OpenMentalizing: leveraging open neurological data for uncovering the differences in mentalizing/empathy capabilities

[stefanches7]

Project info

Title: OpenMentalizing: leveraging open neurological data for uncovering the differences in mentalizing/empathy capabilities

Project lead: Stefan Dvoretskii Twitter: https://twitter.com/StefanDvoretsk1 Mattermost:

Project collaborators: Giorgio Marinato giorgio.marinato@unitn.it

Acknowledgements: The project lead thanks Dr. Aleya Flechsenhar! for the seminar "Social cognitive dysfunction" @ LMU Munich, providing theoretical background and state-of-the-art literature about the current research on the topic.

Registered Brainhack Global 2020 Event: Brainhack Montreal, Brainhack Marseille

Project Description: Mentalizing is a higher cognitive ability that is vital for the social life of an individual. New brain imaging techniques have investigated neural circuits involved in mentalizing the most. The goal of this project is to leverage open neurological data to try and gain the scale in the mentalizing abilities confounders like disease/healthy state, cultural background of the individuals etc., utilizing the state-of-the-art knowledge of the topography of underlying circuits.

Data to use: openneuro.org. I have thought of T1 in the first place (i.e. structural changes)

Link to project repository/sources: See https://mattermost.brainhack.org/brainhack/channels/openmentalizing header

Goals for Brainhack Global 2020:

• [ ] Assess the realizability (advanced/expert)
• [ ] Collect the appropriate data (advanced)

Good first issues:

1. Read reference papers - understand the mentalizing & neural basis concepts
2. Look at OpenNeuro
3. Determine where to store data (brainlife?)

Recommended reading:

1. Schurz, Matthias, et al. "Toward a hierarchical model of social cognition: A neuroimaging meta-analysis and integrative review of empathy and theory of mind." Psychological Bulletin (2020). - Meta-study of the brain regions involved in Empathy/Mentalizing. Also the source of the title picture.
2. Luyten, P., Campbell, C., Allison, E., & Fonagy, P. (2020). The mentalizing approach to psychopathology: State of the art and future directions. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 16, 297-325. - Review paper on the theoretical background
3. Moessnang, C., Baumeister, S., Tillmann, J., Goyard, D., Charman, T., Ambrosino, S., ... & Meyer-Lindenberg, A. (2020). Social brain activation during mentalizing in a large autism cohort: the Longitudinal European Autism Project. Molecular autism, 11(1), 1-17. - Mentalizing in autism; study on a European cohort.
4. https://div12.org/keeping-culture-in-mind-mentalizing-from-a-cross-cultural-perspective/ - one of the possible factors influencing mentalizing capabilities.

Skills: MRI imaging, structural MRI, basic neuropsychology, mentalizing & empathy psychology

Tools/Software/Methods to Use: Your imaging analysis tool & language (suggested: Python, Julia), OpenNeuro, DataLad, [Brainlife] (brainlife.io)

Communication channels: https://mattermost.brainhack.org/brainhack/channels/openmentalizing

**Project labels**

• [x] I added all of the labels I want an associate to my project

Project Submission

Submission checklist

Once the issue is submitted, please check items in this list as you add under ‘Additional project info’

• [x] Link to your project: could be a code repository, a shared document, etc.
• [x] Goals for Brainhack Global 2020: describe what you want to achieve during this brainhack.
• [x] Flesh out at least 2 “good first issues”: those are tasks that do not require any prior knowledge about your project, could be defined as issues in a GitHub repository, or in a shared document.
• [x] Skills: list skills that would be particularly suitable for your project. We ask you to include at least one non-coding skill. Use the issue labels for this purpose.
• [x] Chat channel: A link to a chat channel that will be used during the Brainhack Global 2020 event. This can be an existing channel or a new one. We recommend using the Brainhack space on Mattermost.

Optionally, you can also include information about:

• [ ] Number of participants required.
• [ ] Twitter-sized summary of your project pitch.
• [ ] Provide an image of your project for the Brainhack Global 2020 website.

We would like to think about how you will credit and onboard new members to your project. If you’d like to share your thoughts with future project participants, you can include information about:

• [x] Specify how you will acknowledge contributions (e.g. listing members on a contributing page). CONTRIBUTORS.md in the Github repo, potential mention in a paper, mention in the list of acknowledgements.
• [ ] Provide links to onboarding documents if you have some:

[complexbrains]

Hi @stefanches7 Welcome to Brainhack Montreal and thank you very much for submitting your project! 🎉

It appears your project is ready for publication! 💯

Hope you enjoy your participation and the whole event! 🤗

[PeerHerholz]

@stefanches7 you could also check Neurosynth and Neuroquery wrt large-scale meta-analyses.

[stefanches7]

@stefanches7 you could also check Neurosynth and Neuroquery wrt large-scale meta-analyses.

Thanks @PeerHerholz , these are indeed very useful!

[jesparent]

This project looks really cool! I'm just seeing it now but may try to look into it more this weekend.