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.

[awaidyasin]

Group 2G Members: Shengwenxin Ni, Kaylah Thomas, Yao Yao, Awaid Yasin

Thank you for your talk professor! We found your work quite fascinating and were curious about some of its implications.

So, at many places in your work, the relation between H-P gradient and the extracted bifactor scores has been framed as rather fixed or fundamental in its nature. For instance, on page 9 you mention that “H-P gradient is related to working memory ability in a trait-like manner” and on page 21 you add that “the association between the described Hurst-Psychopathology gradient and working memory performance is relatively stable across time and across at least two working memory tasks.” We were wondering does this mean phenomenon like psychopathology and ADHD are very much predetermined? In other words, how would your work understand the nature vs. nurture debate in this context?

[Toushirow1]

Group 1D: Zixu Chen, MengChen Chung, Yujing Huang, Feihong Lei

Hi Professor Berman, Thank you for coming and presenting in today's workshop! Your paper shows us how the Hurst component is related with psychopathology and attention-deficit, and most importantly, the channel that is the imbalance in resourse allocation between fronto-parietal and sensory-motor regions. We believe that the results have much implications on the treatment of related dysfunctional behaviors and boosting the working memory performance of people. As the four of us are all non-psychology studuents, we are wondering whether H is something unchanged during people's life, and will it change as people are naturally aging? Or could it change due to outside shock or deliberate intervention? Finally, how would understanding such mechanism directly affect children's life, or in other words, could you elaborate on the potential treatment motivated by your research?

[bowen-w-zheng]

Hi Professor Berman, Thank you for this interesting work. I have two questions:

1. In this paper, H is proposed to be a measure of criticaility. Could you clarify the link between H and criticality further? For instance, how we do go from the derivation of H to the mathematical concept of criticality? Or is this link more of a conceptual one?
2. Do you think the result will be more salient using EEG or even trancranial recording that have much higher temporal resolution compared to fMRI?

[LynetteDang]

Group 1J Lynette Dang, Silvan Baier, Yingxuan Liu, Sabina Hartnett

Hi Professor Berman,

Thank you for sharing your work with us! Due to the uncertainty of the directionality of deficits in cognitive resources and psychopathologies mentioned in the paper, we are curious to see whether there are studies that test the resource allocation of individuals with psychopathologies that have received treatment and what the effect of H and its allocation is. That being said, do individuals who receive treatment for their diagnosed psychopathologies see differences in performance / H in their brains? Also, the study mentions that H is a non-specific correlate of psychopathology by various sources of studies focusing on different mental disorders, such as depression and ADHD, detected by EEG. We are also wondering if such H can be changed in an artificial way to prevent mental diseases?

Looking forward to the workshop tomorrow!

[borlasekn]

Group 1E: Kaya Borlase, Xin Li, Zoey Jiao, Liuqi Guo

Hello, thank you Prof. Berman for sharing your expertise and work with us. We were wondering:

You note that individual differences in the Hurst exponent are associated transdiagnostically with psychopathology. Your research also focused on child psychopathology. Do you anticipate that this association would change as an individual ages and gains experiences in their lives or is this H association static? I.e. would you anticipate similar findings if you studied 70+ year olds, or individuals with dementia or Alzheimer's disease?

[97seshu]

Group 2K: Baotong Zhang, Senling Shu, Jinfei Zhu, Koichi Onogi

Hi Professor Berman,

Thanks for presenting at our workshop and sharing your work with us!

The question from our group is:

In the paper, we know that H is a quantitative measure of available cognitive resources and is associated with all forms of psychopathology, are there some ways that we can train some people of psychopathology so that they could increase their available cognitive resources. Basically, do available cognitive resources have an upper bound for each individual?

In addition, can you talk more about the real-world application of this H measure? Can it be used for clinical purposes?

[Hongkai040]

Group2B:Justin Soll, Hongkai Mao, Wanxi Zhou, Coco Yu Hello, Prof. Berman, thank you for sharing your work with us!

We think that the Hurst exponent sounds like a proxy of something inside our body.So do you think environmental factors such as stress might contribute to it? Does it could explain the differences of incidence rate among different groups? (For example, it's been reported that males are more likely to be diagnosed as Autism Spectrum Disorder. )

Reference:

Halladay, A. K., Bishop, S., Constantino, J. N., Daniels, A. M., Koenig, K., Palmer, K., ... & Szatmari, P. (2015). Sex and gender differences in autism spectrum disorder: summarizing evidence gaps and identifying emerging areas of priority. Molecular autism, 6(1), 1-5.

[fyzh-git]

Group 2C: Lu Zhang, Fengyi Zheng, Haohan Shi, Taichi Tsujikawa

Thank you Professor Berman. Our question is based on the following piece:

"Brain states closer to a critical state have values of H close to 1 and have smooth looking temporal fluctuations; brain states farther from a critical state have values of H closer to 0.5 and have temporal fluctuations that look like random noise. One consequence of these properties of complex systems near critical states is that transitions from critical states into task-relevant states are likely easier and may lead to superior task performance."

We don't quite catch the logic here. How does the aforementioned properties of complex systems near critical states imply the easier transition from critical states into the others and the possibility of resulting in superior task performance?

Thanks.

[y8script]

Group 1H: Yuetong Bai, Boya Fu, Zhiyun Hu, Hsin-Keng Ling

Hi Professor Berman,

Thanks for presenting such an interesting paper! Our group has the following questions:

Q1: We wonder how to interpret the connection between H and psychopathology. Is H mathematically reflecting an imbalance, or can already be related to certain neuronal pathology? Also, given that high Hurst states have smooth-looking temporal fluctuations, can we interpret that the brain activity is more stable or has higher signal-noise-ratio(task-related vs. task-unrelated activation) for high Hurst states?

Q2: Have you tried calculating H component at the subregion level and linking it with more specific cognitive processes? Also, do you think there will be significant H differences among different subregions in a cortex?

Q3: In the paper, you mainly focused on the memory performance of children, so we are wondering that if the participant pool expands to teenagers or even adults, will we still see a similar result of how H and multiple mental disorders relationship?

[JoeHelbing]

Group 1K: Hazel Chui, Isabella Duan, Jade Benson, Joseph Helbing

We're curious what an “optimal brain state” means and whether there are multiple different optimal states that help with different tasks (i.e. ADHD brains may be great at making creative connections that other brain states can’t see). If we can clearly see that these mental health conditions have a physically different brain state this might allow us to destigmatize them and develop better therapies to treat them.

[xzmerry]

Group 2I: Daniela Vadillo, Lingfeng Shan, William Zhu, Zimei Xia

Thank you Professor Berman for sharing your research!

This paper tested this hypothesis by modeling psychopathology with a bifactor model. And the hypothesis is whether impaired cognitive function associated with psychopathology follows from a reduced cognitive resource pool and a reduction in resources allocated to the task at hand. The key measure in this paper is the Hurst exponent (H), and lower H indicates higher recognition ability. Our team members are no experts of psychology, so we have some maybe basic questions as follows:

1. What happens if the metric that you are using actually doesn’t support the hypothesis? why use the Hurst index here as there are also other measures of cognitive ability? It is mentioned in the paper that 'H measured from human neuroimaging data is associated with diverse aspects of cognition including learning, task difficulty, and typical adult aging'. There are many measures of cognitive ability, such as calculated cognitive measures from questionnaires. Why their hypothesis should be tested with H? In other words, how a neuroscience metric is important and add to this psychological problem here?

2. What could be the other hypothesis for H and is it possible that these contradict the findings? And how could further utilize these neuroscience metrics in psychological research?

3. What are other indexes for closeness to a critical state, and do those corroborate the findings?

Thank you!

[helyap]

Hi Professor,

Seeing as the present study utilized a subject pool with a narrow age range of 9-10 years old, we’re curious if it’s possible that there are age-dependent cognitive developments that may be correlated with psychopathology and hence explain the findings and if studying a different age range may produce different results.

Thanks,

Group 2J (Emily Yeh, Zhe Zhang, Kuitai Wang, Helen Yap)

[j2401]

Group 1I: Jasmine Huang, Jingnan Liu, Yile Chen, Yu-Hsuan Chou

Hello Professor Berman, Thank you for sharing such fantastic work with us!

Our questions: Given that H gives a quantitative view of the suboptimal brain states that are associated with different forms of psychopathology, how would this finding help with clinical diagnosis?

Since the data used in the study are collected from adolescents, how does it generalize to broader demographics (suppose that brain development differs between demographics such as age groups)? Is there a reason for choosing this specific demographic/dataset?

[wu-yt]

Hi Professor Berman, thank you so much for sharing this amazing research about Hurst exponent (H)! Can the impaired cognitive function be rebuilt or reversed? How should we observe that?

[Yaweili19]

(Individual) Hi Professor Berman, it's a pleasure to have you sharing this amazing paper. I'm truly amazed by how much analysis techniques were utilized to mitigate the non-experimental nature of the survey data. Due to my limited time and knowledge on the field, I fail to understand some concepts in the paper, but I will be sure to follow up during your lecture.

Still, from a data lover perspective, I purpose the question: What are the rationales for using PLS to find the latent variable in the data processing part, rather than other methods? It would seem clearer to me if the article contains your considerations when choosing this model.