Error-related Alpha Suppression: Scalp Topography and (Lack of) Modulation by Modafinil.

Errors in performance trigger cognitive and neural changes that are implemented to adaptively adjust to fluctuating demands. Error-related alpha suppression (ERAS)-which refers to decreased power in the alpha frequency band after an incorrect response-is thought to reflect cognitive arousal after errors. Much of this work has been correlational, however, and there are no direct investigations into its pharmacological sensitivity. In Study 1 (n = 61), we evaluated the presence and scalp distribution of ERAS in a novel flanker task specifically developed for cross-species assessments. Using this same task in Study 2 (n = 26), which had a placebo-controlled within-subject design, we evaluated the sensitivity of ERAS to placebo (0 mg), low (100 mg), and high (200 mg) doses of modafinil, a wakefulness promoting agent. Consistent with previous work, ERAS was maximal at parieto-occipital recording sites in both studies. In Study 2, modafinil did not have strong effects on ERAS (a significant Accuracy × Dose interaction emerged, but drug-placebo differences did not reach statistical significance after correction for multiple comparisons and was absent after controlling for accuracy rate). ERAS was correlated with accuracy rates in both studies. Thus, modafinil did not impact ERAS as hypothesized, and findings indicate ERAS may reflect an orienting response to infrequent events.

Identifying a stable and generalizable factor structure of major depressive disorder across three large longitudinal cohorts.

The Patient Health Questionnaire 9 (PHQ-9) is the current standard outpatient screening tool for measuring and tracking the nine symptoms of major depressive disorder (MDD). While the PHQ-9 was originally conceptualized as a unidimensional measure, it has become clear that MDD is not a monolithic construct, as evidenced by high comorbidities with other theoretically distinct diagnoses and common symptom overlap between depression and other diagnoses. Therefore, identifying reliable and temporally stable subfactors of depressive symptoms could allow research and care to be tailored to different depression phenotypes. This study improved on previous factor analysis studies of the PHQ-9 by leveraging samples that were clinical (participants with depression only), large (N = 1483 depressed individuals in total), longitudinal (up to 5 years), and from three diverse (matching racial distribution of the United States) datasets. By refraining from assuming the number of factors or item loadings a priori, and thus utilizing a solely data-driven approach, we identified a ranked list of best-fitting models, with the parsimonious one achieving good model fit across studies at most timepoints (average TLI >= 0.90). This model categorizes the PHQ-9 items into four factors: (1) Affective (Anhedonia + Depressed Mood), (2) Somatic (Sleep + Fatigue + Appetite), (3) Internalizing (Worth/Guilt + Suicidality), (4) Sensorimotor (Concentration + Psychomotor), which may be used to further precision psychiatry by testing factor-specific interventions in research and clinical settings.

Neural and behavioral markers of inhibitory control predict symptom improvement during internet-delivered cognitive behavioral therapy for depression.

Poor inhibitory control contributes to deficits in emotion regulation, which are often targeted by treatments for major depressive disorder (MDD), including cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Brain regions that contribute to inhibitory control and emotion regulation overlap; thus, inhibitory control might relate to response to CBT. In this study, we examined whether baseline inhibitory control and resting state functional connectivity (rsFC) within overlapping emotion regulation-inhibitory control regions predicted treatment response to internet-based CBT (iCBT). Participants with MDD were randomly assigned to iCBT (N = 30) or a monitored attention control (MAC) condition (N = 30). Elastic net regression was used to predict post-treatment Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) scores from baseline variables, including demographic variables, PHQ-9 scores, Flanker effects (interference, sequential dependency, post-error slowing), and rsFC between the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, bilateral anterior insula (AI), and right temporoparietal junction (TPJ). Essential prognostic predictor variables retained in the elastic net regression included treatment group, gender, Flanker interference response time (RT), right AI-TPJ rsFC, and left AI-right AI rsFC. Prescriptive predictor variables retained included interactions between treatment group and baseline PHQ-9 scores, age, gender, Flanker RT, sequential dependency effects on accuracy, post-error accuracy, right AI-TPJ rsFC, and left AI-right AI rsFC. Inhibitory control and rsFC within inhibitory control-emotion regulation regions predicted reduced symptom severity following iCBT, and these effects were stronger in the iCBT group than in the MAC group. These findings contribute to a growing literature indicating that stronger inhibitory control at baseline predicts better outcomes to psychotherapy, including iCBT.

Concurrent electrophysiological recording and cognitive testing in a rodent touchscreen environment.

Challenges in therapeutics development for neuropsychiatric disorders can be attributed, in part, to a paucity of translational models capable of capturing relevant phenotypes across clinical populations and laboratory animals. Touch-sensitive procedures are increasingly used to develop innovative animal models that better align with testing conditions used in human participants. In addition, advances in electrophysiological techniques have identified neurophysiological signatures associated with characteristics of neuropsychiatric illness. The present studies integrated these methodologies by developing a rat flanker task with electrophysiological recordings based on reverse-translated protocols used in human electroencephalogram (EEG) studies of cognitive control. Various touchscreen-based stimuli were evaluated for their ability to efficiently gain stimulus control and advance to flanker test sessions. Optimized stimuli were then examined for their elicitation of prototypical visual evoked potentials (VEPs) across local field potential (LFP) wires and EEG skull screws. Of the stimuli evaluated, purple and green photographic stimuli were associated with efficient training and expected flanker interference effects. Orderly stimulus-locked outcomes were also observed in VEPs across LFP and EEG recordings. These studies along with others verify the feasibility of concurrent electrophysiological recordings and rodent touchscreen-based cognitive testing and encourage future use of this integrated approach in therapeutics development.

Concordant neurophysiological signatures of cognitive control in humans and rats.

Progress towards understanding neural mechanisms in humans relevant to psychiatric conditions has been hindered by a lack of translationally-relevant cognitive tasks for laboratory animals. Accordingly, there is a critical need to develop parallel neurophysiological assessments of domains of cognition, such as cognitive control, in humans and laboratory animals. To address this, we developed a touchscreen-based cognitive (Eriksen Flanker) task in rats and used its key characteristics to construct a novel human version, with similar testing parameters and endpoints across species. We obtained continuous electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings, including local field potentials in rats, and compared electrophysiological signatures locked to stimulus onset and responses across species. We also assessed whether behavioral or physiological task effects were modulated by modafinil, which enhances aspects of cognitive function in humans. In both species, the task elicited expected flanker interference effects (reduced accuracy) during high-conflict trials. Across homologous neuroanatomical loci, stimulus-locked increases in theta power during high-conflict trials as well as error-related negative potentials were observed. These endpoints were not affected by modafinil in either species. Despite some species-specific patterns, our findings demonstrate the feasibility of a rat Flanker task as well as cross-species behavioral and neurophysiological similarities, which may enable novel insights into the neural correlates of healthy and aberrant behavior and provide mechanistic insights relevant to treatment.

A holistic approach for suppression of COVID-19 spread in workplaces and universities.

As society has moved past the initial phase of the COVID-19 crisis that relied on broad-spectrum shutdowns as a stopgap method, industries and institutions have faced the daunting question of how to return to a stabilized state of activities and more fully reopen the economy. A core problem is how to return people to their workplaces and educational institutions in a manner that is safe, ethical, grounded in science, and takes into account the unique factors and needs of each organization and community. In this paper, we introduce an epidemiological model (the "Community-Workplace" model) that accounts for SARS-CoV-2 transmission within the workplace, within the surrounding community, and between them. We use this multi-group deterministic compartmental model to consider various testing strategies that, together with symptom screening, exposure tracking, and nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPI) such as mask wearing and physical distancing, aim to reduce disease spread in the workplace. Our framework is designed to be adaptable to a variety of specific workplace environments to support planning efforts as reopenings continue. Using this model, we consider a number of case studies, including an office workplace, a factory floor, and a university campus. Analysis of these cases illustrates that continuous testing can help a workplace avoid an outbreak by reducing undetected infectiousness even in high-contact environments. We find that a university setting, where individuals spend more time on campus and have a higher contact load, requires more testing to remain safe, compared to a factory or office setting. Under the modeling assumptions, we find that maintaining a prevalence below 3% can be achieved in an office setting by testing its workforce every two weeks, whereas achieving this same goal for a university could require as much as fourfold more testing (i.e., testing the entire campus population twice a week). Our model also simulates the dynamics of reduced spread that result from the introduction of mitigation measures when test results reveal the early stages of a workplace outbreak. We use this to show that a vigilant university that has the ability to quickly react to outbreaks can be justified in implementing testing at the same rate as a lower-risk office workplace. Finally, we quantify the devastating impact that an outbreak in a small-town college could have on the surrounding community, which supports the notion that communities can be better protected by supporting their local places of business in preventing onsite spread of disease.

Toward a Mobile Platform for Real-world Digital Measurement of Depression: User-Centered Design, Data Quality, and Behavioral and Clinical Modeling.

BACKGROUND: Although effective mental health treatments exist, the ability to match individuals to optimal treatments is poor, and timely assessment of response is difficult. One reason for these challenges is the lack of objective measurement of psychiatric symptoms. Sensors and active tasks recorded by smartphones provide a low-burden, low-cost, and scalable way to capture real-world data from patients that could augment clinical decision-making and move the field of mental health closer to measurement-based care. OBJECTIVE: This study tests the feasibility of a fully remote study on individuals with self-reported depression using an Android-based smartphone app to collect subjective and objective measures associated with depression severity. The goals of this pilot study are to develop an engaging user interface for high task adherence through user-centered design; test the quality of collected data from passive sensors; start building clinically relevant behavioral measures (features) from passive sensors and active inputs; and preliminarily explore connections between these features and depression severity. METHODS: A total of 600 participants were asked to download the study app to join this fully remote, observational 12-week study. The app passively collected 20 sensor data streams (eg, ambient audio level, location, and inertial measurement units), and participants were asked to complete daily survey tasks, weekly voice diaries, and the clinically validated Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9) self-survey. Pairwise correlations between derived behavioral features (eg, weekly minutes spent at home) and PHQ-9 were computed. Using these behavioral features, we also constructed an elastic net penalized multivariate logistic regression model predicting depressed versus nondepressed PHQ-9 scores (ie, dichotomized PHQ-9). RESULTS: A total of 415 individuals logged into the app. Over the course of the 12-week study, these participants completed 83.35% (4151/4980) of the PHQ-9s. Applying data sufficiency rules for minimally necessary daily and weekly data resulted in 3779 participant-weeks of data across 384 participants. Using a subset of 34 behavioral features, we found that 11 features showed a significant (P<.001 Benjamini-Hochberg adjusted) Spearman correlation with weekly PHQ-9, including voice diary-derived word sentiment and ambient audio levels. Restricting the data to those cases in which all 34 behavioral features were present, we had available 1013 participant-weeks from 186 participants. The logistic regression model predicting depression status resulted in a 10-fold cross-validated mean area under the curve of 0.656 (SD 0.079). CONCLUSIONS: This study finds a strong proof of concept for the use of a smartphone-based assessment of depression outcomes. Behavioral features derived from passive sensors and active tasks show promising correlations with a validated clinical measure of depression (PHQ-9). Future work is needed to increase scale that may permit the construction of more complex (eg, nonlinear) predictive models and better handle data missingness.

Optimizing assessments of post-error slowing: A neurobehavioral investigation of a flanker task.

Appropriately adjusting to errors is essential for adaptive behavior. Post-error slowing (PES) refers to the increased reaction times on trials following incorrect relative to correct responses. PES has been used as a metric of cognitive control in basic cognitive neuroscience research as well as clinical contexts. However, calculation of PES varies widely among studies and has not yet been standardized, despite recent calls to optimize its measurement. Here, using behavioral and electrophysiological data from a modified flanker task, we considered different methods of calculating PES, assessed their internal consistency, examined their convergent correlations with behavioral performance and error-related event-related brain potentials (ERPs), and evaluated their sensitivity to task demands (e.g., presence of trial-to-trial feedback). Results indicated that the so-called robust measure of PES, calculated using only error-surrounding trials, provided an estimate of PES that was three times larger in magnitude than the traditional calculation. This robust PES correlated with the amplitude of the error positivity (Pe), an index of attention allocation to errors, just as well as the traditional method. However, all PES estimates had very weak internal consistency. Implications for measurement are discussed.

ERPs show that classroom-instructed late second language learners rely on the same prosodic cues in syntactic parsing as native speakers.

The loss of brain plasticity after a 'critical period' in childhood has often been argued to prevent late language learners from using the same neurocognitive mechanisms as native speakers and, therefore, from attaining a high level of second language (L2) proficiency [7,11]. However, more recent behavioral and electrophysiological research has challenged this 'Critical Period Hypothesis', demonstrating that even late L2 learners can display native-like performance and brain activation patterns [17], especially after longer periods of immersion in an L2 environment. Here we use event-related potentials (ERPs) to show that native-like processing can also be observed in the largely under-researched domain of speech prosody - even when L2 learners are exposed to their second language almost exclusively in a classroom setting. Participants listened to spoken sentences whose prosodic boundaries would either cooperate or conflict with the syntactic structure. Previous work had shown that this paradigm is difficult for elderly native speakers, however, German L2 learners of English showed very similar ERP components for on-line prosodic phrasing as well as for prosody-syntax mismatches (garden path effects) as the control group of native speakers. These data suggest that L2 immersion is not always necessary to master complex L2 speech processing in a native-like way.