Mental Health & Cognition

Summary

Cognition emerges from interconnected processes including attention, memory, language, learning and decision-making. Mental health conditions are similarly shaped by relationships among symptoms, biology, environment and lived experience rather than by isolated factors.

We use tools from complex systems and network science to investigate these relationships at multiple levels. This includes gene co-expression networks, networks of psychological symptoms and simulation studies that test whether highly connected symptoms are meaningful intervention targets.

Research directions

• Biological networks associated with cognition and psychiatric conditions
• Symptom networks and candidate intervention targets
• Simulations for evaluating personalized network strategies
• Reproducible methods for psychological network analysis

Selected publications

• Gysi DM, Nowick K. Understanding human cognition using TF-networks: Identifying signature genes for psychotic and neurodevelopmental disorders through a gene-co-expression networks approach (2021).

• Pimpao F, Gysi DM, Castro D, Ferreira TB. The nosographic network structure of posttraumatic stress disorder. Journal of Traumatic Stress (2022).