ABC - Amsterdam Brain and Cognition
This page gives an overview of recent proposals that have been awarded the ABC Talent Grant or ABC Project Grant. Each project is listed with an abstract, to give you an insight into ongoing research financed by ABC grants.
PI-1 |
Dr. Sanne de Wit |
UvA | FMG, Clinical Psychology |
Talent |
Dr. Tim van Timmeren |
UvA | FMG, Clinical Psychology |
ABC Talent Grant, April 2020
Many young adults spend 3-5 hours daily on social media and some indicate that they feel ‘addicted’, pointing to an emerging public health problem. The idea of a “digital detox” to regain control over social media use has become increasingly popular. However, the effectiveness of detox-interventions remains controversial. The promise of a detox is that it helps to break the habit, but the peril is that it could ultimately lead to intensified use as a consequence of “incubation of craving”. In this ABC Talent project, we aim to elucidate the effects of a digital detox on social media use, and the underlying mechanisms of habit and craving. During and following a detox intervention, we will apply Ecological Momentary Assessment of self-reported craving and automaticity and relate this to duration and frequency of social media use. Additionally, we will conduct an fMRI investigation of the mechanisms underlying a digital detox.
ABC Talent: Milica Nikolić, University of Amsterdam, Research Institute of Child Development and Education
ABC Talent Grant, September 2019
Self-conscious emotions, such as embarrassment and shame, are powerful forces that facilitate social affiliation but dysregulation in self-conscious emotions can significantly impair social functioning. In particular, excessive embarrassment and shame and related blushing responses are hallmark features of social anxiety disorder (SAD), a common mental disorder that starts in adolescence. Little is known about how self-conscious emotions, such as embarrassment and its related blushing response, are generated.
Morever, whether feeling oneself blush triggers more embarrassment via biased interoception and mentalizing about what others think of us—the process thought to underlie SAD— has never been explored. The aim of this project is to shed light on the neural underpinnings of embarrassment including blushing, its self-perception, and related mentalizing in adolescents with high and low levels of social anxiety. Two groups of 30 adolescents with high and low levels of SAD symptoms will sing a song on stage while being video-recorded.
Afterwards, we will play the video of their performance vs. that of another participant to them while measuring their brain activity and blushing in the fMRI scanner. By comparing viewing self vs. other across the high vs. low socially anxious groups, we can, for the first time, identify the neural correlates of blushing and thereby establish how the occurrence and duration of blushing is linked to interoceptive and mentalizing processes. Furthermore, we will establish which neural mechanisms characterize enhanced self-conscious emotions in SAD, and whether they map onto localizers for interoception and mentalizing.
The findings will decompose the processes that may render an adaptive but transient embarrassment in healthy individuals into a debilitating vicious circle of heightened self-consciousness in socially anxious individuals.
PI-1 |
Disa Sauter |
University of Amsterdam | Department of Social Psychology |
PI-2 |
Ramon Lindauer |
Amsterdam UMC | Academic Medical Center, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry |
ABC Talent: Isidoor Bergfeld, Amsterdam UMC, University of Amsterdam, Department of Psychiatry
ABC Talent Grant, April 2019
Autobiographical memories play an important role in forming our identities, imagining ourselves in the future and maintaining long-term goals. The less specific autobiographical memories of patients with major depression, therefore, are hypothesized to result in a failure to maintain long-term goals and, in turn, suicidality. Alternatively, reduced basic cognitive functions of depressed patients could underlie the deficiencies in autobiographical memory as well as future planning. With this ABC talent grant, we aim to see how basic cognitive functions, autobiographical memory, sense of self and future planning interact, and how these relate to psychiatric symptoms.
PI-1 |
Claudi Bockting |
PI-2 |
Esmée Verwijk |
ABC Talent: Maartje de Jong, Spinoza Centre for Neuroimaging, Amsterdam
ABC Talent Grant, April 2019
Recurrent processing is thought to be crucial for consciousness. We will pharmacologically hamper recurrent processing (using an NMDA-blocker) and investigate the effect of this intervention on functional characteristics of visual cortex and the perception of visual illusions. Since illusions occur without stimulus-driven support, we hypothesize a reduction of illusion-strength. Furthermore, we expect modulations of population receptive fields (measured using laminar fMRI) in the deep/superficial but not the middle layers of visual cortex, considering the known involvement of deep/superficial layers in recurrent processing. By combining pharmacology with state-of-the-art neuroimaging we aim to link biochemical with system-level mechanisms underlying conscious perception.
PI-1 |
Simon van Gaal, UvA | Department of Psychology, Brain and Cognition |
PI-2 |
Anouk Schrantee, Amsterdam University Medical Centre, UvA | Radiology and Nuclear Medicine |
PI-1 |
Henkjan Honing, UvA, FGw & FNWI, (ILLC) |
PI-2 |
Pierre-Louis Bazin, UvA, FMG, Psychology |
Post-doc |
Fleur L. Bouwer-Odijk |
ABC Project Grant 2020
To optimize processing in our dynamic environment, the brain continuously tries to predict the timing of upcoming events. In musical rhythm, temporal expectations are ubiquitous, and crucial to our ability to synchronize to music, affecting perception, motor behaviour, as well as emotion. Thus, musical rhythm is exceptionally well suited to study temporal expectations. Previously, temporal expectations were often studied in the context of a regular, periodic, beat (“beat-based expectations”). However, humans can also form expectations based on a predictable but irregular pattern (“memory-based expectations”). It is unclear whether beatbased and memory-based expectations rely on shared or separate neural and computational mechanisms. Also, recently it was suggested that individuals may differ in their reliance on beat-based or memory-based expectations.
In this project, first, we will compare two classes of computational models that have been used to explain temporal expectations: entrainment models, based on coupled oscillators, and probabilistic models. Specifically, we will test whether these models underlie beat-based and memory-based expectations respectively, and whether we can use the models to explain why some people rely more on the beat, and others more on the rhythmic pattern when forming temporal expectations. In the second part of the project, we will use
neuroimaging to study the neural networks underlying temporal expectations, using the same models.
Together, these studies will provide insight in how our brain forms temporal expectations, and how this is related to the structure in the input and individual differences. This will not only improve our general knowledge of predictive processing and our understanding of the human musical mind, but also has implications for the use of rhythm-based interventions, especially in movement rehabilitation.
PI-1 |
Vanessa van Ast, UvA FMG, Clinical Psychology |
PI-2 |
Harm Krugers, UvA FNWI, Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences |
PI-3 |
Joram Mul, UvA FNWI, Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences |
Post-doc |
Wouter Cox |
ABC Project Grant 2020
For survival, it is imperative to learn and remember which cues represent threat, and to generalize such memories to similar situations. However, fear-generalization can turn maladaptive when nonthreatening situations are inappropriately remembered as threatening, a main characteristic of patients with anxiety or stress-related disorders. Recent insight derived from basic animal studies point to physical exercise training as a novel therapeutic avenue to target the neurobiological roots of fear-generalization. But, depending on the timing of such an exercise training intervention, fear-generalization may also aggravate. The key objective of this translational ABC project is to provide a neurobiological account of how exercise training affects fear-generalization, and how this can promote prevention or aggravation of developing anxiety- and stress-related symptoms.
PI-1 |
Romke Rouw, FMG, Psychology, Brain and Cognition |
PI-2 |
Willem Zuidema , FNWI, Cognition, Language & Computation lab, ILLC |
PI-3 |
Richard Ridderinkhof, FMG, Developmental Psychology/Brain and Cognition |
Postdoc: |
Nicholas Root, Psychology, University of California, San Diego |
ABC Project Grant 2019
The seemingly-simple question "How are letters represented in the brain?" is complicated by the fact that different languages have different representational systems (e.g., alphabets), and that many different linguistic properties plausibly influence letter representations.
We study grapheme-colour synesthesia, where normal (healthy) individuals have consistent color sensations with letters (“R is sky-blue”). Remarkably, the linguistic properties of each letter (e.g., orthographic, phonetic) act as regulatory factors (RFs): they influence the synesthetic letter-to-colour pairings. These RFs similarly influence non-synesthetes requested to choose colors for letters. In this project, we employ synesthetic colours as a means for cross-language comparisons of letter representations.
We will create a large multi-language letter-to-colour database, a computational model predicting letter-to-colour associations using the (weighted) regulatory factors, and a neurological model explaining how linguistic properties shape letter representations in the brain. Finally, a spinoff project pilots the computational model as innovative approach to second-language learning.