida diaria del paciente afectado. Sin embargo, son los problemas de conducta (agresividad, irritabilidad, etc.) los que provocan mayores problemas para la integración del paciente en la vida familiar, social y laboral. En este sen...

In this study we examined spatiotemporal profiles of brain activity in the context of tasks designed to engage different verbal learning strategies (serial order, phonological, and semantic). The profile of activation associated with the serial-order strategy, which resulted in poor recall performance, featured early activation of the inferior fron...

Objective: To assess the effectiveness of neuropsychological rehabilitation as the impact on functional independence and psychosocial adaptation on patients with traumatic brain injury. Development: Neuropsychological rehabilitation in patients with acquired brain damage due to traumatic brain injury, has been developed at great speed for the last...

Es complejo elaborar conclusiones claras sobre la efectividad de los tratamientos sobre las alteraciones atencionales, diferentes grupos de investigación están centrando su trabajo en analizar los mecanismos atencionales que pueden mejorar con la rehabilitación. Asimismo, es indispensable estudiar su influencia en la vida cotidiana. Algunas estrate...

The impulse that neurosciences are receiving in the world of the investiga- tion, has its reflection in the advances, as to experimental level as clinical, in psychology, in the specialty in neurops- ychology. Neuropsychology means nowadays in the psychology, the appro- ach to the world of the neurosciences and with it the adaptation of this ancien...

Aunque desde hace más de un centenar de años se ha considerado la existencia de déficits neuropsicológicos en algunas patologías psiquiátricas, sólo recientemente se han dirigido los esfuerzos a tratarlos y/o modificarlos explícitamente. Probablemente sea debido a que desde un punto de vista clínico tradicionalmente se ha considerado el tema de los...

La rehabilitación de la memoria constituye uno de los aspectos fundamentales de la rehabilitación neuropsicológica. Las alteraciones mnésicas son muy frecuentes y el efecto que tienen sobre la vida cotidiana puede ser enormemente frustrante, tanto para los pacientes como para sus familiares o incluso los propios terapeutas. La mayoría de las patolo...

Brain trauma is one of the most frequent causes of hospitalization and work disability, mainly due to the increasing number of traffic accidents. Brain injury produces both acute and long-term effects, which – in view of their disability implication – may have a major social and assistance load. However, the patients’ complaints may be underestimat...

To show the degree of detection of simulation, defined as the conscious, intentional production of false or exaggerated physical and psychological symptoms, motivated by external rewards such as payments by insurance companies and compensations. In forensic circles, a major problem is under consideration, namely recognition of the existence and nat...

Introduction and objective: Establishment of the prognosis after traumatic brain damage is an important question for doctors, patients and their families, as well as for health organizations and insurers. The precision of the prognosis varies markedly according to the final objective of the prediction (mortality, severity and type of residual defe...

Various factors may contribute to cognitive deterioration in temporal lobe epilepsy, and there is controversy as to which has the greatest effect. In this study, we establish a comparison between patients with temporal lobe epilepsy controlled by drugs and drug-resistant patients, with the object of discovering the effect of different factors in ca...

Introduction. Various factors may contribute to cognitive deterioration in temporal lobe epilepsy, and there is controversy as to which has the greatest effect. Patients and methods. In this study, we establish a comparison between patients with temporal lobe epilepsy controlled by drugs and drug-resistant patients, with the object of discovering t...

Traditionally assessment of cognitive function has not been employed adequately in our medical community. In the last two decades the neuropsychological assessment has experimented an evolution in order to improvement in specificity and sensitivity. In this paper we present a compendium of neuropsychological test that could be evaluate cognitive fu...