Damien Vistoli
Laval University
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Featured researches published by Damien Vistoli.
Psychiatry Research-neuroimaging | 2011
Eric Brunet-Gouet; Amélie M. Achim; Damien Vistoli; Christine Passerieux; Marie-Christine Hardy-Baylé; Philip L. Jackson
This article discusses the important advances in a recent field of science dealing with the brain processes implicated in understanding social situations and interacting with others. Many behavioral studies on schizophrenia have shown the impairment of these processes and their preferential relation with disorganization and negative syndromes. Brain imaging is a powerful method to identify brain systems participating in these processes in healthy subjects and will be used increasingly to study mental disorders such as schizophrenia. A few preliminary studies have opened this field of research and allowed for the drawing of some limited conclusions. We emphasize the importance of developing an integrated neurocognitive framework to account for the multifaceted nature of social cognition deficits in schizophrenia. Inspired by contemporary models of empathy and social cognition that identify different components such as shared representation, mentalizing, self/other distinction, we show how schizophrenia affects these components at the behavioral and functional levels. We also outline the interest of this model to understand putative abnormalities of contextual integration within the area of mentalization. Finally, we discuss how specialized measures of brain functions during the performance of these precisely defined mental processes might be used as outcome predictors.
Schizophrenia Research | 2011
Damien Vistoli; Christine Passerieux; Bérengère Houze; Marie-Christine Hardy-Baylé; Eric Brunet-Gouet
Numerous behavioral and electrophysiological studies have provided evidence of abnormal semantic processing in schizophrenia. However, the neural basis of these deficits is poorly understood. We investigated magnetic cortical responses elicited by a word-pair lexical decision task in 20 patients with schizophrenia and 12 healthy control subjects. The task involved presentation of a prime word (200 ms), followed by a blank (250 ms), and then a target stimulus (1200 ms); the subject had to decide whether the target was a real word or not. During this task, bilateral temporal and left prefrontal activations were observed in both groups. However, in contrast to controls, patients with schizophrenia did not show increased activation in the left temporal and anterior cingulate cortices between 200 and 450 ms in response to semantic incongruity. These results suggested that schizophrenia was associated with a functional disturbance in some semantic regions that gave rise to the N400 component. Moreover, a significant modulation in the right temporal cortex was observed in patients, but not in controls. This suggested the existence of alternative processes in patients because both groups showed similar behavioral priming. Finally, we elucidated some functional abnormalities in the semantic network during prime word processing in patients, indicated by prolonged activation compared to healthy controls. Thus, in addition to context integration impairment, abnormal activations during the prime word provided new evidence of context processing deficits in schizophrenia.
Cortex | 2016
Marie-Audrey Lavoie; Damien Vistoli; Stephanie Sutliff; Philip L. Jackson; Amélie M. Achim
Theory of mind (ToM) refers to the ability to infer the mental states of others. Behavioral measures of ToM usually present information about both a character and the context in which this character is placed, and these different pieces of information can be used to infer the characters mental states. A set of brain regions designated as the ToM brain network is recognized to support (ToM) inferences. Different brain regions within that network could however support different ToM processes. This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study aimed to distinguish the brain regions supporting two aspects inherent to many ToM tasks, i.e., the ability to infer or represent mental states and the ability to use the context to adjust these inferences. Nineteen healthy subjects were scanned during the REMICS task, a novel task designed to orthogonally manipulate mental state inferences (as opposed to physical inferences) and contextual adjustments of inferences (as opposed to inferences that do not require contextual adjustments). We observed that mental state inferences and contextual adjustments, which are important aspects of most behavioral ToM tasks, rely on distinct brain regions or subregions within the classical brain network activated in previous ToM research. Notably, an interesting dissociation emerged within the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and temporo-parietal junctions (TPJ) such that the inferior part of these brain regions responded to mental state inferences while the superior part of these brain regions responded to the requirement for contextual adjustments. This study provides evidence that the overall set of brain regions activated during ToM tasks supports different processes, and highlights that cognitive processes related to contextual adjustments have an important role in ToM and should be further studied.
Social Neuroscience | 2015
Damien Vistoli; Christine Passerieux; M. El Zein; Catherine Clumeck; Sabine Braun; Eric Brunet-Gouet
Chronometric properties of theory of mind and intentions understanding more specifically are well documented. Notably, it was demonstrated using magnetoencephalography that the brain regions involved were recruited as soon as 200 ms post-stimulus. We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to characterize an electrophysiological marker of attribution of intentions. We also explored the robustness of this ERP signature under two conditions corresponding to either explicit instructions to focus on others’ intentions or implicit instructions with no reference to mental states. Two matched groups of 16 healthy volunteers each received either explicit or no instructions about intentions and performed a nonverbal attribution of intentions task based on sequential four-image comic strips depicting either intentional or physical causality. A bilateral posterior positive component, ranging from 250 to 650 ms post-stimulus, showed greater amplitude in intentional than in physical condition (the intention ERP effect). This effect occurs during the third image only, suggesting that it reflects the integration of information depicted in the third image to the contextual cues given by the first two. The intention effect was similar in the two groups of subjects. Overall, our results identify a clear ERP marker of the first hundreds of milliseconds of intentions processing probably related to a contextual integrative mechanism and suggest its robustness by showing its blindness to task demands manipulation.
Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience | 2017
Damien Vistoli; Marie-Audrey Lavoie; Stephanie Sutliff; Philip L. Jackson; Amélie M. Achim
Background Schizophrenia is associated with important disturbances in empathy that are related to everyday functioning. Empathy is classically defined as including affective (sharing others’ emotions) and cognitive (taking others’ cognitive perspectives) processes. In healthy individuals, studies on empathy for pain revealed specific brain systems associated with these sets of processes, notably the anterior middle cingulate (aMCC) and anterior insula (AI) for affective sharing and the bilateral temporoparietal junction (TPJ) for the cognitive processes, but the integrity of these systems in patients with schizophrenia remains uncertain. Methods Patients with schizophrenia and healthy controls performed a pain empathy task while undergoing fMRI scanning. Participants observed pictures of hands in either painful or nonpainful situations and rated the level of pain while imagining either themselves (self) or an unknown person (other) in these situations. Results We included 27 patients with schizophrenia and 21 healthy controls in our analyses. For the pain versus no pain contrast, patients showed overall typical activation patterns in the aMCC and AI, with only a small part of the aMCC showing reduced activation compared with controls. For the other versus self contrast, patients showed an abnormal modulation of activation in the TPJ bilaterally (extending to the posterior superior temporal sulcus, referred to as the TPJ/pSTS). Limitations The design included an unnecessary manipulation of the visual perspective that reduced the number of trials for analysis. The sample size may not account for the heterogeneity of schizophrenia. Conclusion People with schizophrenia showed relatively intact brain activation when observing others’ pain, but showed abnormalities when asked to take the cognitive perspectives of others.
European Psychiatry | 2012
E. Brunet-Gouet; Damien Vistoli; C. Passerieux
Since the nineties, the study of social cognition has benefited from advances in neuroimaging that allowed to cartography the “social brain”. The available literature reports results of PET or fMRI experiments that globally agree on the topography of the cortical regions involved in understanding/representing others persons. Among these regions, medial prefrontal structures, the sensorimotor cortex, the temporoparietal cortex including the superior temporal sulcus have been implicated in different aspects of social cognition. Brain cartography was successful in separating networks that detect/process social cues from those that maintain shared representations (mirror system), or process inferences about others’ mental states (mentalization or theory of mind system). Although the neural bases of these systems are distinguished in many experiments, their mutual relations are yet hypothetical. Moreover, their main cognitive characteristics, such as their explicit/implicit or automatic/controlled nature, are mostly unknown. The use of cognitive electrophysiology (EEG and MEG) appears promising as a way to address these issues. Recent works based on these techniques demonstrate that theory of mind inferences are related with magnetic activation of the temporo-parietal junction as soon as 300 to 500 milliseconds post-stimuli when comic-strips with intentional characters are presented to subjects. Furthermore, these activations are modulated by top-down influences such as prior instructions urging the subjects to focus on the characters’ mental states. These results will be discussed with respect to their impact on schizophrenia research.
Behaviour Research and Therapy | 2008
Loretxu Bergouignan; Cédric Lemogne; Aurélie Foucher; Estelle Longin; Damien Vistoli; Jean-François Allilaire; Philippe Fossati
NeuroImage | 2011
Damien Vistoli; Eric Brunet-Gouet; Emilie Baup-Bobin; Marie-Christine Hardy-Baylé; Christine Passerieux
Psychiatry Research-neuroimaging | 2010
Galina Iakimova; C. Passerieux; Guy Denhière; Jean-Paul Laurent; Damien Vistoli; Jeanne Vilain; Marie-Christine Hardy-Baylé
Social Neuroscience | 2011
Damien Vistoli; Eric Brunet-Gouet; Amelia Lemoalle; Marie-Christine Hardy-Baylé; Christine Passerieux