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There are likely many reasons for this difference, and there is still a ton of work left to do to validate the ACI (e.g., establish cutoff scores, etc.), but this represents an important first step toward the first measure of validity in informant ratings of personality change

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We compared the ACI for these patients to patients who underwent independent neuropsychological exams (INEs), and we found that the ACI was significantly higher on average in the INE group.

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The ACI was created such that these vmPFC patients rarely had scores higher than 1 (i.e., 1 extreme change reported by the informant).

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these patients are the "blue ribbon" examples of personality change after brain damage - think Phineas Gage or patient EVR!

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We developed what we are calling the "Atypical Change Index" or ACI, which measures the number of extreme change ratings in the ISPC. We analyzed ACI data from patients with focal ventromedial prefrontal lesions enrolled in the Iowa Neurological Patient Registry...

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We've been using the ISPC for years and noticed something important: we didn't have an empirical basis for assessing the validity of ISPC ratings! Our group has taken the first step toward addressing this issue in the article linked above.

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neurology.medicine.uiowa.edu

Our team here at Iowa developed an informant-report questionnaire of personality change called the Iowa Scales of Personality Change (ISPC; neurology.medicine.uiowa.edu/clinical-neu...) to measure personality change along neurologically relevant dimensions (e.g., dysexecutive personality change).

Clinical Neuropsychology Resources

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Personality change is one of my favorite areas of research and clinical assessment in neuropsychology. It's also a longstanding area of interest to the Iowa-Benton neuropsychology group (e.g., we have many studies linking personality change to the ventromedial prefrontal region).

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Our next publication on neuropsychological assessment of personality change is out! www.tandfonline.com/eprint/QXKZG...

tandfonline.com

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Reposted by Mark Bowren

The first two papers produced by my lab, the Brain Lesion and Neuromodulation Laboratory (BLNL), are finally published! The first, "Cognition Disconnected," is available now via open access in Cerebral Cortex: academic.oup.com/cercor/artic...

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More to come soon on the second BLNL publication!

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Shout out to Lara Sozer on her very first peer-reviewed publication! She is applying to graduate schools in neuroscience this year. She quickly picked up skills in programming and high performance computing to help push this project across the finish line.

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We hope this work can guide future study designs in lesion-deficit mapping, and improve our ability to infer the architecture of cognition - a goal that is relevant to many fields within the basic and clinical neurosciences.

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For example, partitioning out domain-general variance from a factor score of visuospatial ability can improve our understanding of WHY a patient with a brain lesion is performing poorly on visuospatial tests. There is more than one route to impairment!

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Here, using data from 473 individuals with focal brain lesions, we show that psychometric (bifactor) models can be used partition domain-general from domain-specific variance and thus help create more distinctive mappings for domain-specific abilities.

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However, since my graduate school days, I noticed that lesion-symptom maps of purportedly different cognitive abilities can sometimes look suspiciously similar to one another, and that the "culprit" regions were often areas linked to domain-general cognitive ability (g).

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Lesion-deficit mapping and lesion network mapping are often used to demonstrate that two cognitive abilities can be dissociated from one another neuroanatomically.

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Reposted by Mark Bowren

Faculty Requisition Details - Jobs@UIOWA: Search and Apply for Jobs at The University of Iowa

We're recruiting! Iowa's Carver College of Medicine Department of Neurology is looking for a clinical neuropsychologist to join our team in the historic Benton Neuropsychology Clinic. If you're on the market, apply via the link below: jobs.uiowa.edu/faculty/view... Please share!

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Jobs@UIOWA: The official place to search and apply for jobs at The University of Iowa.

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Conditions like epilepsy and TBI can affect your memory and other thinking skills. Our neuropsychologists can measure these abilities and suggest treatments.

This role is great for anyone looking to shape the future of neuropsychology through teaching and clinical service, and anyone with any level of interest in helping out with or leading research! uihc.org/services/neu....

uihc.org

Neuropsychology

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Iowa City, IA - Livability.com

Any questions about the position or what it's like to live, work, and play in Iowa City? Don't hesitate to ask me! Iowa City is routinely highly ranked on lists of best places to live (e.g., #31 here: livability.com/ia/iowa-city/). More on that here: thinkiowacity.com

livability.com

Discover why Iowa City, IA, ranks as a best place to live in the U.S., with cost of living, employment, things to do and more.

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Faculty Requisition Details - Jobs@UIOWA: Search and Apply for Jobs at The University of Iowa

jobs.uiowa.edu

Jobs@UIOWA: The official place to search and apply for jobs at The University of Iowa.

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Mark Bowren @markbowrenjr.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

Experience w/ resting state fMRI, diffusion MRI, lesion analysis, and electrophysiology (iEEG) are all valued. This postdoc position is supported by our department of neurosurgery here at the University of Iowa, and mentorship will involve a team of scientists as suited to the candidate's interests.

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Mark Bowren @markbowrenjr.bsky.social · 13/03/2026

My lab is officially recruiting a postdoctoral research scholar: jobs.uiowa.edu/postdoc/view... We are seeking someone who can help advance our research on predicting cognitive/behavioral/emotional outcomes after neurosurgerical lesions in patients with epilepsy using multimodal neuroimaging data.

jobs.uiowa.edu

Postdoctoral Requisition Details - Jobs@UIOWA: Search and Apply for Jobs at The University of Iowa

Jobs@UIOWA: The official place to search and apply for jobs at The University of Iowa.

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I'm hopeful that this work will ultimately lead to improvements in pre-surgical mapping of cognition to brain networks, and better cognitive outcomes after neurosurgery for patients with epilepsy.

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With it, our team at the University of Iowa will seek to understand the cognitive and neurophysiological impacts of a new method of intracranial electrical stimulation.

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I'm extremely grateful to the American Brain Foundation, the American Epilepsy Society, and the Epilepsy Foundation for jointly supporting this award and for their investment in early-career scientists. This funding is a game changer at this early stage of my career.

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Mark Bowren @markbowrenjr.bsky.social · 07/02/2026

I'm incredibly honored to share that I have been selected to receive one of the American Brain Foundation's Next Generation Research Grants, specifically the award in epilepsy!

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Thanks @insneuro.bsky.social for the conference! I got to present my lab's electrical stimulation mapping work, listen to inspiring talks (big fan of the "main thing" talk/Dr. Bauer's ideas on neural mechanisms of behavior!), and introduce my Iowa and Florida friends! Plus I made a new canine friend

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A huge shout out to the first full-time RA for the BLNL, Lara Sozer, and to the entire Iowa Lesion Registry team, including Aaron Boes, Dan Tranel, and their labs. Hopefully this puts the BLNL off to a good start!

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This project has been in the making for years, with the idea for this growing from my dissertation work with Dan Tranel in lesion-symptom mapping of g.

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In the manuscript, we discuss the nuances of our conclusions in more detail, but the take home message is that consideration of g is important for lesion-deficit studies seeking to investigate dissociable neuroanatomy for higher-order cognitive abilities.

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This shows how there can be two routes to low scores on a cognitive task: damage to brain systems for domain-general cognitive ability, and damage to systems unique to the given domain. Without explicitly modeling these sources of variance, we might conflate these two on accident!

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Let's bring this to life with case examples. On the right, a lesion affecting a region only see in mapping of the bifactor version of visuospatial ability. The left, a lesion of g regions. Both had low scores on the visuospatial factor from the correlated factors model, but not the bifactor version.

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Here is how g affected mapping of visuospatial ability. Top=lesions only, middle row=structural disconnections, bottom=functional lesion network mapping. Across all 3, the results change quite dramatically if we partitioned out g-variance from the factor (right column) vs if we didn't (left column).

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We found that this was in fact the case. We compared spatial correlations among domain-specific maps from the two models and found statistically significantly lower correlations (Fisher r-to-Z transformed) for the bifactor model on average.

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If g's influence is embedded within any given lesion-deficit mapping, then the resultant maps should be more similar if g is left unaccounted for in the model (correlated factors model) versus if it is explicitly separated from domain-specific abilities (bifactor model).

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Specifically, we used "correlated factors" and "bifactor" models to create latent variables for cognitive abilities both with (model on the right) and without (model on the left) g-variance embedded within each factor.

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In this study, we used structural equation modeling and lesion-deficit mapping to investigate whether or how formal consideration of g matters for lesion-deficit mapping.

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Despite the ubiquity of this g signal in cognitive test data, it is rarely addressed in lesion-deficit mapping studies of cognitive abilities. This could be an issue if the goal is the tease apart neural correlates of different abilities, or test the idea whether two abilities are indeed distinct.

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We've known for over a century that cognitive tests are positively intercorrelated. The most popular explanation for this "positive manifold" of correlations is the existence of a domain-general cognitive ability (g) which exists alongside domain-specific functions like memory or visual processing.

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Since the inception of voxel-wise lesion-symptom mapping, we have seen a boom in large-scale lesion-deficit mapping studies. However, I've always felt that there was something missing from some of these studies: explicit psychometric modeling of behavior/cognition.

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