NP_Publications

Adolescence is a life period marked by increased emotionality, and, for some, volatile friendships and emotion dysregulation. Yet little research has examined peer processes in relation to adolescent emotion dysregulation from a dynamic perspective. This 3-wave longitudinal study examined two peer-related processes - loneliness and friend support - in association with emotion dysregulation with data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, we examined if these associations differed in...

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CONCLUSIONS: Impaired value-based decision-making is dimensionally associated with greater NSSI engagement, with reduced punishment-based learning and choice persistence emerging as preliminary cognitive markers. With further research, these computational targets may eventually inform early identification and intervention efforts.

Adolescent brain development is difficult to study at scale because diffusion MRI (dMRI) measures are sensitive to technical variability across scanning environments. The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) study is the largest US-based longitudinal neuroimaging study of adolescent brain maturation. We present ABCD-Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) Community Collection (ABCC) release 3.1.0, a curated resource of more than 24,000 fully processed human ABCD dMRI datasets from...

Changepoint analysis for time series data identifies the time points for which properties about the data shift. In this paper, we are motivated by two distinct types of biomedical time series data: digital health monitoring and neuroimaging. The neuroimaging study consists of multivariate time series obtained from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The digital health monitoring data consists of binary univariate time series observed within an individual throughout the...

CONCLUSIONS: SMA-directed cTBS is a safe, feasible augmentation that may amplify the neural effects of CBIT on sensorimotor circuitry. Findings identify cTBS as the preferred stimulation regimen for future efficacy testing.

Depression is among the most prevalent and disabling mental health conditions worldwide. It is associated with low mood and motivation, cognitive inefficiencies, altered reward and punishment learning, and broader executive dysfunction that can disrupt daily functioning. Depression has also been linked to differences in sensory perception, sensitivity, and processing speed. However, how depression affects sensorimotor decision-making under uncertainty remains comparatively understudied. In this...

Visual noise is widely used as a stimulus in vision science, yet the neural representation of noise itself remains poorly understood. We investigated how external visual noise is encoded in the primary visual cortex (V1) using a biologically inspired neural network model (VOneNet). We simulated V1 responses to noise patterns and analyzed both the response of individual model neurons and the correlations among them. As expected, simulated neurons with smaller receptive fields showed stronger...

CONCLUSIONS: Neurocognitive, social cognitive, and metacognitive capacities-as experienced within an individual's social context-can buffer the effects of stress exposure on vulnerable individuals by enabling adaptive behavioral strategies and modulating maladaptive neurophysiologic responses. Resilience-promoting interventions that target these factors include: fostering safe and supportive social contexts for individuals at risk for or experiencing psychosis; developing their cognitive health...

OBJECTIVE: Suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs) are common in individuals with anorexia nervosa (AN), including those who are weight-restored. Dysfunction in reward processing has been proposed as a mechanism linking AN to STBs; however, little research has interrogated putative reward links between these phenomena. The present study examined behavioral markers associated with STBs in weight-restored AN using two reward-related decision-making tasks.

CONCLUSION: These findings demonstrate that TMS' effects on cognitive control are state-dependent, in which endogenous engagement of PFC-anchored networks can shape the magnitude and functional relevance of TMS-evoked activity and the associated modification of circuit function. Constraining cognitive states during TMS may therefore offer a framework to enhance the reliability of TMS' effects.

Emerging data support the benefits of creative arts interventions for addressing depression in adolescents, but the neural mechanisms are poorly understood. This study examined changes in connectivity among large-scale brain networks implicated in both depression and creativity, before and after an arts intervention for adolescents with depression. Thirty-nine adolescents with depression completed resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scans before and after completing a two-week...

Clinical improvement following psychiatric neuromodulation often requires weeks to months, creating prolonged uncertainty during treatment optimization. Neural biomarkers could reduce this uncertainty by forecasting treatment outcome, providing early evidence of therapeutic engagement, and objectively tracking clinical response. We analyzed nearly 120,000 patient-hours of chronic intracranial recordings from 24 patients undergoing ventral capsule/ventral striatum deep brain stimulation for...

Spatial navigation involves neural computations in distributed regions of the brain. Little is known about how activity across cortical regions is coordinated when animals navigate novel spatial environments or how that coordination changes as environments become familiar. We recorded mesoscale calcium (Ca2+) dynamics across large swathes of the dorsal cortex in male mice solving the Barnes maze, a 2D spatial navigation task where mice used random, serial, and spatial search strategies to...

Various neurocognitive processes contribute to reinforcement learning (RL) and decision making, requiring careful task designs and computational modeling to disentangle them. People rely on capacity-limited working memory (WM) to rapidly and flexibly adapt behavior during learning, together with slower incremental RL processes that support robust long-term retention. The RLWM paradigm was developed to isolate these contributions by manipulating WM demands during learning. Empirical and...

Sensitivity analysis informs causal inference by assessing the sensitivity of conclusions to departures from assumptions. The consistency assumption states that there are no hidden versions of treatment and that the outcome arising naturally equals the outcome arising from intervention. When reasoning about the possibility of consistency violations, it can be helpful to distinguish between covariates and versions of treatment. In the context of surgery, for example, genomic variables are...

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The human posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) is routinely implicated in cognition and disease, yet its specific functional contributions remain unclear. Historically, human neuroimaging has linked the region to episodic memory and the default mode network, while a distinct non-human primate electrophysiology literature has focused on economic decision-making. Integrating anatomical evidence with these literatures, it has recently been proposed that this divergence reflects subregional...

Suicidal ideation and attempts are common in first-episode psychosis (FEP), but less is known about how these outcomes change in large, community-based, coordinated specialty care (CSC) settings. This longitudinal cohort study examined 2951 individuals with FEP enrolled in 87 CSC clinics across 15 states in the Early Psychosis Intervention Network between 2019 and 2024. Suicide-related outcomes were assessed at admission and every 6 months for up to 2 years. At admission, 34% reported suicidal...

CONCLUSIONS: Hospitalizations decreased substantially after CSC admission and remained low over 2 years in this large national FEP cohort. Prior hospitalization and markers of earlier illness course (younger age and shorter DUP) were associated with higher hospitalization burden, highlighting targets for CSC care refinement.