John Gabrieli

Psychotherapy for psychiatric disorders has a long history, rising to prominence with the works of Freud and Jung and transforming into modern versions with the work of Aaron Beck and others. Supported by the strong empirical evidence of many well-controlled studies, cognitive and behavioral therapies (CBT) have since become the dominant approach for treating virtually all mental health problems (Hofmann et al., 2012). This psychotherapeutic approach is often contrasted with pharmacological treatments. To the extent that either kind of treatment benefits a patient in regard to changes in thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, however, it must do so through brain plasticity that mediates all forms of human psychological change. Advances in neuroimaging methods and technologies over the past three decades have allowed, for the first time, measurement, and visualization of therapeutic brain plasticity for both psychotherapy and pharmacology. Neuroimaging allows for examination of longitudinal changes in brain structure, function, and chemistry that occur in and mediate treatment. Further, associating such brain plasticity with remission (no longer meeting criteria for a presenting diagnosis) or response (significant reduction of symptoms) identifies the neural mechanisms that may be most important in treatment efficacy. In the last decade, there has also been progress in identifying pre-treatment brain characteristics (biomarkers) that are associated with or predict post-treatment response. Such biomarkers may allow for scientifically guided treatment selection for individual patients (personalized or precision medicine), which is needed, as even …

Mindfulness has been linked to a range of positive social-emotional and cognitive outcomes, but the underlying mechanisms are unclear. As one of the few traits or dispositions that are associated with both affective and cognitive benefits, we asked whether mindfulness is associated with affective and cognitive outcomes through a shared, unitary process or through two dissociable processes. We examined this in adolescents using behavioral measures and also reanalyzed previously reported neuroimaging findings relating mindfulness training to either affect (negative emotion, stress) or cognition (sustained attention). Using multivariate regression analyses, our findings suggest that the relationships between dispositional mindfulness and affective and cognitive processes are behaviorally dissociable and converge with neuroimaging data indicating that mindfulness modulates affect and cognition through …

Reading books is an opportunity for children to encounter and learn more complex vocabulary and language than they are exposed to in everyday speech. However, children vary widely in the amount of time they spend reading, and those who struggle to read are often less motivated to spend their free time reading. Lack of reading experience then leads to impoverished vocabulary and language knowledge. To determine whether removing print as a barrier to accessing more complex language would improve children’s vocabulary and other language skills, we conducted a randomized controlled trial intervention (RCT) study in which children listened to audiobooks along with text, either alone or with scaffolded instructional support. Third and fourth-grade students (N= 314, age: mean (SD)= 9.47 (. 56) years) were randomly assigned to Audiobooks-Only, Audiobooks+ Scaffold, or Mindfulness (active control group) for 8 weeks. The results showed significant improvements in receptive and expressive vocabulary for the two audiobook groups compared to the control group. The effectiveness of the intervention varied based on reading ability and socioeconomic status (SES); poor readers benefited only in the Audiobooks+ Scaffold group, whereas children from lower-SES backgrounds improved with audiobook access alone, especially if they were already proficient readers. Additionally, the Audiobooks+ Scaffold group listened to more audiobooks during the study. These findings suggest that text-supplemented audiobooks, particularly when combined with personalized support, can be a valuable tool for supporting vocabulary development in …

The famous amnesic patient Henry Molaison (H.M.) died on December 2, 2008. After extensive in situ magnetic resonance imaging in Boston, his brain was removed at autopsy and transported to the University of California San Diego. There the brain was prepared for frozen sectioning and cut into 2401, 70 μm coronal slices. While preliminary analyses of the brain sections have been reported, a comprehensive microscopic neuroanatomical analysis of the state of H.M.'s brain at the time of his death has not yet been published. The brain tissue and slides were subsequently moved to the University of California Davis and the slides digitized at high resolution. Initial stages of producing a website for the public viewing of the images were also carried out. Recently, the slides, digital images, and tissue have been transferred to Boston University for permanent archiving. A new steering committee has been established …

Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is the primary method to investigate macro-and microstructure of neural white matter in vivo. DWI can be used to identify and characterize individual-specific white matter bundles, enabling precise analyses on hypothesis-driven connections in the brain and bridging the relationships between brain structure, function, and behavior. However, cortical endpoints of bundles may span larger areas than what a researcher is interested in, challenging presumptions that bundles are specifically tied to certain brain functions. Functional MRI (fMRI) can be integrated to further refine bundles such that they are restricted to functionally-defined cortical regions. Analyzing properties of these Functional Sub-Bundles (FSuB) increases precision and interpretability of results when studying neural connections supporting specific tasks. Several parameters of DWI and fMRI analyses, ranging from data acquisition to processing, can impact the efficacy of integrating functional and diffusion MRI. Here, we discuss the applications of the FSuB approach, suggest best practices for acquiring and processing neuroimaging data towards this end, and introduce the FSuB-Extractor, a flexible open-source software for creating FSuBs. We demonstrate our processing code and the FSuB-Extractor on an openly-available dataset, the Natural Scenes Dataset.

Previous brain imaging studies have identified three brain regions that selectively respond to visual scenes, the parahippocampal place area (PPA), the occipital place area (OPA), and the retrosplenial cortex (RSC). There is growing evidence that these visual scene-sensitive regions process different types of scene information and may have different developmental timelines in supporting scene perception. How these scene-sensitive regions support memory functions during child development is largely unknown. We investigated PPA, OPA and RSC activations associated with episodic memory formation in childhood (5–7 years of age) and young adulthood, using a subsequent scene memory paradigm and a functional localizer for scenes. PPA, OPA, and RSC subsequent memory activation and functional connectivity differed between children and adults. Subsequent memory effects were found in activations of all …

Children with dyslexia frequently also struggle with math. However, studies of reading disability (RD) rarely assess math skill, and the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying co‐occurring reading and math disability (RD+MD) are not clear. The current study aimed to identify behavioral and neurocognitive factors associated with co‐occurring MD among 86 children with RD. Within this sample, 43% had co‐occurring RD+MD and 22% demonstrated a possible vulnerability in math, while 35% had no math difficulties (RD‐Only). We investigated whether RD‐Only and RD+MD students differed behaviorally in their phonological awareness, reading skills, or executive functions, as well as in the brain mechanisms underlying word reading and visuospatial working memory using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The RD+MD group did not differ from RD‐Only on behavioral or brain measures of …

In the early 2000s, Kurt Fischer and colleagues founded the Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) field, including a flagship journal, society, and a master’s degree program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (Harvard). The MBE program was the first-of-its-kind, focused on the intersection of neurobiology, psychology, and educational research and practice. Between its first cohort in 2004 and its final cohort in 2022, the program graduated 668 students from around the world. Contemporaneously, scholars developed MBE or related Educational Neuroscience initiatives in several US states, Canada, the United Kingdom, Austria, The Netherlands, China, Israel, across Latin America, and other locations around the world.(PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved)