NP_Publications

Planning entails running simulations forward to identify possible outcomes. It is useful for situations where outcomes are uncertain, costly or dangerous to pursue. A growing body of literature is finding that during theta states in the rodent hippocampus, sequences run forward along possible futures, enabling 'episodic future thinking' that can be used within a neural circuit for planning. Emerging data suggest that the prelimbic cortex initiates these simulations, an entorhinal-hippocampal...

Clinical psychology is a young science. Psychological suffering remains extensive, with core scientific issues the subject of ongoing study and debate. Clinical practice depends on the research base for elucidating etiology, systematic improvements in provision of mental health care, improvements in public health, and credibility with clients and the larger public. Science-oriented training programs endeavor to develop students into independent scientists, clinicians, and/or administrators who...

CONCLUSIONS: Our results demonstrate distinct behavioral and neurophysiological attentional control profiles in schizophrenia and major depressive disorder compared to control participants during language comprehension.

Functional brain networks support human cognition, yet how individualized network architecture emerges in early childhood remains poorly understood. Averaging across participants can obscure age-specific organization and person-to-person differences, particularly in slowly developing association cortices. We developed an age-appropriate functional reference that captured common structure across toddlers without averaging away individual variability, enabling estimation of each child's networks...

CONCLUSIONS: A brief, self-administered, and scalable brain health battery demonstrates associations with military vocational aptitude and with neurocognitive domains associated with cognitive resilience. Future studies should evaluate whether integrating these assessments into current practices predicts success in Basic Combat Training, guides military progression, and supports long-term cognitive screening and monitoring across the Armed Forces.

Specific phobia (SPH) is a prevalent anxiety disorder and may involve advanced biological aging. However, limited brain age research has been conducted in anxiety disorders. This mega-analysis investigated brain aging in SPH participants within the ENIGMA-Anxiety Working Group. 3D brain structural MRI scans from 17 international samples (600 SPH individuals, of whom 504 formally diagnosed and 96 questionnaire-based cases; 1134 controls; age range: 22-75 years) were processed with FreeSurfer....

Precise measurement of individual variation in psychiatric symptoms is essential for developing scalable tools that can ultimately inform treatment development and clinical care. Individuals performing the same cognitive task often adopt qualitatively distinct strategies that may reflect differences in underlying neural processes and psychiatric symptom dimensions. Yet most cognitive paradigms implicitly assume that all individuals rely on the same cognitive strategy, attributing behavioral...

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a psychiatric condition that may develop after trauma exposure. PTSD is characterized by considerable clinical heterogeneity. The amygdala's key role in fear conditioning makes it an important focus for investigating the neurobiology of PTSD. However, associations between amygdala volume and PTSD have been inconsistent. The amygdala consists of functionally distinct nuclei. Specific associations between amygdala nuclei volumes and PTSD may account for...

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Polarization-sensitive optical coherence tomography (PS-OCT) is a label-free imaging technique that exploits birefringence to visualize myelinated axons at micrometer resolution. However, serial PS-OCT imaging has been limited to small volumes, including tissue blocks from larger species, owing to constraints in acquisition speed, system stability, and data processing. These limitations have prevented its application to whole-brain mapping in large mammals. Here we present a scalable PS-OCT...

CONCLUSION: Current ACE models may not fully capture neurodevelopmental impacts reflected in diagnosed psychiatric disorders among adolescents, particularly in high-risk groups such as foster and adopted individuals. In a large clinic sample our findings support a nuanced association between ACEs and later psychiatric diagnoses and highlight the need for ACE-focused assessment, prevention, and treatment strategies tailored to foster care and adopted populations.

CONCLUSION: Increasing numbers of PSEs were associated with higher odds of psychiatric diagnoses, with patterns varying by substance and outcome. These findings motivate research on exposure timing and combinations to support earlier identification and intervention for at-risk children.

Several factor-analytic studies of the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS) and Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) have identified two dimensions. These dimensions reflect expressive (EXP) and experiential or Motivation and Pleasure (MAP) negative symptoms. However, the extent to which these factor solutions yield similar dimension scores across the two scales remains unclear. This study compared equipercentile linking and linear regression data harmonization methods...

Prior research suggests that rapid neurobiological changes and their interaction with psychosocial stressors serve as major precipitants of disordered eating in adolescence. However, there has been little discussion of how similar processes may facilitate disordered eating in later life, which is similarly associated with rapid biosocial change. We present a novel framework for the increased risk of eating pathology in midlife into older adulthood, suggesting testable mechanistic pathways to...

The clinical and biological heterogeneity of major depressive disorder (MDD) may reflect the aggregation of different conditions with distinct pathologies under a single diagnostic label. Neuroanatomical heterogeneity in MDD was examined using a harmonized, age- and sex-matched sample from the ENIGMA MDD consortium (N = 5146; age range: 9-82 years; 64% female). Analyses of global neurostrucutral variability revealed greater cortical thickness heterogeneity in MDD compared with healthy controls...

CONCLUSIONS: The connectivity profile of potentially necessary tracts for successful DBS treatment after failed capsulotomy revealed a surprising proportion of subcortical regions and inconsistent PFC involvement, highlighting an often-ignored set of connections that may be critical to effective DBS.

INTRODUCTION: Reduced or lost sensation and movement after a spinal cord injury (SCI) impairs the brain's ability to accurately localize paralyzed body parts, causing deficits in its internal body map, or "mental body representations" (MBR). These deficits hinder functional recovery and contribute to neuropathic pain. Medications for neuropathic pain are often ineffective and carry side-effects. Our pilot trials found that in-person Cognitive Multisensory Rehabilitation (CMR), a physical therapy...

CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that the effects of VCVS DBS on cognitive control are primarily mediated by right dorsal prefrontal cortical axons projecting from the dlPFC and dmPFC. Targeting these pathways may improve stimulation strategies and outcomes for psychiatric disorders characterized by impaired cognitive control.

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the ventral capsule/ventral striatum (VCVS) can treat obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and other psychiatric conditions. Yet, optimizing its clinical efficacy is a major challenge, often hindered by incomplete knowledge of how stimulation parameters and targets affect neural activity and behavior. VCVS DBS is thought to work in part by improving cognitive control, an important decision-making component that is impaired in OCD and other illnesses. The magnitude...

Deep learning models have demonstrated the potential to predict task-evoked brain activation from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging, offering a pathway toward individualized brain mapping without requiring task-based data. In this study, we systematically evaluate architectural strategies for improving the efficiency and scalability of such models. Using data from the Human Connectome Project, we replicate the BrainSurfCNN framework and introduce two extensions: BrainSERF,...