Evaluation of neural and behavioral characteristics expressed in narratives in the clinical context of epilepsy

• Grant number: 24/01635-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: July 01, 2024
• Status: Discontinued
• Field of knowledge: Health Sciences - Medicine - Medical Clinics
• Principal Investigator: Ésper Abrão Cavalheiro
• Grantee: Ana Teresa Ribeiro Contier
• Host Institution: Escola Paulista de Medicina (EPM). Universidade Federal de São Paulo (UNIFESP). Campus São Paulo. São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 24/18114-7 - Evaluation of neural and behavioral characteristics expressed in narratives in the clinical context of epilepsy, BE.EP.PD

Abstract

Narratives are fundamental in shaping worldviews and human decisions, serving as a means through which people receive and transmit information. In recent years, the study of narratives has been gaining ground in neuroscience research. There are at least three approaches to this topic. Illness narratives are being analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative methods to assess the impact of diseases on patients, their families, and healthcare professionals. This approach is crucial for developing Patient-Centered Care practices (PCC), where the needs and perspectives of patients take priority. Narratives are also used as stimuli in cognitive neuroscience experiments, such as using films to investigate brain activity in complex social environments. Lastly, the third perspective explores how narratives are processed in the brain, investigating the neural bases of language and narrative comprehension and their relationships with various cognitive functions such as memory. The postdoctoral proposal is a continuation of doctoral research on the study of narratives in the field of epilepsy to evaluate cognitive and affective aspects found in narratives of people with epilepsy through analysis using LIWC-22, short for Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count-22, and Natural Language Processing techniques. Additionally, there is the expectation of working in an internship at the Hasson Lab, at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, which is at the frontiers of knowledge by establishing connections between the evaluation of the neural bases of narratives; development of narrative stimuli to investigate communication in naturalistic contexts; as well as the use of deep learning techniques and artificial neural networks to model natural language. The internship at the Hasson Lab will contribute to improving the proposed protocol and learning innovative methods and techniques for studying narratives in the field of neuroscience.Keywords: narrative, neuroscience, epilepsy clinic.