Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "The integrative neuroscience of behavioral control (Neuroscience)" "Wim Fias" "Department of Experimental psychology" "The Institute for Neurosciences studies behavioural control in the field of cognition and emotion, from a perspective of health and pathology and in terms of behaviour-based, neuro-atomic and neurochemical aspects." "Action execution and observation in macaque monkeys: Towards social systems neuroscience" "Koen Nelissen" "Laboratory for Neuro- and Psychophysiology" "Action execution and observation are fundamental aspects of primate live. Humans and monkeys perform hand actions to manipulate food or objects to achieve goals from basic survival to social communications. Successful communication and interactions with others require constant monitoring of others’ actions in order to plan and facilitate own actions. Action execution and observation are not independent processes but could be influenced by many other cognitive factors such as learning or social contexts. Neuroimaging and electrophysiology studies have identified a number of cortical regions in human and monkeys that encode action related information, including visual and motor areas as well as mirror neuron regions that contains neurons which respond both to executed and observed actions. However, it still remains unclear how action representations in primate brain modulate due to learning and social context. To date, evidence of action representations at whole brain level has been obtained mostly using non-invasive neuroimaging in humans, while the majority of neuronal evidence at single cell level comes from monkeys, yet from a limited number of regions. Therefore, non-human primate fMRI offers a valuable model and technique to bridge a link between evidence from humans with indirect measurements of brain activity based upon hemodynamics and single neuron spiking activity in monkey brain. Using fMRI technique in monkeys, we will investigate effects of cognitive factors such as categorization learning and various social contexts (alone or with presence of another conspecific) on brain representations of observed and executed actions as well as how and to what extent different brain networks engage in these cognitive processes. These experiments will shed light onto the primate brain networks involved in representing own and others` actions and will provide much needed insights into the modulatory effects of social context on social and cognitive brain networks." "EBRAINS 2.0: A Research Infrastructure to Advance Neuroscience and Brain Health" "Daniele Marinazzo" "Department of Data-analysis" "EBRAINS is a collaborative European Research Infrastructure designed to advance and accelerate progress in neuroscience and brain health. This innovative infrastructure, a legacy of the Human Brain Project (HBP), is an ecosystem where researchers, clinicians and experts from various disciplines converge to explore and analyze brain complexity – from molecular and cellular levels to the functioning of the entire organ. Therefore, the project aims to create a new standard for brain atlases from the micro- to the macroscale, link foundational multi-level data and connectomes in the healthy and pathological brain with atlases and models, create digital twins through modelling and simulation as well as unique, excellent, and preferred services for FAIR neuroscience data. The overarching goal of EBRAINS 2.0 is to foster a deeper understanding of brain structure and function with dedicated and mature software tools, to facilitate the development of more effective treatments, new drugs, diagnostics and preventive measures for neuropsychiatric disorders. We expect that EBRAINS 2.0 catalyzes progress in the field of large-scale models running on HPC towards Exascale and leads to innovative solutions for neuro-inspired computing, and cognitive technologies such as neurorobotics and AI. Sophisticated digital modeling and data analytics capabilities will benefit communities beyond neuroscience, such as biomedicine. We will advance EBRAINS technology, platform services and the base infrastructure roadmap, educate and train a new community of users and developers from academia, industry and SMEs, and ensure knowledge transfer. EBRAINS 2.0 will become the neuroscience hub in the European infrastructure landscape, through building strong links with the European data spaces, EOSC and EuroHPC JU, centers of excellences and other initiatives. Globally, EBRAINS 2.0 will make a strong contribution to the new era of digital neuroscience and foster European leadership in this field." "Backup mandate Research Council: Perceived injustice-targeted pain neuroscience education combined with motivational interviewing: Can we decrease health care utilization in breast cancer survivors?" "Physiotherapy, Human Physiology and Anatomy, Pain in Motion" "The survival rate of breast cancer is increasing every day. However,21-76% of breast cancer survivors (BCS) experience pain. Morehealthcare use (HCU) is seen in BCS with pain. Recent work revealed that perceived injustice (PI) is experienced by 22% of BCS with pain. PI is the tendency to attribute blame to others for one’s suffering and to experience a sense of unfairness and is associated with higher opioid use, influencing HCU. Next to PI, other cognitive and emotional factors have been found to be related with HCU in people experiencing pain. However, their relationship with HCU in BCS has not been investigated. The proposed research aims to investigate the role of PI and other cognitive and emotional factors in HCU in BCS. I will do this through examining an intervention that specifically targets PI and other cognitive and emotional factors and that has been shown to substantially decrease HCU in a non-cancer pain population. With this project I aim to unravel the mechanism behind HCU in BCS with pain and PI, by means of randomized controlled trial in which the experimental group will receive PI- targeted pain neuroscience education combined with motivational interviewing, while the control group will receive biomedical pain education which will not address PI or any other cognitive/emotional factor. A greater decrease in HCU is expected in the PI-targeted intervention, possibly lowering the socio-economic burden for the large population of BCS and society." "EBRAINS 2.0: A Research Infrastructure to Advance Neuroscience and Brain Health" "Wim Vanduffel" "Laboratory for Neuro- and Psychophysiology" "EBRAINS is a collaborative European Research Infrastructure designed to advance and accelerate progress in neuroscience and brain health. This innovative infrastructure, a legacy of the Human Brain Project (HBP), is an ecosystem where researchers, clinicians and experts from various disciplines converge to explore and analyze brain complexity – from molecular and cellular levels to the functioning of the entire organ. Therefore, the project aims to create a new standard for brain atlases from the micro- to the macro-scale, link foundational multi-level data and connectomes in the healthy and pathological brain with atlases and models, create digital twins through modelling and simulation as well as unique, excellent, and preferred services for FAIR neuroscience data. The overarching goal of EBRAINS 2.0 is to foster a deeper understanding of brain structure and function with dedicated and mature software tools, to facilitate the development of more effective treatments, new drugs, diagnostics and preventive measures for neuro-psychiatric disorders. We expect that EBRAINS 2.0 catalyzes progress in the field of large-scale models running on HPC towards Exascale and leads to innovative solutions for neuro-inspired computing, and cognitive technologies such as neurorobotics and AI. Sophisticated digital modeling and data analytics capabilities will benefit communities beyond neuroscience, such as biomedicine. We will advance EBRAINS technology, platform services and the base infrastructure roadmap, educate and train a new community of users and developers from academia, industry and SMEs, and ensure knowledge transfer. EBRAINS 2.0 will become the neuroscience hub in the European infrastructure landscape, through building strong links with the European data spaces, EOSC and EuroHPC JU, centers of excellences and other initiatives. Globally, EBRAINS 2.0 will make a strong contribution to the new era of digital neuroscience and foster European leadership in this field." "Lab animal based cognitive and behavioural research" "Peter De Deyn" "Experimental Neurobiology Unit (ENU)" "Support of collective laboratory animal-based neuroscience research via the funding of an ATP employee with extensive expertise in behavioral and cognitive analysis of rodent models, therapeutic interventions, neurochemical and neuropathological analyses." "Connections for cognition: A cognitive neurocomputational perspective on human flexibility" "Tom Verguts" "Department of Experimental psychology" "Humans can rapidly and flexibly adapt to task requirements; consider for example the steps we take for executing a novel arithmetic problem. This flexibility is poorly understood, although it is crucial in daily life (e.g., education, traffic, social interaction, …). We address this issue by framing flexibility in a cognitive neurocomputational perspective." "Cognitive workload monitoring during virtual reality gameplay by combining performance and task difficulty with EEG with ECG recordings" "Marc Van Hulle" "Laboratory for Neuro- and Psychophysiology" "Current evidence suggests that short training sessions can improve cognitive performance of elder individuals and postpone age-related cognitive decline development. But the expected outcome could be compromised when these sessions increase the subject's cognitive workload (CW) -the interaction between mental demands of the task and the subject's ability to perform them. Several attempts have been made to relate CW to task difficulty, leaving out the subject-dependent factor. In order to gauge the latter, we propose to record EEGs, and to extract the EEG components that reflect attention-related and working memory processes, and electrocardiograms (ECGs) as the latter are known to be sensitive to CW, not only in terms of engagement, but also in terms of fatigue, drowsiness and boredom. We will consider a virtual reality (VR) game task as such settings have been shown to yield beneficial training effects. Our goal is to develop a statistical model that will combine VR game performance, task difficulty, and EEG and ECG recordings with the aim to predict and track, in real-time, an individual's CW during task performance and to adjust task complexity so as to avoid boredom and fatigue. As a proof of concept, we will test our approach on both healthy young and older individuals as CW differences are expected between these two age groups. When successful, it would signify a breakthrough in the applicability of EEG/ECG-based CW monitoring in cognitive training applications." "Validation of biomarkers for dementia and mild cognitive impairment." "Sebastiaan Engelborghs" "Neurochemistry and behaviour" "Diagnosis of sporadic Alzheimer's disease (AD) is based on clinical exclusion criteria and the required diagnostic work-up is time-consuming and expensive at best resulting in a diagnosis of probable AD. In specialized centers, a diagnostic accuracy of maximally 68% is obtained. Besides, diagnosis is only definite on post-mortem neuropathological examination of the brain. Therefore, validated biological markers allowing diagnosing AD at an early stage of the disease are highly desirable. In AD, several proteins accumulate in the brain. As the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) is in close contact with the brain, those proteins can be detected in the CSF. Using biomarker-based models, a combined assessment of CSF levels of β-amyloid peptide (Aβ1-42), total tau protein (T-tau) and tau phosphorylated at threonine 181 (P-tau181P) increases discriminatory power allowing differentiating AD from other dementias. As this combined assessment using newly developed biomarker-based models has not been validated and as its discriminatory power and its added diagnostic value remain to be established, we set up a prospective study, including dementia (n=800) and MCI (n=200) patients as well as healthy control subjects (n=200). As Aβ isoforms can be detected in plasma, diagnostic accuracy for (early) AD diagnosis will be tested as well." "Behavioral and psychoendocrinological rodent studies on the consequences of disturbances in mother-infant bonding for adult emotional, social and cognitive functioning" "Rudi D'Hooge" "Clinical Psychology, Laboratory for Biological Psychology" "The first 1001 days of life, from conception to the second birthday, are crucial for child development. Infancy constitutes a sensitive period for neurodevelopment when experiences can induce lasting consequences in brain function and behavior. Different kinds of early-life stress (ELS) exist and increase the risk of development of psychopathology in later life. However, the specific consequences of ELS into adulthood are unclear and so are the putative mechanisms connecting ELS with negative outcomes. An important reason why these questions are hard to answer are the inherent difficulties of research in human subjects. Mouse models are not only preferable from an ethical point of view, they allow us to investigate mechanistic questions using invasive methods while controlling for factors that complicate human studies. We can benefit from these models because of the similarities between our species in terms of our altricial and social nature, similar physiology as well as homology in brain and behavior relationships. Regarding outcomes, mouse models simplify longitudinal (and transgenerational) research. Using standardized protocols, behavioral performance can be extensively probed at different ages in rodents. Regarding potential mechanisms connecting ELS to certain outcomes, both the mother-infant attachment bond and (epi)genetic factors have come into consideration but few studies have integrated these before. Attachment formation is crucial for newborns in altricial species, not only for nutrition and warmth but for normal emotional and social development. We now know that environmental factors like maternal care can ‘program’ stress reactivity through increasing or decreasing stress receptors in different brain regions in offspring. Since social skills develop based on our first attachment bond, the possibility exists that our sociobehavioral repertoire develops similarly. The social deficits in different neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric disorders such as autism, depression and schizophrenia should be noted in this respect.The current research project utilized mouse models to detail the consequences of developmental perturbations in early life. We focused on two conditions, psychiatric illness in the mother (PPD), and neurodevelopmental issues in the child (ASD). Our first study describes the spectrum of changes in adult social behavior in a mouse model of ASD (related to Nbea haploinsufficiency). The second study reports about the effects of PPD on maternal care, maternal preference in juvenile offspring and adult neurobehavioral proficiency in the offspring. It represents the most elaborate investigation of functional alterations in this PPD model to date. The last study addresses the question whether this PPD model affects the genome-wide transcriptome in the brain of young pups. The first study shows that Nbea haploinsufficiency impacts different aspects of social behavior in adulthood, reminiscent of ASD symptoms. The results of the second study indicate subtle changes in bonding and different aspects of adult behavioral repertoire in offspring despite finding no marked differences in maternal care. The last study shows how this PPD model influences the transcriptome early on, depending on the brain region studied. The differentially expressed genes are known to be involved in neuronal functioning, neurodevelopment, innate fear, learning and memory, and different neuropsychiatric disorders. Since sex differences are a recurring finding in this project, we conclude that both males and females should be included in further research on ELS and that biological sex should be considered in diagnosis and counseling regarding attachment, related behavioral issues and psychological wellbeing. We hope that this work complements the growing field of early life stress by 1) focusing on sex differences, 2) focusing on social and emotional functioning in addition to cognitive performance, and 3) adding to the validation of the mouse models used to aid in further research on PPD and ASD."