01/13: Berman

[ehuppert]

Comment below with a well-developed group question about the reading for this week's workshop. Please collaborate with your groups off-line this week.

One person can submit on the group's behalf and put the Group Name in the submission for credit.

Please post your question by Wednesday 11:59 PM, and upvote at least three of your peers' comments on Thursday prior to the workshop. You need to use 'thumbs-up' for your reactions to count towards 'top comments,' but you can use other emojis on top of the thumbs up.

[Thiyaghessan]

Hi Professor,

Thank you for sharing your research with us. The paper mentions that it is unclear whether the deficits in cognitive resources occurs first before mental disorders manifest or are a product of these disorders. While longitudinal studies might help determine how long these deficits themselves last, they are not likely to provide answers as to what comes first. How can this research be further extended/built upon to answer this question?

Group 2A

[GabeNicholson]

Hello Professor,

Given the fact that many psychopathologies such as ADHD, Schizophrenia, Depression, etc.. are highly heritable, is it fair to say that differences in H are also highly heritable? If so, are there any promising techniques that could be applied with this new information for early prevention strategies?

Group 2F Gabriel Nicholson, Wenqian Zhang, Sophie Wang, Xin Tang

[chuqingzhao]

Hi Professor Berman,

Thank you for sharing your work with us! We are wondering the following questions: Q1: Does this conclusion also apply to non-cognitive resources disruptions? For example, some people have extreme high time preference, and some people are super risk aversion.

Q2: What are the practical implications of being able to quantitatively define different psychopathologies? Do you think this could be the first step towards a cure or treatment? Or might this be a different method of diagnosing psychopathologies?

Q3: Do you think that the methods you talk about in your paper could be replicated with a different (less expensive) medical imaging modality (CT, Echo, etc.)? Could a different method help scale up the research?

Q4: Is there any theory or sense of where discrepancies in the H-P gradient come from? Genetics? Conditioning? Environment?

Group 2D: Yijing Zhang, Chuqing Zhao, Mike Packard, Alex Williamson

[afchao]

Group 1N:

Are cognitive resources as indirectly indexed by H also involved in not executing state transitions?

If H quantifies how easy it is for state transitions to occur in the brain and certain states (i.e. task-relevant states) are associated with better task performance than others (i.e. task-irrelevant states), it feels like there’s a piece missing to arrive at the result that H is positively correlated with task performance. In other words, once a brain has achieved a task-relevant state, it seems like further state transitions (which are more likely under high-H regimes) would be detrimental to performance.

[JunoWuu]

Group 2E:

A lot of the studies about psychopathology are trying to find specific factors for each disorder, or even each symptom, which is kind of an opposite direction than a search for general factor. So I think it is quite informative to learn about such general factor.
Since this H is found to be a general factor for psychopathology including ADHD, Depression, etc. We are interested to know how that finding could lead to a new direction of research. What the next step could be? Is there any clinical implication from this finding?

[chrismaurice0]

Group 2M: ChenMing Zhang, Chris Maurice, Xin Su, Yujing Sun

Hello Professor Burnam: We have two questions for you that cover two different areas of your expertise:

The first is stems from the paper we had to read for today's workshop, and the potential ethical implications of the connection you find between H and individual differences in cognitive resource allocation. Could schools or companies use your methods to determine who is qualified to be accepted for a position at their institution? Is that ethical? What if you compare your methods to how we currently assess performance using standardized tests, which are known to favor more affluent individuals. Do your methods eliminate that bias or reinforce it?

Second, can you speak on how advancements in technology (specifically virtual reality and the metaverse) will impact
Psychology/ Neuroscience research in the future. Is there a future for these methods in your fields? Are these methods already being utilized?

[Raychanan]

Group 1C: Val Alvern Cueco Ligo, Rui Chen, Max Kramer, Yutai Li

• Since lower H is indicative of deficits in cognitive resources in a non-specific pattern, do you expect the level of H will change across the life span(in aging)? If so, could H be used as an early indicator of the onset of certain mental disorders(Alzheimer’s)?
• Study results show that decreased H is associated with higher general psychopathology and attention deficit/hyperactivity extracted factor scores. I am curious if it is possible to intervene with H in some way so as to help mitigate his attention disorder? Is this only possible with medication? Are there other (of course ethical) approaches?

[javad-e]

Group 1F:
Thank you Prof. Berman for presenting at our workshop.
We were wondering what factors influence the Hurst exponent of a person’s brain? Does genetics play a role in influencing a person’s Hurst exponent? What about other external factors such as exercising and diet?
Would the changes in Hurst exponent be permanent or are they temporary? Can a low Hurst exponent go higher under any circumstances?

[pranathiiyer]

Group 1B: Guangyuan Chen, Yuxuan Chen, Qishen Fu, Pranathi Iyer

Hi professor, your work was an interesting read! You say that the Hurst-Psychopathology gradient is predictive of out of scanner and future--which is the same task after two years. Is there any kind of reason for the bound on two years? More specifically, did you perform or if not, do you have an idea as to how it might behave for a frame of time beyond this? Also, is it possible to understand if such developments are genetic or emerge with time and their sensitivity to the time frame of reference being studied (for instance children between 9-10 years here).
Additionally,

1. Why could the authors preclude the possibility that there is not a common pathological cause that contributes both to the reduction of activities in the fronto-parietal area and the psychological deficits?

2. Are the current pathological studies clear and strong enough to let the authors make the association valid for causal inference?

[a-bosko]

Group 1A:

Dr. Berman,

Thank you for presenting this week! Our question this week is as follows:

The article mentions that H is a non-specific correlate of overall psychopathology. However, mental disorders can vary widely, from depression to schizophrenia to autism. Therefore, is there evidence of differing brain patterns of H when it comes to varying mental disorders? Also, is it useful to understand differing brain patterns of H among mental disorders?

Thank you, and we look forward to discussion!

[Yutong0828]

Hi Professor Berman,

This is a really intriguing paper!

As the decrease and increase in H can quantify the available cognitive resources and the allocation of cognitive resources to different cognitive systems, it was found to be related to work memory tasks.

So, our question is, in addition to psychopathology, what other major areas do you think may be relate to the changing pattern of H? For example, what tasks other than working memory do you think may worth exploration?

Also, as different people may have different neural activating patterns, is it possible that the individual differences in H indicates normal individual differences in cognitive functions in addition to psychopathology? Thanks!

Group 1L:
Hongxian Huang
Xi Cheng
Yutong Li
Elliot Delahaye

[AlexPrizzy]

Group 2L: Jingwen Ni, Alex Przybycin, Allison Towey, David Xu, Sirui Zhou

We were wondering about the H coefficient. As it's used in this article as a measure of working memory capabilities in psychopathology, can multiple H's be used at once to monitor the states of various cognitive resources? For example, can one combine a measures of auditory and visual working memory capabilities at once?

[ginxzheng]

Group 2H: Egemen Pamukcu, Ning Tang, Taize Yu, Gin Xiaojin Zheng

Thank you for coming to our workshop this quarter, Professor Berman! We have questions about some principles in psychopathology research. Would you explain more about the varying emotional distractors be like when measuring the recognition memory using fMRI? How can the "blocks" task simultaneously examine emotional regulation and working memory? Why do these two abilities that are tied to childhood psychopathology, in particular, affect the outcome? Thank you and looking forward to tomorrow!

[YLHan97]

Group 1G: Yulun Han, Tian Chen, Tanzima Chowdhury, Qihui Lei

Hi Professor Berman,
Thank you for sharing such interesting topic and looking forward to tomorrow's speech.
The article mentioned that H will decrease with increased general psychopathology and attention-deficit/hyperactivity extracted factor scores in the working memory task. Because these factors interact with each other to have an effect on H. So, the question is, where can it be applied other than in psychopathology? Would you please provide some real world cases?

[Peihan12]

Group 1M: Jiehan Liu, Partha Kadambi, Peihan Gao, Shiyang Lai, Zhibin Chen

Hello professor Berman,
Thank you for sharing your research. The paper mentions that H can be used to predict concurrent and future performance in two years and the association between H and mental disorder is indicated to be related to misallocation of cognitive resources, we want to know whether it can be used to predict the long term effect and whether the mechanism can still be detected.