Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "Understanding cognitive vulnerability for depression: A network analysis of the role of cognitive control in emotion regulation processes" "Ernst Koster" "Department of Experimental clinical and health psychology" "Prevention of recurrence of depression is an important societal challenge. There is need for fundamental research focusing on mechanisms underlying depression vulnerability. Recent studies show that cognitive control training (CCT) procedures hold potential in improving emotion regulation (ER) in at-risk and patient samples, providing evidence for the causal involvement of cognitive control in depression vulnerability. However, these studies yielded limited knowledge regarding how cognitive control affects complex patterns of depression vulnerability. The aim of this project is to improve our understanding of the involvement of cognitive control in ER, taking into account time-varying dynamics and contextual attunement. Using network analysis, we first model how specific characteristics of rumination interact to predict distress in daily life, and how cognitive control is involved in this process. Second, we test central theoretical frameworks of ER, exploring (a) whether cognitive control predicts flexible use of ER strategies in daily life, (b) how this is affected by depression levels, and (c) how fluctuations in cognitive control over time relate to recurrence of depressive symptoms in remitted depressed (RMD) patients. Finally, we test how CCT affects ER processes in daily life in RMD patients. This project will provide a detailed insight into the causal role of cognitive control in depression vulnerability which can inform more targeted interventions." "Using EEG to study the temporal dynamics of cognitive processes such as cognitive control, attention and observational learning" "Eva Van Den Bussche" "Experimental and Applied Psychology" "At current, the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel does not possess functional facilities for conducting Electroencephalography (EEG) research. This renders us the only Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences in Belgium without EEG facilities. At the Cognitive Psychology Research Group we are conducting several EEG studies, many of which funded by the FWO. However, in order to be able to conduct these studies, we are obliged to rely on other universities who do possess EEG facilities. This exceptional situation is time and means consuming. Furthermore, it limits our opportunities to establish and extend independent neuroscientific research at our Faculty and to progress within this methodological domain. Due to our inexistent neuropsychological facilities, our research consequently often stays limited to behavioral studies, which seriously hampers our research potential. Our dependence on other universities also implies that all output based on EEG studies is dependent on external partners. This limits our ability to conduct research on a competitive level, both nationally and internationally. Given the steep increase in research projects with a strong EEG focus in our lab, the urgency to create up-to-date EEG facilities within our own Faculty is high. To provide support for our dire need for EEG facilities, this project describes the current and planned EEG studies within the COPS lab of the VUB." "The domain-specific and domain-general cognitive and neural processes underlying human success and failure" "Hans Op de Beeck" "Brain and Cognition, Parenting and Special Education" "The human mind has two powerful tools that make it unique: (i) The availability of a wide spectrum of domain-specific knowledge, and (ii) the presence of domain-general processes that use this domain-specific knowledge in a flexible way. The current project aims to understand the cognitive and neural determinants of the structure of domain-specific processes and their development, as captured through multivariate and transdiagnostic profiles, as well as to clarify the interactions between domain-specific and domain-general processes. The proposed interdisciplinary research will combine approaches and methods from experimental and cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, neuroscience (e.g., brain imaging, rehabilitation after brain damage), and computer science (e.g., deep neural networks)." "Cognitive processes associated with proprioceptive information processing in the elderly: age-related neural overactivation and compensatory recruitment." "Stephan Swinnen" "Movement Control & Neuroplasticity Research Group" "The ability to discern body/limb positions and movements (i.e. proprioception) is critical for many aspects of movement control. Interestingly, in a recent review of the aging literature by the candidate, it was revealed that proprioceptive sensibility is substantially degraded with age, leading to difficulties in performing daily activities. Given that peripheral proprioceptive signals are inherently noisier in elderly individuals, we hypothesize that old adults must recruit additional resources within the central nervous system to achieve young adult levels of performance on cognition-related proprioceptive tasks. In this fellowship proposal, three experiments are outlined that test this hypothesis using medical imaging of young and old adults performing different types of proprioceptive feedback processing tasks (i.e. perception, memory and attention). Overall, we expect that high versus low performing old adults will show overactivation of the brain, reflecting a compensatory strategy. This important result would complement, and extend to the sensory domain, previous work conducted in the supervisors laboratory. Such work has found that, during inter-limb coordination tasks, high-functioning old subjects show more extensive activations in the same brain areas as young adults, as well as unique activations in areas reflecting higher order feedback processing and cognition." "Tensor based integration of the electroencephalogram and functional magnetic resonance imaging in the study of cognitive processes and disorders." "Sabine Van Huffel" "ESAT - STADIUS, Stadius Centre for Dynamical Systems, Signal Processing and Data Analytics" "In this PhD the aim is to integrate two completely different and complementary biomedical measurement techniques, namely EEG and fMRI.For this purpose, new tensor based algorithms will be developed and validated. The integrated results offer simultaneously spatial as wellas temporal information about complex cognitive processes, which is acompletely new concept in the study of normal perceptual-cognitiveprocesses, the study of the development of these processes as well asthe study of persons with cognitive difficulties." "Cognitive, emotional, and motivational processes in relation to depressive symptoms" "Ernst Koster" "Department of Experimental clinical and health psychology" "Simultaneous influence of emotion and motivation on cognitive processing hasn’t been investigated in relation do depressive symptoms. This project is aimed to explore these influences in order to provide a better understanding of depression-linked cognitive biases and deficits. The project is also aimed to develop novel cognitive trainings in order to reduce biases and deficits and thus attenuate depressive symptoms." "Unravelling the puzzle of back pain chronicity: An integrative perspective on disturbed sensorimotor control and maladaptive cognitive processes" "Lieven Danneels" "Department of Rehabilitation Sciences, Department of Experimental clinical and health psychology, Department of Rehabilitation Sciences and Physiotherapie" "According to a large European survey back problems are the most common cause of chronic pain [1 ]. After an acute episode of low back pain (LBP), 60-80% of patients experience recurrence or persistence of this condition [2]. Recurrent and chronic LBP form a major health care problem, strongly interfering with functional behavior (disability) and quality of life, and causing important socioeconomic costs [3]. Identifying which factors play a role in LBP chronicity is a major challenge in order to prevent its detrimental consequences and to improve treatment efficacy. Mechanisms possibly contributing to pain-related disability have been proposed from different disciplines. In this project, we specifically focus upon factors identified in movement science (i.e., disturbed sensorimotor control) and psychological science (i .e., maladaptive cognitive processes), and especially on their interaction" "Cognitive processes in neural adaptation: effects of the behavioral paradigm." "Rufin Vogels" "Laboratory for Neuro- and Psychophysiology, Laboratory for Biological Psychology" "This PhD project deals with two topics set within the broader context of visual and cognitive neuroscience. First of all, we investigate whether certain properties of the primate visual system might be found in rats. The second topic deals with how representations of visual input are not fixed but are influenced by recent sensory input or even cognitive processes. In a first set of studies in rats, we investigate whether and to what extent some general principles of the primate visual system (e.g. object representations) are also present in that of the rat. This includes comparing complex stimulus representations based on action potential activity measured at different levels of the visual system. In addition, we investigate how previous sensory input affects neural responses. A robust manifestation of the influence of recent input is neural adaptation or repetition suppression, which refers to a reduced neural activity when stimuli are repeated. Additionally neural responses could also be enhanced, for example when a stimulus is rare. These mechanisms have an important role in the predictive coding theory, which postulates that cortical responses signal violations of prior expectations. For the final part of the project, we moved to macaques for experiments that could not be performed in less cognitively developed animals. Here we investigate claims that perceptual expectations can modulate the strength of adaptation of action potential activity in visual cortex." "Depression in early adolescence: the relationship between emotion and cognitive control processes" "Caroline Braet" "Department of Experimental clinical and health psychology, Department of Developmental, Personality and Social Psychology" "In this study we suggest that executive control deficits could be an important underlying mechanism of the difficulties in information processing and the perturbed emotion regulation that characterizes MDD. Therefore it is the central goal of the current project to investigate cognitive processing of emotional material in depressed adolescents using different experimental paradigms targeting inhibition, updating, attentional control and shifting." "Dynamic cognitive psychometrics: modeling temporal changes in response processes." "Francis Tuerlinckx" "Quantitative Psychology and Individual Differences" "The unobserved processes that operate when people make decisions are a topic of much scientific interest. One aspect of decision making processes that has recently received some consideration is how properties of the processes change over short time spans (e.g. during an experiment). For examples, participants may become more cautions after a series of errors, or less careful if their accuracy is high but they consider their speed insufficient. Not only is it important to account for such temporal dynamics from a statistical point of view (typical contemporary models falsely assume interchangeability of responses under identical experimental conditions), but the dynamics of temporal change may reveal certain participant dispositions (fast/slow adaptation, high/low desired level of accuracy, etc.) or properties of the cognitive architecture. While several dynamical models have been proposed, two aspects have typically been lacking. First, across-trial dynamics are often detached from response processes - meaning that changes are modeled in raw data rather than in (more interpretable) latent process parameters. We intend to add a laten (psychometric) measurement level to dynamical models. Second, these models require appropirate fifting algorithms. We will exploit similarities to the statistical literature of dynamical systems modeling to fit ""dynamical psychometric models"" to experimental data."