Scholars@Duke
Sze Chai Kwok

Sze Chai Kwok

Associate Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke Kunshan University
DKU Faculty

Selected Publications

Unveiling the potential of machine learning in schizophrenia diagnosis: A meta-analytic study of task-based neuroimaging data.

Journal Article Psychiatry and clinical neurosciences · March 2024 The emergence of machine learning (ML) techniques has opened up new avenues for identifying biomarkers associated with schizophrenia (SCZ) using task-related fMRI (t-fMRI) designs. To evaluate the effectiveness of this approach, we conducted a comprehensiv ... Full text Cite

An intricate relationship between executive function and second-language ability in a cohort of Uyghur-Chinese bilingual children.

Journal Article Developmental science · March 2023 The relationship between executive function and second-language ability remains contentious in bilingual children; thus, the current study focused on this issue. In total, 371 Uyghur-Chinese bilingual children ranging from 3 to 6 years old were assessed by ... Full text Cite

Time-sensitive prefrontal involvement in associating confidence with task performance illustrates metacognitive introspection in monkeys.

Journal Article Communications biology · August 2022 Metacognition refers to the ability to be aware of one's own cognition. Ample evidence indicates that metacognition in the human primate is highly dissociable from cognition, specialized across domains, and subserved by distinct neural substrates. However, ... Full text Cite

Distinct Generation of Subjective Vividness and Confidence during Naturalistic Memory Retrieval in Angular Gyrus.

Journal Article Journal of cognitive neuroscience · May 2022 Our subjective experience of remembering guides and monitors the reconstruction of past and simulation of the future, which enables us to identify mistakes and adjust our behavior accordingly. However, what underlies the process of subjective mnemonic expe ... Full text Cite

Atypical meta-memory evaluation strategy in schizophrenia patients.

Journal Article Schizophrenia research. Cognition · March 2022 BackgroundPrevious research has reported that patients with schizophrenia would regard false memories with higher confidence, and this meta-memory deficit was suggested as a neurocognitive marker of schizophrenia. However, how schizophrenia patien ... Full text Cite

Effect of Aquatic Exercise on Sleep Efficiency of Adults With Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain.

Journal Article Journal of physical activity & health · September 2021 BackgroundAerobic exercise improves sleep for people who have difficulty in sleeping soundly, but most research to date has focused on land-based exercise. There has been only very limited research into the effect of aquatic exercise on people wit ... Full text Cite

Common functional localizers to enhance NHP & cross-species neuroscience imaging research.

Journal Article NeuroImage · August 2021 Functional localizers are invaluable as they can help define regions of interest, provide cross-study comparisons, and most importantly, allow for the aggregation and meta-analyses of data across studies and laboratories. To achieve these goals within the ... Full text Cite

Microvascular decompression for hemifacial spasm involving the vertebral artery: A modified effective technique using a gelatin sponge with a FuAiLe medical adhesive.

Journal Article CNS neuroscience & therapeutics · July 2021 Microvascular Decompression for Hemifacial Spasm Involving the Vertebral Artery (VA): A Modified Effective Technique Using a Gelatin Sponge with a FuAiLe Medical Adhesive. (a)The VA pushes the anterior inferior cerebellar artery (AICA) which compressed the ... Full text Cite

Diffusion property and functional connectivity of superior longitudinal fasciculus underpin human metacognition.

Journal Article Neuropsychologia · June 2021 Metacognition as the capacity of monitoring one's own cognition operates across domains. Here, we addressed whether metacognition in different cognitive domains rely on common or distinct neural substrates with combined diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and f ... Full text Cite

Beyond MRI: on the scientific value of combining non-human primate neuroimaging with metadata.

Journal Article NeuroImage · March 2021 Sharing and pooling large amounts of non-human primate neuroimaging data offer new exciting opportunities to understand the primate brain. The potential of big data in non-human primate neuroimaging could however be tremendously enhanced by combining such ... Full text Cite

Autobiographical and episodic memory deficits in schizophrenia: A narrative review and proposed agenda for research.

Journal Article Clinical psychology review · February 2021 Schizophrenia is associated with memory disorders that affect patients in their daily life. Patients complain about difficulty to remember knowledge that has been recently learnt together with its context (episodic memory, EM) but also more complex events ... Full text Cite

Sharing voxelwise neuroimaging results from rhesus monkeys and other species with Neurovault.

Journal Article NeuroImage · January 2021 Animal neuroimaging studies can provide unique insights into brain structure and function, and can be leveraged to bridge the gap between animal and human neuroscience. In part, this power comes from the ability to combine mechanistic interventions with br ... Full text Cite

Distinct generation of subjective vividness and confidence during naturalistic memory retrieval in angular gyrus

Journal Article · 2021 Our subjective experience of remembering guides and monitors the reconstruction of past and simulation of the future, which enables us to identify mistakes and adjust our behavior accordingly. However, it remains incompletely understood what underlies the ... Full text Cite

Distinct generation of subjective vividness and confidence during naturalistic memory retrieval in the angular gyrus

Journal Article · 2021 Subjective experience of remembering is a hallmark of episodic memory, which is deemed crucial for effective behavior. A fundamental and enduring puzzle is the origin of confidence in memory; for example, does the confidence during episodic retrieval depen ... Full text Cite

Time-sensitive prefrontal involvement in associating confidence with task performance illustrates metacognitive introspection in monkeys

Journal Article · 2021 Metacognition refers to the ability to be aware of one’s own cognition. Ample evidence indicates that metacognition in the human primate is highly dissociable from cognition, specialized across domains, and subserved by distinct neural substrates. However, ... Full text Cite

Fallacious reversal of event-order during recall reveals memory reconstruction in rhesus monkeys.

Journal Article Behavioural brain research · September 2020 Whether nonhuman primate species can construct, still less reconstruct, order of past events remains controversial. Here we show that rhesus macaques are capable of reconstructing the temporal order of memory traces of dynamic videos. We made use of 2000 u ... Full text Cite

Behavioral evidence for memory replay of video episodes in the macaque.

Journal Article eLife · April 2020 Humans recall the past by replaying fragments of events temporally. Here, we demonstrate a similar effect in macaques. We trained six rhesus monkeys with a temporal-order judgement (TOJ) task and collected 5000 TOJ trials. In each trial, the monkeys watche ... Full text Cite

Context-Dependent Coding of Temporal Distance Between Cinematic Events in the Human Precuneus.

Journal Article The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · March 2020 How temporal and contextual information interactively impact on behavior and brain activity during the retrieval of temporal order about naturalistic episodes remains incompletely understood. Here, we used fMRI to examine the effects of contextual signals ... Full text Cite

The Confidence Database.

Journal Article Nature human behaviour · March 2020 Understanding how people rate their confidence is critical for the characterization of a wide range of perceptual, memory, motor and cognitive processes. To enable the continued exploration of these processes, we created a large database of confidence stud ... Full text Cite

Accelerating the Evolution of Nonhuman Primate Neuroimaging.

Journal Article Neuron · February 2020 Nonhuman primate neuroimaging is on the cusp of a transformation, much in the same way its human counterpart was in 2010, when the Human Connectome Project was launched to accelerate progress. Inspired by an open data-sharing initiative, the global communi ... Full text Cite

Diffusion property and functional connectivity of superior longitudinal fasciculus underpin human metacognition

Journal Article · 2020 Metacognition as the capacity of monitoring one’s own cognition operates across domains. Here, we addressed whether metacognition in different cognitive domains rely on common or distinct neural substrates with combined diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and f ... Full text Cite

Behavioral evidence for memory replay of video episodes in macaque monkeys

Journal Article · 2020 ABSTRACT Humans recall the past by replaying fragments of events temporally. Here, we demonstrate a similar effect in macaques. We trained six rhesus monkeys with a temporal-order judgement (TOJ) task and collected 5000 TOJ trials. In each trial, ... Full text Cite

A meta-analysis on uncertainty monitoring in four non-primate animal species: Pigeons, rats, large-billed crows, and bees

Journal Article · 2020 Humans have the metacognitive capacity to be aware of what they do and do not know. While uncertainty monitoring has long been regarded as uniquely human, researchers in search of the polygenetic root of this ability have gathered evidence that primate spe ... Full text Cite

Mnemonic vulnerability induced by post-activation time-dependent new-learning.

Journal Article Neurobiology of learning and memory · October 2019 Reactivation renders consolidated memory labile again, and the ensuing temporary reconsolidation process is highly susceptible to mnemonic modification. Here, we show that memories in such an unstable state could be influenced by sheer behavioral means, by ... Full text Cite

Individual susceptibility to TMS affirms the precuneal role in meta-memory upon recollection.

Journal Article Brain structure & function · September 2019 A recent virtual-lesion study using inhibitory repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) confirmed the causal behavioral relevance of the precuneus in the evaluation of one's own memory performance (aka mnemonic metacognition). This study's goal ... Full text Cite

Temporal-order iconicity bias in narrative event understanding and memory.

Journal Article Memory (Hove, England) · September 2019 Incongruence between the narrated (encoded) order and the actual chronological order of events is ubiquitous in various kinds of narratives and information modalities. The iconicity assumption in text comprehension proposes that readers will by default ass ... Full text Cite

Mnemonic Introspection in Macaques Is Dependent on Superior Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex But Not Orbitofrontal Cortex.

Journal Article The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · July 2019 The human PFC has been associated more with meta-perceptual as opposed to meta-memory decisions from correlational neuroimaging investigations. Recently, metacognitive abilities have also been shown to be causally dependent upon anterior and dorsal PFC in ... Full text Cite

Collaborative open science as a way to reproducibility and new insights in primate cognition research

Journal Article · 2019 The field of primate cognition studies how primates, including humans, perceive, process, store, retrieve, and use information to guide decision making and other behavior. Much of this research is motivated by a desire to understand how these abilities ... Full text Cite

An Open Resource for Non-human Primate Imaging.

Journal Article Neuron · October 2018 Non-human primate neuroimaging is a rapidly growing area of research that promises to transform and scale translational and cross-species comparative neuroscience. Unfortunately, the technological and methodological advances of the past two decades have ou ... Full text Cite

Causal Evidence for Mnemonic Metacognition in Human Precuneus.

Journal Article The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · July 2018 Metacognition is the capacity to introspectively monitor and control one's own cognitive processes. Previous anatomical and functional neuroimaging findings implicated the important role of the precuneus in metacognition processing, especially during mnemo ... Full text Cite

A biphasic effect of cross-modal priming on visual shape recognition.

Journal Article Acta psychologica · February 2018 We used a cross-modal priming paradigm to evoke a biphasic effect in visual short-term memory. Participants were required to match the memorandum (a visual shape, either spiky or curvy) to a delayed probe (a shape belonging to the same category). In two-th ... Full text Cite

Mnemonic introspection in macaques is dependent on dorsolateral prefrontal cortex but not orbitofrontal cortex

Journal Article · 2018 ABSTRACT The human prefrontal cortex (PFC) has been associated more with meta-perceptual as opposed to meta-memory decisions from correlational neuroimaging investigations. Recently, metacognitive abilities have also been shown to be causally depe ... Full text Cite

Locally distributed abstraction of temporal distance in human parietal cortex

Journal Article · 2018 An enduring puzzle in the neuroscience of memory is how the brain parsimoniously situates past events by their order in relation to time. By combining functional MRI, and representational similarity analysis, we reveal a multivoxel representation of time i ... Full text Cite

Individual susceptibility to TMS affirms the precuneual role in metamemory upon recollection

Journal Article · 2018 Background A recent virtual-lesion study using inhibitory repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) confirmed the causal behavioral relevance of the precuneus in the evaluation of one’s own memory performance (aka mnemonic metacognition) ... Full text Cite

Causal evidence for mnemonic metacognition in human precuneus

Journal Article · 2018 Metacognition is the capacity to introspectively monitor and control one’s own cognitive processes. Previous anatomical and functional neuroimaging findings implicated the important role of precuneus in metacognition processing, especially during mnemonic ... Full text Cite

Time-dependent mnemonic vulnerability induced by new-learning

Journal Article · 2018 Reactivation renders consolidated memory labile again, and the ensuing temporary reconsolidation process is highly susceptible to mnemonic modification. Here, we show that memories in such an unstable state could be reprogrammed by sheer behavioral means, ... Full text Cite

Erratum.

Journal Article Human brain mapping · January 2016 Full text Cite

Quantum information processes in protein microtubules of brain neurons

Chapter · January 1, 2016 We study biologically ‘orchestrated’ coherent quantum processes in collections of protein microtubules of brain neurons, which correlate with, and regulate, neuronal synaptic and membrane activity. In this situation the continuous Schrodinger evolution of ... Full text Cite

Adaptability to changes in temporal structure is fornix-dependent.

Journal Article Learning & memory (Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y.) · August 2015 Recognition memory deficits, even after short delays, are sometimes observed following hippocampal damage. One hypothesis links the hippocampus with processes in updating contextual memory representation. Here, we used fornix transection, which partially d ... Full text Cite

Scale invariance of temporal order discrimination using complex, naturalistic events.

Journal Article Cognition · July 2015 Recent demonstrations of scale invariance in cognitive domains prompted us to investigate whether a scale-free pattern might exist in retrieving the temporal order of events from episodic memory. We present four experiments using an encoding-retrieval para ... Full text Cite

Immediate memory for "when, where and what": Short-delay retrieval using dynamic naturalistic material.

Journal Article Human brain mapping · July 2015 We investigated the neural correlates supporting three kinds of memory judgments after very short delays using naturalistic material. In two functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments, subjects watched short movie clips, and after a short ret ... Full text Cite

Exogenous features versus prior experiences modulate different subregions of the right IPL during episodic memory retrieval.

Journal Article Scientific reports · June 2015 The fractionation view holds that distinct cognitive operations are mediated by subregions of the inferior parietal lobule (IPL). Within IPL, we hypothesised that retrieval-related activity in different parts of the right supramarginal gyrus (rSMG) may be ... Full text Cite

Attentional cueing by cross-modal congruency produces both facilitation and inhibition on short-term visual recognition.

Journal Article Acta psychologica · October 2014 The attentional modulation of performance in a memory task, comparable to the one obtained in a perceptual task, is at the focus of contemporary research. We hypothesized that a biphasic effect (namely, facilitation followed by inhibition) can be obtained ... Full text Cite

Set-relevance determines the impact of distractors on episodic memory retrieval.

Journal Article Journal of cognitive neuroscience · September 2014 We investigated the interplay between stimulus-driven attention and memory retrieval with a novel interference paradigm that engaged both systems concurrently on each trial. Participants encoded a 45-min movie on Day 1 and, on Day 2, performed a temporal o ... Full text Cite

Where neuroimaging and lesion studies meet.

Journal Article Journal of neuroimaging : official journal of the American Society of Neuroimaging · January 2013 Lesion studies (both patients and nonhuman animals) and functional neuroimaging studies of normal, healthy subjects provide complementary, but different types of information. This article suggests that both study types are necessary for deriving inferentia ... Full text Cite

Functional anatomy of temporal organisation and domain-specificity of episodic memory retrieval.

Journal Article Neuropsychologia · October 2012 Episodic memory provides information about the "when" of events as well as "what" and "where" they happened. Using functional imaging, we investigated the domain specificity of retrieval-related processes following encoding of complex, naturalistic events. ... Full text Cite

Exploration and ambulatory behaviours in normal and fornix transected macaque monkeys in an open space

Chapter · December 1, 2011 Prompted by the theoretical prediction that damage to the hippocampal system should abolish exploratory behaviour, the present study examined exploratory movements in control monkeys (CON) and monkeys with transection of the fornix (FNX), a major input/out ... Cite

Long-term visuospatial retention unaffected by fornix transection.

Journal Article Hippocampus · August 2010 As part of an earlier experiment (Kwok and Buckley, 2009), six macaque monkeys (three with fornix transection and three unoperated controls) were trained postoperatively to discriminate a total of 104 new concurrent visuospatial conditional problems to cri ... Full text Cite

Fornix transection selectively impairs fast learning of conditional visuospatial discriminations.

Journal Article Hippocampus · March 2010 As the fornix has previously been implicated in the rapid learning of associations, we hypothesized that fornix transection in macaques would selectively impair the acquisition of rapidly learned conditional visuospatial discrimination problems. Macaque mo ... Full text Cite

Fornix transected macaques make fewer perseverative errors than controls during the early stages of learning conditional visuovisual discriminations [corrected].

Journal Article Behavioural brain research · December 2009 Previous studies with macaque monkeys have found rapid learning to be impaired in both spatial (visuospatial) and non-spatial (visuomotor) associative learning tasks after fornix transection. In order to test theories that posit a general role for the forn ... Full text Cite

Dissociable components of rule-guided behavior depend on distinct medial and prefrontal regions.

Journal Article Science (New York, N.Y.) · July 2009 Much of our behavior is guided by rules. Although human prefrontal cortex (PFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) are implicated in implementing rule-guided behavior, the crucial contributions made by different regions within these areas are not yet spec ... Full text Cite

Fornix transection impairs exploration but not locomotion in ambulatory macaque monkeys.

Journal Article Hippocampus · January 2006 Prompted by the theoretical prediction that damage to the hippocampal system should abolish exploratory behavior, the present study examined exploratory movements in control monkeys (CON) and monkeys with transection of the fornix (FNX), a major input/outp ... Full text Cite