Corporeal awareness, namely the consciousness of one’s body and sensations, is influenced by internal and external cues that interplay to create a coherent self-representation. Specifically, interoceptive signals (physiological internal signals), are crucial in shaping our perception of the body and processing specific sensations, such as pain. Part One of this thesis explores the influence of...
The present doctoral thesis aims at investigating how humans represent space, time, and motion through auditory and visual sensory modalities. It has been demonstrated that hearing prevails in representing the time domain and vision in representing the space domain. Given this strong link between sensory modality and domain of representation, one objective of this thesis is to deepen the...
Quando mangiamo, ci rappresentiamo la posizione delle posate rispetto a noi (soggetto-oggetto) o rispetto al piatto (oggetto-oggetto). In generale, codifichiamo le posizioni degli oggetti utilizzando un sistema di riferimento egocentrico o allocentrico. Frequentemente però, per raggiungere uno scopo, dobbiamo utilizzare entrambe le rappresentazioni: passiamo quindi da una rappresentazione...
Measurement is fundamental to accurately investigate constructs in psychological science, influencing the estimation of effects, the validity of study results, and ultimately replicability. Illness has a dramatic psychological impact on patients and (informal) caregivers, often termed “hidden patients”.
However, crucial constructs like uncertainty in illness (UI) and caregiver burden were...
The introduction of the TMS cortico-cortical paired associative stimulation (ccPAS) technique has spurred a paradigm shift in the study of brain connectivity: ccPAS targets cortical pathways, repeatedly stimulating nodes to transiently enhance/hinder their coupling, exploiting Hebbian spike-timing dependent plasticity. This allows manipulation of cortical networks, to study their physiological...
In recent years, the importance of constructing agile measures that can be applied to different clinical contexts for the evaluation of interventions has increased, as has the construction of instruments that find application in clinical practice. The aim of this symposium is to propose different evaluation strategies applicable to multidimensional interventions, the construction of...
Il cervello umano è una struttura complessa che opera attraverso una rete di interazioni a vari livelli, dalle singole cellule neurali a interi sistemi funzionali. Le interazioni di ordine superiore sono al centro di questa complessità e rivoluzionano il nostro approccio allo studio delle dinamiche cerebrali. Offrendo una finestra unica sul funzionamento del cervello, permettono di comprendere...
In un periodo storico in cui le scelte individuali e collettive acquisiscono una rilevanza scientifica e applicativa sempre maggiore, diventa essenziale comprendere le dinamiche emotive e cognitive che possono influenzare il processo decisionale. Confrontati con diversi scenari morali, gli individui possono sperimentare differenti emozioni, quali colpa o rimpianto, e talvolta vivere conflitti...
As the elderly population continue to grow, there is an urgent need for innovative and comprehensive healthcare approaches to support the well-being of older individuals. The World Health Organization Integrated Care for Older People (WHO-ICOPE) is a holistic, comprehensive approach designed to address the multifaceted needs of elderly individuals, focusing on person-centered assessment and...
Il cervello deprivato dei sensi è da sempre stato considerato uno stimolante oggetto di studio per la comprensione della cognizione e del comportamento umano. Promosso dalla spinta delle neuroimmagini, il numero di studi che hanno descritto la neuroanatomia funzionale e strutturale nei ciechi congeniti o tardivi è aumentato costantemente negli ultimi anni. Queste osservazioni sulla cecità...
Le emozioni sono quanto di più sfuggevole possa esistere: elementi contingenti a momenti e a stimoli, che si susseguono l'un l'altro. Per secoli la letteratura, la filosofia e non per l'ultima la psicologia le hanno descritte individualmente delineandone i tratti comportamentali e fisiologici. Le emozioni discrete di Ekman o il modello Circonflesso di Russell sono tutti tentativi di...
L'esplorazione della relazione tra spazio e tempo in psicologia offre nuove prospettive sull'analisi e comprensione della dinamica affettiva e sul ruolo dello spazio nella modulazione delle esperienze umane. Il simposio si concentra principalmente sull'applicazione di tecniche avanzate per l'analisi delle dinamiche affettive nel tempo e sull'impiego della realtà virtuale per la creazione di...
In this presentation, I will begin by discussing the established methods for conducting cross-frequency analysis in functional neuroimaging. Following this, I will introduce a novel statistical approach known as Multi-dimensional Antisymmetric Cross-Bicoherence (MACB, [1]). Grounded in bispectral analysis, MACB aims to identify quadratic lagged phase-interactions among vector time series...
All’Università di Bologna, agli inizi degli anni ’60 del secolo scorso, la ricerca psicologica era di impostazione gestaltista e si occupava soprattutto di fenomeni (prevalentemente di percezione, quasi esclusivamente visiva) e trascurava i processi che quei fenomeni producevano. Lo studio dei processi era lasciato alla neurofisiologia. Al termine del decennio la rivoluzione cognitivista aveva...
Questo simposio mira ad approfondire le complessità della riorganizzazione e della plasticità corticale, in particolare in risposta a deprivazioni sensoriali congenite come cecità e sordità. Nonostante ampie ricerche, la portata e la natura della plasticità cerebrale in tali condizioni rimangono ambigue. Il simposio porrà in questione alcuni modelli teorici contemporanei, ispirato dalle...
Il simposio è dedicato a Paolo Bonaiuto, recentemente scomparso, studioso dei temi della percezione visiva e della psicologia dell’arte che aveva iniziato a sviluppare a partire dagli anni ’60 del Novecento a Bologna. I suoi studi di matrice gestaltista – su temi come gli effetti di campo, la deprivazione sensoriale e le qualità espressive di manifestazioni dell’arte – hanno dato un contributo...
Un conflitto morale si manifesta quando decisioni o giudizi implicano ragioni morali contrastanti. Studi trattanti il tema hanno adoperato spesso dilemmi morali sacrificali al fine di approfondire i meccanismi alla base del processo decisionale.
Nel presente studio sono state adottate versioni video interattive del Footbridge Dilemma per esaminare come la prossimità influenzi le decisioni...
Laser-evoked potentials (LEP) are widely used to investigate the nociceptive pathway in patients with Fibromyalgia (FM). Since FM causes widespread pain and cognitive impairment, it presents diagnosis and treatment challenges. Quantifying the interaction Information (II), a higher-order information theoretic quantity, on laser-evoked potentials can provide an analytical measure of its neuronal...
Quando osserviamo immagini di oggetti, paesaggi, volti, animali, una parte della nostra corteccia visiva si attiva per elaborare queste informazioni visive in arrivo.
Cosa succede a queste aree cerebrali in caso di deprivazione visiva totale? Negli ultimi 3 decenni un gran numero di studi ha esaminato questo argomento, definendo il fenomeno di riorganizzazione corticale o plasticità...
Lo spazio virtuale, fornito dalla realtà virtuale, rappresenta un nuovo setting per simulare le attività quotidiane nel campo della neuropsicologia. Questo ambiente può essere utilizzato per valutare le capacità cognitive come la memoria, le funzioni esecutive, l'attenzione e le abilità visuospaziali. Il ruolo dello spazio in questi contesti assume un significato particolare per la...
Le ricerca di strategie di intervento volte a sviluppare ed incentivare comportamenti, pratiche ed atteggiamenti pro-ambientali è uno degli obiettivi della scienza contemporanea. In psicologia, è stato dimostrato che l'anticipazione del regret (rimpianto o rammarico) è un forte incentivo ad agire. Infatti, attraverso un ragionamento controfattuale, l’anticipazione del possibile regret...
Autism Spectrum Disorder represents a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by a variety of behavioral manifestations. In addition, there has been growing awareness of the importance of early diagnosis and the development or revision of screening and diagnostic tools for autism. The Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule – 2 (ADOS-2) represents the gold standard in autism diagnosis, but...
La rappresentazione del movimento su una superficie bidimensionale è stata da sempre una sfida per artisti, grafici e designer. Arnheim (1974), Cutting (2002), Massironi & Bonaiuto (1965) hanno proposto diversi fattori espressivi di movimento in immagini statiche, che possono essere sintetizzati in: rottura della simmetria, immagini multiple, sfocatura, diagonale e linee d’azione. Noi abbiamo...
Una vasta letteratura dimostra che, nelle condizioni di incertezza tipiche della vita quotidiana, le scelte sono influenzate dal modo in cui sono formulate e rappresentate dai decisori, ma anche dai loro timori e desideri, così come dalle emozioni che sono attive nel momento della scelta. Ma come e in quale direzione avviene tale influenza? E come specifici stati mentali ed emotivi influenzano...
Lo studio della plasticità corticale nella sordità profonda apre una finestra preziosa sui sorprendenti meccanismi adattivi del cervello umano. Tuttavia, le osservazioni raccolte finora hanno suscitato un vivace dibattito nella comunità scientifica, sollevando interrogativi fondamentali: quale ruolo gioca il fenomeno del reclutamento cross-modale corticale nell'adattamento comportamentale? Il...
Monoclonal antibodies against calcitonin gene-related peptides (CGRP) such as Galcanezumab (GCA), have revolutionized the therapeutic scenario in migraine. Even though they are clinically effective, how anti-CGRP treatment reduces migraine attacks still remains unclear. We carried out an observational case–control study aimed at studying how the interaction between metabolic and electrical...
V-MEB è una batteria innovativa per la valutazione dei deficit di memoria utilizzando la realtà virtuale. Sfruttando la potenza della realtà virtuale e dei video 360°, verrà creata una piattaforma innovativa ed ecologicamente valida per la valutazione della memoria. La batteria si comporrà di diversi subtests che analizzano le seguenti sottocomponenti della memoria: la memoria episodica,...
Introduzione
Quale conseguenza dei limiti restrittivi imposti dal COVID-19, la Didattica a Distanza (DaD) trova tutt’oggi un’ampia diffusione. Nell'assessment della percezione della qualità della DaD, porre il focus misurativo sul “blended learning” e disporre di strumenti eminentemente qualitativi sono aspetti limitanti. Con l’obiettivo di fornire uno strumento quantitativo solido per la...
L’introduzione delle qualità terziare o espressive come parti proprie dei fenomeni percettivi è stata considerata elemento distintivo della psicologia della Gestalt. Köhler (1929, 1938), Koffka (1935) e Lewin (1935) hanno sostenuto che siano qualità appartenenti agli aspetti oggettivi dell’ambiente e hanno ipotizzato le condizioni a cui siano rilevabili nell’esperienza quotidiana. Metzger...
Diversi studi sono stati condotti sugli aspetti psicologici del gioco d’azzardo con il fine di comprendere i fattori che contribuiscono allo sviluppo e al mantenimento del gioco patologico. Le risposte alle diverse caratteristiche di gioco, fattori ambientali, lo sviluppo di comorbidità e studi sull’efficacia degli interventi terapeutici sono stati quelli maggiormente studiati. Lo studio...
I principali aspetti psicologici dell’esperienza cinematografica, dal movimento all’elaborazione delle diverse sequenze filmiche fino alle strategie per ottenere illusioni di ambienti, hanno rappresentato argomenti approfonditi nelle meritorie attività di ricerca coordinate dal Prof. Paolo Bonaiuto. La mia collaborazione con il Prof. Bonaiuto, in particolare su tali argomenti, è iniziata alla...
I risultati delle ricerche di neuroscienze cognitive non si fermano dentro i laboratori, i dibattiti scientifici e le riviste di settore. Si diffondono attraverso comunicati stampa, i media e i social network, arrivando a influenzare pratiche cliniche e politiche sociali. In questo percorso, potenzialmente virtuoso, la complessità di alcuni risultati sperimentali rischia di perdersi. Le...
Caregiver burden refers to the multifaceted strain experienced by informal caregivers assisting a loved one suffering from a severe medical condition. Despite the crucial role of this construct in health psychology, one of the most used measurement tools to assess it lacks a full validation.
Indeed, the original study providing the ZBI Italian adaptation only utilized a principal component...
L’emozione complessa del sublime ha affascinato studiosi di tutte le epoche, andando a intercettare, recentemente, anche l’interesse della psicologia sperimentale. Secondo questa branca della psicologia, oggi, il termine “sublime” sarebbe assimilabile a quello di awe che tradurremmo in italiano con “profonda meraviglia”, comportando non poche implicazioni nell’ambito del suo studio empirico....
Il Disturbo da Gioco d'Azzardo (DGA) è una condizione complessa influenzata da diversi fattori dati dall'interazione di fattori clinici, cognitivi ed emotivi. L'impulsività, una variabile cruciale nello studio delle dipendenze, è strettamente legata alle distorsioni cognitive nel DGA, includendo scelte impulsive, risposte motorie, presa di decisione e bias cognitivi. Inoltre, le emozioni,...
Nel loro classico saggio Michotte, Thinés e Crabbè (1964) proponevano di estendere la nozione di completamento amodale alla strutturazione dello spazio percettivo, in particolare alla distanza tra gli oggetti, lamentando al tempo stesso l’assenza di ricerche riconducibili a tale approccio. Nonostante il rinnovato interesse verso il completamento amodale (van Lier & Gerbino, 2015; Gerbino,...
This study investigated the potential of a new executive functions assessment battery developed for evaluating cognitive-neuropsychological correlates in addictions, and its remote administration in a sample of patients with gambling disorder (GD). The Battery for Executive Functions in the Addiction (BFE-A) comprises five neuropsychological tests aimed at measuring verbal short- and long-term...
Parkinson's disease (PD) is typically known as a neurodegenerative disorder affecting motor skills. It is characterized by the loss of dopamine-producing neurons in the substantia nigra and subsequent accumulation of Lewy bodies in the residual neurons. Although cognitive impairments are a significant aspect of PD, there has been limited investigation and analysis of these changes. This is...
Faces influence our initial trust decisions but sometimes can be deceiving. Young children can form trust impressions from faces and use them to guide their decisions in economic trust games (Ewing et al., 2015). Older children can also consider the fairness of partners' return behavior when making trust decisions (Siddique et al., 2022). Here, we explored how 5-7-year-olds adjust their trust...
Gli ambienti sociali in cui ci muoviamo sono ricchi di stimoli capaci di suscitare emozioni diverse nelle persone. Come esseri intrinsecamente sociali, noi esseri umani abbiamo sviluppato diversi processi per proteggerci e socializzare con altri esseri umani. Tra queste componenti troviamo il sistema immunitario comportamentale (SIC), risultato di una combinazione di processi socio-cognitivi,...
Nel contesto lavorativo contemporaneo, le aziende sono spinte a un rapido adattamento alle nuove modalità e agli strumenti tecnologici sempre più avanzati. Queste innovazioni hanno però ripercussioni sui livelli di attenzione, engagement e sintonizzazione nelle interazioni interpersonali.
Il presente studio intende indagare il processo di collaborazione e sincronizzazione in una popolazione...
Patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) may be more prone to make risky value-based decisions, probably due to impairments in anticipating the unrewarding consequences or to an insensitiveness to them. So far, evidence showed that: i) In PD neural structures pivotal in decision making (DM) are affected; ii) Dopaminergic medications may bias choices toward risk; iii) Cognitive functioning, in...
A widespread problem in studying the neural correlates of visual consciousness is the difficulty in disentangling the actual correlates of the visual experience from the neural consequences of such percepts. This study aims to elucidate the electrophysiological dynamics underlying visual experiences' consequences. To do so, a partial report paradigm was used to separate activity related to the...
In sports, the home advantage is the higher chance to win a game when playing home, while the referee bias is the referee decision bias in favor of the home team. During the pandemic period, a natural experiment occurred, due to the large number of matches played in absence of spectators. Previous studies examined the effect of spectators on these phenomena on a relatively small number of...
Psychological research has focused on developing a deeper theoretical and practical understanding of the best intervention strategies to support eco-friendly behaviours, attitudes, and practices. It has been noted that the anticipation of regret is a strong inducement to act. The overall goal is to encourage young individuals to make eco-friendly decisions by manipulating their regrets. For...
L'Effetto boost attenzionale si riferisce alla facilitazione nel riconoscimento di immagini (o parole) presentate insieme a stimoli target, ai quali i partecipanti devono rispondere, durante la fase di codifica. Uno studio precedente ha dimostrato che l'effetto boost può migliorare la discriminazione visiva di immagini molto simili tra loro (pattern separation; Sisk & Lee, 2022). Gli obiettivi...
An extensive literature demonstrated that non-invasive Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) through overt and covert manipulation of specific brain signals enable alternative ways of communication in highly disabled individuals with neurodegenerative disorders. In particular, EEG-BCI spellers allow patients with severe loss of motor control and language abilities to by-pass the dysfunctional...
Research consistently shows that rhythm complexity elicits pleasurable responses to music, with medium complexity rhythms eliciting the highest levels of pleasure and wanting to move. However, whether it predicts rhythmic skills and its association with musical pleasure and musical hedonia remains unexplored. So, in Experiment 1, we first quantified the pulse entropy of realistic musical...
The Values-Beliefs-Norms theory is frequently utilized in environmental psychology to explain pro-environmental actions through a causal relationship among psychological dimensions. The theory suggests that values influence beliefs, which then shape personal norms. These factors interact and influence each other, promoting the adoption of Pro-Environmental Behaviors (PEB). However, the...
Short periods of sleep restriction have been found to alleviate symptoms of depression. Among other manifestations, depression is characterized by anhedonia, a lack of enjoyment from life’s experiences. According to this, individuals with depressive symptoms may exhibit less frequent or reduced reactions to positive emotional stimuli, performing paradoxically better in emotion suppression...
Gender bias is pervasive in many aspects of our lives: women experience more difficulties than men in the job market. Here, we tested a linguistic strategy to mitigate gender bias in professional contexts in Italian.
Four versions of 20 faces were created, varying along a continuum from masculinity (1) to femininity (7) using FaceGenArtistPro3 (Values:1,3,5,7). Participants saw two versions...
Le relazioni rivestono un ruolo di fondamentale importanza per il benessere psicofisico della persona, specialmente nell’anziano. Durante le interazioni sociali entrano in gioco diverse abilità, fra cui la Teoria della Mente (ToM) che permette di interpretare i propri e altrui stati mentali (pensieri, emozioni, desideri). Tale abilità è particolarmente utile nel predire i comportamenti degli...
During the decision-making process, people create mental representations of the situation, that could be directed at the “real” or “ideal” world. Moreover, when people decide, they could adopt an individual or group orientation. In the first type of orientation, people consider the task and personal needs as more relevant than relationships, while group orientation is characterized by a high...
I ricordi fotografici (Flashbulb Memories, FBMs) sono ricordi autobiografici vividi e dettagliati del contesto di apprendimento di un evento pubblico, inaspettato, importante e ad alto impatto emotivo. Uno studio cross-nazionale condotto su 11 Paesi nel mondo (N= 2306), ha indagato la formazione di un ricordo flashbulb per la notizia del primo caso COVID-19 nel proprio Paese, e ha testato...
Il presente studio si pone l’obiettivo di indagare il ruolo dell’attenzione visuo-spaziale durante l’elaborazione semantica delle informazioni in parafovea.
È stato utilizzato il paradigma Rapid Parallel Visual Presentation (RPVP) che prevede la presentazione simultanea di due parole per 150 ms, una in fovea (W1) e una in parafovea (W2), controllate per lunghezza e frequenza d’uso. Metà delle...
Conflict is an inevitable aspect of human life, and the manner in which it is managed critically influences the outcomes of such situations. Extensive research has demonstrated that culture, personality, and situational factors shape individuals' preferences for conflict management styles. Despite the fact that women constitute 50% of the global population and 60% of individuals are bilingual...
L’obiettivo dello studio è verificare l’effetto nel tempo dei sintomi da COVID-19 sulle condizioni di ansia, depressione e sonno su un campione di adulti spagnoli. Le 601 persone hanno compilato il questionario su ansia, depressione e sonno, ogni 2 settimane, per un anno, all’interno del periodo che va tra la fine di luglio 2021 e dicembre 2022. Per ciascun partecipante sono disponibili anche...
Previous research has shown that visual stimuli presented across eye movements can distort time and space perception. Interestingly, introducing a full-field visual mask within 40 milliseconds after two brief visual events can reverse temporal judgments, even in the absence of eye movements. We explored whether the spatial characteristics of the mask could influence this temporal inversion...
La transizione dai tradizionali veicoli a combustione ai veicoli elettrici (VE) è essenziale per raggiungere gli obiettivi di decarbonizzazione e cercare di fronteggiare il surriscaldamento globale. Ci sono vari ostacoli che frenano tale transizione, di cui molti di natura psicologica. Particolarmente noto è il problema del range anxiety, cioè il timore di rimanere senza carica durante gli...
Nei compiti di ricerca in cui la caratteristica che definisce lo stimolo target può cambiare da una prova all'altra, le risposte sono più rapide quando tale caratteristica è ripetuta rispetto a quando cambia.
Questo effetto, noto come “Intertrial Priming of Pop-Out” (PoP), suggerisce che le proprietà dell’array di ricerca precedente modulano l’efficienza della selezione dello stimolo target...
In un compito di scelta, la prestazione è tipicamente più veloce e accurata quando l’orientamento della porzione afferrabile di un utensile corrisponde alla posizione della risposta manuale (effetto di corrispondenza manico-mano). Secondo una spiegazione aggiornata in termini di “affordance activation”, il manico, visivamente saliente o meno, attiverebbe un’appropriata azione di afferramento...
In this study we targeted metacognition of lip-reading benefits in older and younger adults listening to a visible talker in noise. We explored individuals' awareness of the advantages of lip-reading under the form of improved confidence and reduced listening effort. Additionally, we examine whether this metacognitive awareness changes with age, investigating differences in metacognitive...
Objectives: Sars-Cov-2 infection had a significant impact on the psychological well-being of children and led to negative effects on their mental health. Although children affected by COVID-19 had milder symptoms compared to adults, impairments in neuropsychological and emotional development were noted.
The main aim of this study was to detect possible changes in the neuropsychological and...
The perinatal period (conception to first year) brings about psychological changes in mothers, including heightened vulnerability to potential threats, especially during pregnancy (e.g., Brygger Venø et al., 2021). When competing for resources, people are also sensitive to cues of threat, with physically weaker individuals tending to concede more resources to those who appear more (vs less)...
The aim of this viewpoint paper is to synthetically report the state of the art at a global level on research, practice and assessment, policies, and training in clinical psychology of aging and more specifically in geropsychology. The main sources of information were: 1) the most recent reviews of the literature available in the scientific literature, 2) the resources on the internet...
In professional settings, interruptions can frequently disrupt tasks, necessitating adaptive control processes and focused attention to meet deadlines effectively. This research explored the behavioral and electrophysiological (EEG) markers of professionals’ capacity to resist distractions during a goal setting task, and their adaptability and willingness to adjust a previously determined...
Scototaxis test is an anxiety-like test used by behavioural neuroscientists consisting in the assessment of dark/light preference of laboratory animals. Most of the fish species have been shown to express a preference for the dark environment. However, the majority of the investigated species has a dark body colour, thus making a clear contrast with a white/bright background. Also, while in...
Recent studies have revealed intriguing links between experimental manipulation of body ownership and changes in autonomic responses, including skin temperature changes. However, the mechanisms underlying this interaction remain unclear.
The aim of the present study is to investigate the electroencephalographic correlates of body ownership manipulation and skin temperature changes.
The...
Un noto studio di Ward e colleghi (2017) ha messo in evidenza che la mera presenza dello smartphone (posizionato sul tavolo vs. in un’altra stanza) sembrerebbe interferire con le prestazioni cognitive (Ward et al., 2017). Tale effetto, definito “brain drain” da Ward e colleghi, è stato oggetto di alcuni tentativi di replica, con risultati nulli nella maggior parte dei casi. Il presente...
Most of the studies on the cognitive abilities of fish focused on models organisms adopted in behavioural neuroscience. To date, little attention has been devoted to characiformes fish and we record a lack of cognitive investigation on the piranha. In the present study, we aimed to assess whether red-bellied piranhas (Pygocentrus nattereri) can solve an automated operant conditioning task like...
When we observe an object, our visual system identifies its general shape and adds specific details to form a coherent representation. This coarse-to-fine approach involves quick processing of low spatial frequency content (LSF) to generate a basic template, which aids the integration of the more detailed high spatial frequency information (HSF). In three experiments, we explored how LSF and...
In an eye tracking and pupillometry study, we investigated the factors influencing attentional capture when individuals see food items. We suggest that the two core motivational systems, namely Wanting (i.e.,the desire for food and meal selection) and Liking (i.e.,the subjective pleasure and arousal evoked by food), modulate attentional processes in different ways. Moreover, we hypothesized...
Environmental issues and climate change require consumers to shift their habits towards more sustainable consumption behaviors. Recently, the negative environmental impact of the fashion industries has garnered increasingly attention. Hence, we conducted an exploratory study aiming at understanding which determinants and barriers shape consumers’ sustainable fashion consumption. Additionally,...
La Realtà Virtuale (VR) è sempre più utilizzata per creare strumenti avanzati di valutazione ecologica delle funzioni cognitive. Tuttavia, comprendere i vantaggi e le sfide introdotte da questa nuova tecnologia è cruciale per sviluppare test neuropsicologici più funzionali. Questo studio ha analizzato l'influenza del tipo di ambiente virtuale (VR a 360° vs. VR model-based) sulle capacità...
Embodied cognition theories suggest that even abstract processes such as, for example, language syntax can be influenced by the sensorimotor signals through which bodily self-consciousness -our sense of owning a body (ownership) and being the author of actions (agency)- is built and maintained. Using an embodied morality framework, I will report on recent research that explores how bodily...
Le caratteristiche fondamentali di uno stimolo, come la dimensione, il contrasto, la tessitura e il volume, così come il contesto e la salienza emotiva, possono influenzare la percezione soggettiva in compiti psicofisici riguardanti il tempo e la velocità. Ricerche recenti hanno dimostrato che, oltre alle caratteristiche dell'oggetto e al contesto, le aspettative acquisite nel corso della vita...
The widespread effect of sleep deprivation on basic cognitive functioning raises the question of its effect on daily activities, and particularly those that – being performed simultaneously – are inherently more challenging. The simultaneous performance of a cognitive and a motor task (i.e., dual-tasking) has indeed shown to reflect an interference, usually referred to as Cognitive Motor...
Listening to unpredictable aversive sounds, such as screams, can induce specific neural responses, corresponding to the differential activity of emotional processing-related brain areas. Moreover, human screams have been shown to induce transient states of fear and anxiety, being linked to personal or conspecific signals of danger.
Our aim is to investigate the neural activity associated to...
L’effetto Bouba-Kiki è uno dei più famosi esempi di associazione fono-simbolica e consiste nell’associare spontaneamente la non-parola ‘Bouba’ a forme tondeggianti e la non-parola ‘Kiki’ a forme spigolose. Sebbene questo effetto compaia già in bambini preverbali (tra i 4 e i 7 mesi), non vi sono ancora dati conclusivi circa la possibilità che sia un meccanismo predisposto o dipendente...
Negli ultimi anni si è riscontrato un incremento dell’uso quotidiano dello Smartphone anche in bambini in età scolare.
Per tale valutazione si è utilizzato un questionario auto valutativo per la misurazione della dipendenza da Smartphone SARCQ (Conte et al., 2022), mentre per gli aspetti di personalità si é utilizzato il BFC (Barbaranelli, et al., 2003). Si dono osservate correlazioni tra il...
In the contemporary landscape of job recruitment, characterized by an ever-growing digital presence, the utilization of digital platforms for conducting job interview simulations is becoming increasingly significant. Nevertheless, there exists a notable gap in understanding the impact of these simulations in contrast to traditional interviews on stress management. This study aims to examine...
While traditional neuroimaging approaches to the study of executive functions (EFs) have typically employed task-evoked paradigms, resting state studies are gaining popularity as a tool for investigating inter-individual variability in the functional connectome and its relationship to cognitive performance outside of the scanner. Using resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging data...
In challenging acoustic scenarios, individuals can implement behavioral strategies (e.g., lip-reading) to enhance speech comprehension. We hypothesized that lip-reading depends on the exerted listening effort that accompanies challenging conditions. To test this, we manipulated listening effort through variations in cognitive demands and motivation. Normal-hearing adults (N=64) performed an...
Rhythm and reading must be somehow related, as several studies uncovered that dyslexic individuals display poor performance in rhythmic tasks. However, the nature of the rhythm-reading relationship is far from being fully explored. The present work aims at establishing whether the disadvantage observed in participants with dyslexia has its origins in rhythmic awareness, meter reproduction and,...
The sense of agency is the feeling of voluntarily controlling our actions and, through them, the events in the outside world. Here, we explored the sense of agency in individuals with schizophrenia.
We measured the intentional binding phenomenon (an implicit index of self-agency) using a validated ecological temporal judgment paradigm based on the comparison between active and passive...
The recurrent activation over time of distinct cortical networks, also known as brain states (BSs), plays a crucial role in supporting cognitive control (CC) performance across the lifespan. Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) have emerged as a valuable tool for identifying BSs. However, studies utilizing HMMs in developmental populations are relatively limited. In this study, we employed high-density...
Il Cradling Bias Sinistro (l'asimmetria motoria per cui si tende a cullare i neonati maggiormente sul lato sinistro del proprio corpo a livello di popolazione) è stato spesso associato alla specializzazione emisferica destra per i processi sociali ed emozionali. Inoltre, la ricerca ha quasi sempre dimostrato una prevalenza maggiore di tale asimmetria tra gli individui di sesso femminile...
The present study builds on the Maze Task, a recent experimental paradigm particularly useful to study sentence processing with minimal spillover effects. Specifically, in our study, we explore how linguistic violations interact with sentence repetition. The structure of each sentence used in the study included seven words forming a transitive sentence followed by a prepositional phrase. The...
As the global elderly population grows research increasingly focuses on their well-being and quality of life, aspects that are often impacted by a perceived loss of energy and fatigue. To describe individuals' energy dynamics, Self-Determination Theory (SDT) recently proposed a dual-process model based on two constructs: Subjective Vitality and Depletion. The present study aims to validate the...
Motor inhibition is crucial for effective collaboration between people, as it allows us to suppress and adjust actions in joint action scenarios (JA). Previous research showed a social effect on motor inhibition: a delay in stopping ongoing motor actions with others, relative to when conducting actions alone. This effect is presumably due to the need to represent both our own actions and those...
The number of 10-year-old boys and girls with reading comprehension difficulties increased from 57% in 2019 to about 70% in 2022 in low- and middle-income countries according to the World Bank. The effects of this literacy crisis have been worsened by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has increased learning deficits and social disparities (Betthäuser, Bach-Mortensen & Engzell, 2023). Effective and...
Understanding others’ actions entails the use of internal motor models. Recent findings demonstrated that children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD), as those with Cerebral Palsy (CP), both characterized by the presence of difficulties in performing and learning movements, also display anticipatory planning deficits. However, while DCD children do not use pre-cue information to...
Le abilità di problem solving sono essenziali per fronteggiare situazioni critiche nella vita di tutti i giorni e possono avere un ruolo cruciale nel promuovere l’invecchiamento attivo.
Qualsiasi compito che richieda attività di pianificazione, organizzazione, gestione del tempo e flessibilità di pensiero potrebbe essere particolarmente stimolante per le persone anziane; soprattutto se...
Developmental Dyslexia (DD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by both auditory-phonological and visual-attentional deficits. This study aimed at investigating the cumulative impact of transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) and visual-attentional reading training. tACS was applied to parietal sites, bilaterally at beta frequency (18 Hz), to improve the...
Contesto: L'uso dei social media ha un impatto importante sull'immagine corporea dei giovani adulti e sull’investimento emotivo legato alla pubblicazione delle proprie foto online. Il Photo Investment (PI), in particolare, è il costrutto che descrive la preoccupazione personale per la qualità e la rappresentazione delle proprie foto sui social media, spesso associata a confronto sociale e...
Even when healthy, ageing is associated with a gradual and unavoidable decline in various cognitive functions. These cognitive changes affect older adults' quality of life, well-being, and life expectancy, causing significant welfare political implications worldwide. In this context, cognitive training and stimulation have become valuable interventions to prevent age-related cognitive decline...
Human brain employs sensory inputs to predicts future events [1]. Research has delved into linguistic expectations and alpha oscillations (8-12Hz), where alpha power modulation was linked to anticipatory mechanisms [2]. Studies that manipulated contextual constraint revealed stronger predictions associated with lower pre-stimulus alpha power than weaker predictions [3]. Yet, such results could...
Transcutaneous Vagus Nerve stimulation (tVNS) has been proposed as a prospective treatment for clinical conditions with altered GABAergic neurotransmission. Several studies demonstrated that tVNS can improve, at least at behavioural level, participants’ performance in inhibitory control tasks, supposedly mediated by GABA neurotransmission. However, the neurophysiological evidence showing its...
The Landmark task constitutes one of the most effective behavioral tasks in visuospatial perception, detecting a distortion of space perception known as Perceptual Bias (PB). This study intended to highlight the behavioral and neural basis of PB by administering the Landmark task while concurrently recording EEG.
A computerized Landmark task was administered to thirty-seven healthy...
Contesto: Le piattaforme sociali in realtà virtuale (PS-VR) come Engage VR offrono diversi vantaggi in contesti terapeutici, poiché favoriscono un forte senso di presenza e una interazione naturale, offrendo, al contempo, un significativo livello di anonimato grazie alla possibilità di rappresentare sé stessi attraverso avatar, rimuovendo la dimensione del proprio corpo e dell’aspetto fisico...
Recent methodological developments have contributed to a significant advance in computerised neuropsychological instruments and procedures, including those accessible through web-based platforms. We recently developed Auto-GEMS, an open-access, web-based, self-administered screening test in Italian. It allows a quick assessment of an individual’s cognitive state and cognitive reserve....
INTRODUCTION: Previous work suggested that idiopathic REM Sleep Behavior Disorder (iRBD) may be associated with alterations in dream content, including more aggression as compared to healthy control (HC) individuals, and in dream recall frequency (DRF; i.e., the number of dreams recalled in a given timespan). However, several studies failed to replicate these findings, questioning their...
Language acquisition relies on environmental stimulations during sensitive periods. Native phonemes categorisation is acquired according to sensory experience during the first year of life. However, in case of congenital deafness, infants can rely only on visual input. Thus, they cannot distinguish consonant couples discernible only by acoustic properties such as b and p. By testing...
In this study, we investigated the influence of appetite on automatic approach tendencies and inhibitory responses toward food stimuli and whether this effect is modulated by the actual availability of food.
Forty-three healthy weight participants (21 males) completed an approach-avoidance paradigm aimed at assessing the approach bias for food and a Go/No-Go task aimed at assessing...
Research on movement kinematics has demonstrated that observers can understand actions’ outcome only by looking at the reach-to-grasp phase of a movement directed to an object. However, it remains unclear the extent to which the kinematic similarity between the observer and the agent affects the ability of reading the action and how such similarity reflects on neural signals. We combined...
Research on human motor behavior has extensively investigated the kinematics of both upper and lower limb. However, these two districts where often considered separately. Consequently, while it is well known that movements performed with either arms or legs exhibit highly variable motor implementation, the study of their potential covariation effects remains basically neglected. To fill this...
Proper sensory inputs at specific time windows are fundamental for shaping infants’ development (Werker, Hensch, 2015). Temporary auditory deprivation in the first year of life can alter the ability to integrate audiovisual speech cues even if hearing is restored with cochlear implants (CI; Schorr et al., 2005).
Yet, it’s unclear if neural circuitries responsible for audiovisual speech...
Despite intense and costly treatments, developmental dyslexia (DD) often persists into adulthood. Several brain skills unrelated to speech sound processing (i.e., phonology), including the spatial distribution of visual attention, are abnormal in DD and may represent possible treatment targets. This study investigates the efficacy in DD of rightward prismatic adaptation (rPA), a visuomotor...
Questa ricerca indaga le dinamiche dell’empatia umana attraverso un innovativo studio sperimentale che utilizza fotografie per esplorare le reazioni empatiche di fronte al pericolo percepito. Le immagini presentate ritraggono individui di diverse età e background culturali in contesti che suggeriscono situazioni di potenziale pericolo, mirando a sollecitare una vasta gamma di risposte emotive...
Individuals' responses to aging or neuropathological insults vary due to factors affecting the central nervous system’s structure and function. Cognitive reserve, shaped by life experiences, helps protect the brain from neuronal damage. Modifiable lifestyle factors like sleep can enhance cognitive reserve, counteracting age- or disease-related brain changes. Sleep impacts cognitive domains,...
Un deficit nell’acquisire instances potrebbe essere alla base dei disturbi dell'apprendimento e spiegare la difficoltà nell'acquisire rappresentazioni ortografiche e fatti aritmetici. Studi di grammatica artificiale esaminano la capacità dei soggetti di apprendere implicitamente regole presenti in stringhe di stimoli visivi. Il seguente studio vuole comprendere quale sia il locus del deficit...
Nell’ambito dei comportamenti legati alla salute, il frame di perdita è più efficace nel promuovere comportamenti di rilevamento (come gli screening), mentre il frame di guadagno è più efficace nel promuovere comportamenti di prevenzione (come l’igiene orale).
In uno studio sperimentale preregistrato abbiamo testato l’effetto framing di una comunicazione che promuove l’allattamento materno...
Emotion regulation (ER) has been acknowledged as an important factor for older adults’ well-being. Recently, it has been suggested that creativity may play a role in the effectiveness of cognitive reappraisal, an adaptive form of ER. The present study aims to test whether creativity is linked to greater effectiveness in the use of cognitive reappraisal in a sample of older adults.
A...
One of the major challenges of consciousness research is represented by the identification of the brain areas responsible for the emergence of visual awareness. In this framework, the present study aims at unravelling the spatio-temporal dynamics underlying conscious vision, disentangling them from confounding post-perceptual processing related to the response. To this goal, we employed a...
Apraxia refers to a variety of higher-order motor disorders not primarily caused by motor, sensory or cognitive impairment. Evaluation of apraxia typically involves gestural imitation, pantomime, and actual tool use. Lesion studies correlate the ability of movement control to cortical areas such as the inferior frontal gyrus, inferior parietal, and temporal lobes. Apraxia-related lesions often...
Transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS) is held as a non-invasive tool to enhance the effect of motor rehabilitation in neurological diseases. However, there is no evidence supporting its neurophysiological effect on brain plasticity. Here, we aimed to explore the effects of tVNS on brain plasticity, induced by Paired Associative Stimulation (PAS), i.e., a paradigm generating long-term...
Demenza è un termine ombrello utilizzato per definire un gruppo di disturbi neurologici caratterizzati da declino cognitivo che interferisce con le attività quotidiane dell’individuo. Secondo l'Organizzazione Mondiale della Sanità (OMS), la demenza è una priorità di salute pubblica globale. I fattori di rischio studiati includono l'età, la storia familiare, i disturbi cardiovascolari, il...
Introduction:
Individuals exhibit higher attentional allocation toward threatening than neutral information. Nevertheless, a source of variability could be related to both the specific emotion elicited and the attentional process involved. This study aimed to investigate the impact of different emotionally activating negative stimuli on the automatic and voluntary attentional processes....
Il deficit di automatizzazione è stato esaminato in un campione di soggetti con disturbo di apprendimento adulti (138 controlli; 51 dsa) e bambini (155 controlli e 64 dsa), anche in funzione del tipo di deficit (i.e., nel recupero mnestico di instances vs nell’applicazione delle procedure di letto-scrittura e calcolo). A tal fine è stato utilizzato il test di apprendimento alfanumero. I...
The Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) is the most used self‐report questionnaire to assess deficits in emotion regulation (ER), composed of 6 dimensions and 36 items. Many studies have evaluated its factor structure, not always confirming the original results, and proposed different factor models. A possible way to try to identify the dimensionality of the DERS could be through a...
Superando la visione dualistica che pone la cognizione e l’emozione come due funzioni mentali distinte e separate, la psicologia moderna è concorde nell’affermare che cognizione ed emozione rappresentano due aspetti interagenti di uno stesso processo volto alla messa a punto di un comportamento adattivo. In linea con quest’idea, l’avvento delle neuroscienze ha messo in evidenza un alto grado...
Estraiamo costantemente regolarità dall'esperienza, creando memorie concettuali per organizzare conoscenze[1]. Studi precedenti si sono spesso concentrati su conoscenze precedentemente consolidate[2], qui invece abbiamo indagato il processo di trasformazione di nuove informazioni contestuali in conoscenze generalizzate.
40 partecipanti hanno guardato una serie TV (encoding) ed eseguito...
Eye-gaze plays a central role in social interactions and can elicit orienting of attention in an observer. Recent evidence has shown differences in inducing attentional shifting between eye-gaze stimuli compared to non-social stimuli (e.g., 'arrows'). For example, in a spatial Stroop task, while arrows induce a standard congruency effect (faster reaction times for congruent compared to...
Nelle interazioni sociali, le nostre azioni sono profondamente influenzate da una ricca gamma di segnali provenienti dai volti altrui. Tra questi, la direzione dello sguardo gioca un ruolo primario nei processi di attenzione, mentre le espressioni emotive sono centrali nei meccanismi affettivi. Inoltre, elementi più stabili come identità, genere ed età possono modulare significativamente le...
Voices are arguably the most relevant auditory stimuli for human social interactions conveying linguistic content but also offering several paralinguistic cues about the speakers, including their identity, gender, age, and emotional state. Thus, from voices, it is possible to extract both the linguistic content conveying propositional meaning and the prosodic aspects conveying the speaker's...
L’abilità di percepire e combinare coordinate spaziali che provengono da diversi segnali sensoriali è fondamentale per conoscere l’ambiente e interagire con esso. Sebbene il ruolo della vista sia predominante nel fornire un’accurata rappresentazione dello spazio, comprendere anche il contributo degli altri sensi nella sua assenza è essenziale per una completa analisi delle diverse modalità con...
Nel corso degli ultimi due decenni, vari modelli che rappresentano i propri contenuti all'interno di spazi vettoriali sono stati utilizzati come proxy della memoria semantica. In questo simposio intendiamo mostrare come questo tipo di approccio possa essere applicato con successo a un ampio numero di processi e componenti legati all'elaborazione del significato. I quattro interventi previsti...
From the very beginning infants are aware of their surrounding environment. Since the auditory system is one of the first sensory systems to develop, newborns can already absorb a wealth of information from their auditory environment. They exhibit both behavioral and neurophysiological responses to a variety of external sounds, such as pure tones, sounds at different acoustic frequencies, and...
‘Noi, gli animali e le piante’. L’essere umano ha la tendenza a riferirsi alle altre specie come organismi completamente diversi e separati. Tale propensione ci porta spesso a guardare all’uomo come unico agente cognitivo possibile. L’approccio comparato ci permette di superare i limiti dell’antropocentrismo e antropomorfismo individuando e decifrando i fattori cognitivi che contraddistinguono...
The idea that invertebrates have primitive forms of emotions is growing, partly because of recent evidence of their high-level cognitive skills. However, these skills do not imply the existence of emotional states per se and the characterization of emotions in invertebrates is still at its infancy. Here we used a multicomponent approach, including behavioural, neurophysiological, and cognitive...
L’abilità di orientarsi verso la fonte sonora è presente già dai primi giorni di vita. Studi su adulti rivelano una maggiore accuratezza nel localizzare stimoli orizzontali rispetto a quelli verticali. Al fine di comprendere lo sviluppo delle competenze di localizzazione uditiva sul piano frontale, questo esperimento confronta le abilità di localizzazione spaziale tra adulti e bambini (3-5...
Le piante sono organismi molto complessi, in grado di percepire e di rispondere simultaneamente ai diversi stimoli ambientali. Nonostante il loro successo evolutivo negli ultimi 440 milioni di anni, come accade a tutti gli organismi vivi, la loro capacità di interazione e risposta ai diversi stimoli ambientali è limitata. Ciò suggerisce che le piante possiedano un meccanismo che permette loro...
Gli agenti artificiali sono ormai parte della nostra quotidianità, e sono sempre più applicati in ambiti di sostegno e supporto psicologico. A partire dagli anni ’70, numerosi studi hanno indagato il fenomeno noto come effetto Uncanney valley (UV), ossia il fenomeno per cui quanto più un agente artificiale assomiglia ad un agente umano nell’aspetto fisico, tanto più induce nell’osservatore...
Learning is the fundamental backbone of social creatures. In humans, learning is the essential ability to take advantage of what others have already experienced. Here, we want to evaluate the presence of learning during pregnancy and the maintenance of it after birth in postnatal life. Exploiting EEG neural entrainment, we want to evaluate the presence of a brain preference for a learned...
Nella disabilità visiva, la cognizione spaziale risente di fattori come: la deprivazione totale o parziale della vista, l’età di insorgenza e la durata della disabilità. In particolare, in un compito di rappresentazione spaziale dei numeri dove su una barretta aptica i partecipanti indicano dove si trova un numero target positivo o negativo, è stato osservato che partecipanti ipovedenti hanno...
Recenti evidenze suggeriscono che il significato possa essere estratto non solo da parole, ma anche da stringhe di lettere inesistenti (pseudoparole). Secondo il modello FastText, estrarre il significato da una qualsiasi stringa di lettere implica combinare il significato della parola intera -se esiste- e delle subunità ortografiche di n lettere (ngrams) che lo compongono, con eguale...
During the COVID-19 pandemic, most people wore face masks to protect themselves and the others. Whilst this was recommendable, unfortunately face masks represented a critical problem for deaf people by preventing lipreading. Moreover, the mouth region represents a critical source of information for inferring emotional states as well as for visually-based social first impressions....
La lateralizzazione cerebrale, cioè l’asimmetria delle funzioni tra l'emisfero sinistro e quello destro, è un tratto comune nel regno animale. Un numero crescente di ricerche ha dimostrato che alterazioni della lateralizzazione cerebrale sono associate a disturbi neuropsichiatrici e malattie neurologiche.
La diffusione della specializzazione emisferica in numerose specie ha consentito di...
Introduction: Studying attachment development in children with visual impairment (VI) is fundamental to investigating the associations of the attachment style with the maturation of socioemotional skills and the emergence of psychological conditions.
Methods: Four children with VI (38.5 ± 33.9 months old) played while parents sat in one corner of the set-up. We used the Vicon Motion...
Since the first hours of life human newborns are subjected to a multitude of stimuli and they need to learn quickly how to integrate visual and auditory input. Cross-modal integration operates not only at the perceptual level, where low-level features of stimuli such as shape, texture, and temporal occurrence are recognized, but also at a more abstract level. For instance, research has shown...
Il paradigma DRM (Deese-Roediger-McDermott) è uno dei compiti più utilizzati per indagare sperimentalmente la formazione dei falsi ricordi. In letteratura, questo paradigma è stato impiegato quasi esclusivamente con stimoli linguistici: le parole tendono ad essere erroneamente riconosciute quando sono semanticamente simili a quelle dell’elenco memorizzato. Sebbene sia ben consolidato il ruolo...
The posterior cerebellum has recently gained attention as a crucial structure of the social brain, mediating the processing of different social cues, including emotional facial expressions. Nevertheless, many open questions still remain regarding its causal contribution and functional role in this process. To address this gap in cerebellar knowledge, we performed a series of studies employing...
Lesioni alla corteccia visiva primaria (V1) producono cecità clinica nella parte corrispondente del campo visivo, ma alcune funzioni visive permangono in assenza di consapevolezza – “visione cieca”. In questo intervento presenterò una breve rassegna storica del fenomeno per poi concentrarmi su risultati recenti in due principali ambiti: integrazione visuo-motoria e percezione emotiva. Evidenze...
La ricerca sui comportamenti animali si è confrontata con una corposa serie di problemi derivanti dall’antropomorfismo, che hanno a loro volta portato a radicalizzare queste tendenze in contromisure anti-antropomorfizzanti.
Esistono diversi tipi di antropomorfismo, dai casi più ingenui, a quelli maggiormente giustificabili, riconducibili alla più ampia categoria dell’antropomorfismo...
La Malattia di Parkinson (MP) si caratterizza per sintomi motori e non motori. Tra questi ultimi, vi è la difficoltà nel riconoscimento di volti connotati da espressioni facciali emotive. Tra le diverse interpretazioni, è stato ipotizzato che questo deficit sia legato ad una ridotta espressività facciale che impedisce il riconoscimento di espressioni facciali tramite simulazione sul proprio...
Compelling evidence shows that audio-tactile multisensory integration (AT-MSI) is modulated by body proximity already at birth. In our view, early movement may represent the developmental context allowing to encode multisensory stimuli in a body-centered reference frame, by anchoring auditory and tactile inputs to the body through proprioception. Based on these premises, we addressed whether...
La conoscenza geografica emerge dalla relazione tra informazioni spaziali e linguistiche (ad esempio, memorizzare il nome di una città e la sua posizione spaziale assoluta su una mappa). Qui abbiamo indagato se questa relazione possa essere ricondotta a una sistematica mappatura linguaggio-spazio. I risultati di due esperimenti computazionali basati su oltre 40.000 città in 5 paesi hanno...
Visuospatial processing deficits are commonly observed in individuals with cerebral visual impairment (CVI), even in cases where visual acuity and visual field functions are intact. CVI is a brain-based visual disorder associated with the maldevelopment of central visual pathways and structures. However, the neurophysiological basis underlying higher-order perceptual impairments in this...
Animal vocalisations are pivotal for intraspecies communication and serve as indicators of welfare and social interactions. In the early days of life, poultry chicks' (Gallus gallus) vocalisations are crucial for hen-chick relation, offering insights into chicks' affective states and welfare. However, there is a dearth of automated vocalisation detection and recognition systems. While previous...
Diversi studi elettroencefalografici e psicolinguistici hanno suggerito che il contenuto emotivo delle parole influenza i processi cognitivi di lettura. Le parole emotive rispetto a quelle neutrali producono modulazioni in più componenti elettrofisiologiche ed in diverse regioni cerebrali. Tuttavia, il modo in cui le caratteristiche emotive delle parole (valenza ed arousal) interagiscono per...
Uno degli elementi distintivi delle prime fasi cliniche del decadimento cognitivo lieve amnesico (aMCI) e del morbo di Alzheimer (AD) è la compromissione della memoria episodica (EM).
Tuttavia, la maggior parte degli strumenti neuropsicologici classici forniscono una sua valutazione lontana da quella comunemente esperita nella vita quotidiana. inoltre, la maggior parte della ricerca si...
Studi recenti hanno dimostrato che stimoli a valenza negativa sembrano portare ad una riduzione del conflitto cognitivo esperito in un compito successivo. In due esperimenti, abbiamo indagato l'effetto di volti emotivi usati come feedback da parte dei membri del proprio gruppo sociale o di un altro gruppo sociale diverso nel modulare il controllo cognitivo. Nello specifico, ai partecipanti è...
Le emozioni influenzano sia come percepiamo noi stessi che l’ambiente circostante (Damasio, 1994; Schwarz, 2012). Tuttavia, il modo in cui gli individui rappresentano le informazioni spaziali è stato prevalentemente studiato in contesti privi di informazione emotivamente saliente. Quindi, lo scopo di questo lavoro è quello di indagare l’influenza degli stimoli emotigeni sulla cognizione...
Deciding for others (surrogate decision making) is ubiquitous in
everyday life as many prototypical scenarios can be found in various life domains. Previous research indicated that, when faced with monetary
intertemporal choice for others, people exhibit a more impulsive choice pattern than when deciding for themselves, but still little is known about the underlying cognitive mechanism. Some...
Brain functions depend on recognizing patterns to predict future events (Auksztulewicz et al., 2018; Morillon & Schroeder, 2015). Early in auditory processing, the brain detects repetitions, guiding attention to specific intervals in the auditory stream (Auksztulewicz et al., 2018). Speech perception involves the dynamic sampling of acoustic information across different time scales...
Questo simposio viene organizzato nell'ambito del progetto PRIN 2022 - SCOPERTA. L'aumento dell'aspettativa di vita pone sfide cruciali alle società moderne (es., piano Next Generation EU).
Cambiare invecchiando è un dato di fatto. L'obiettivo del simposio è quello di comprendere meglio tali cambiamenti, un processo che influenza la personalità, la cognizione e le relazioni...
Interoception is the perception of inner bodily sensations, including signals from diverse bodily systems, such as the cardiac and digestive ones. This sensory capacity exhibits significant variability among individuals, garnering attention in research because of its relevance to mental and physical health and in driving cognitive processes such as decision-making and social cognition. Despite...
La memoria autobiografica (MA) ricopre un ruolo fondamentale per lo sviluppo dell’identità dell’individuo e per il mantenimento di un concetto di sé positivo. Tuttavia, può essere caratterizzata da distorsioni e il suo funzionamento può essere alterato da vari fattori.
Il simposio inizia con la presentazione di un nuovo strumento per misurare le convinzioni che le persone hanno sul...
There's no doubt that large-scale collaboration efforts are improving the precision and reliability of our science (wannabe) and, ultimately, the contribution of experimental psychology to the community at large. However, this radically new way of carrying out psychological research brings along several challanges. Some of these challenges are quite obvious and pervasive in our day-to-day...
In humans, very few studies have directly tested the link between the neural coding of time and space. Here we combined ultra-high field functional magnetic resonance imaging with neuronal-based modeling to investigate how and where the processing and the representation of a visual stimulus duration is linked to that of its spatial location. Results show a transition in the neural response to...
Modern research in psychology is adopting several tools to face the replicability and reproducibility crisis. In this context, multi-lab research combined with the multiverse approach is a very powerful yet complex approach. The symposium aims to present a modern overview of editorial aspects, statistical methods, and data management in the era of multi-lab and multiverse studies highlighting...
Although no dedicated organ or sensory system exists to perceive time, temporal processing is essential to cognition at many levels, from sensory discrimination to the ability to mentally project oneself in the past and future. These processes extend across different temporal scales, ranging from milliseconds to seconds, days and even years. Despite the key role of time perception in cognitive...
Si presenta il primo studio che valuta le convinzioni sul funzionamento della memoria umana nella popolazione italiana, utilizzando uno strumento di nuova concezione: l’Italian Memory Belief Questionnaire (IMBQ). La ricerca condotta in altri paesi ha dimostrato che le credenze sulla memoria variano ampiamente tra gruppi professionali e non professionali, suggerendo l'esistenza di limitazioni...
The perception of interoceptive signals and their neural representation profoundly affect physical, mental, and cognitive health. Despite this appreciation, the developmental trajectory of interoception is relatively under-researched, particularly during adolescence, a relevant period for interoceptive learning, as many bodily changes characterize it. This study aims to address this gap by...
Open data is fundamental to open science, enhancing the trustworthiness and reproducibility of research alongside pre-registration. Many journals and European grants require data sharing and encourage compliance with the FAIR guidelines. However, despite its benefits, data sharing faces barriers, particularly around privacy.
GDPR mandates strict privacy protections that challenge the...
Le teorie tradizionali della personalità presuppongono una struttura universale con un insieme limitato di tratti: in particolare, il modello HEXACO li raggruppa in sei fattori. Tuttavia, la personalità cambia nel corso della vita. L’invecchiamento, infatti porta a un ritiro dall’attività lavorativa accompagnato da problemi sanitari sempre crescenti. Questi fattori possono portare a un ritiro...
La ricerca esamina l'influenza dei metodi di codifica del ricordo (2D vs VR) e della complessità delle azioni sulla creazione di falsi ricordi, basandosi su studi precedenti che dimostrano la capacità degli osservatori di “riempire” con dettagli mancanti i ricordi attraverso simulazioni mentali attivate dall'osservazione delle azioni (Papenmeier et al., 2019; Ianì et al., 2018). I nostri...
Temporal representations are fundamental for delving into our daily lives, yet they are susceptible to distortion from various factors, including emotional experiences. This distortion is often attributed to physiological activation, where heightened arousal can accelerate our internal clock, leading to an over-estimation of time. Despite the abundance of studies delving into the association...
The critical contribution of interoceptive signals to bodily self awareness and self-consciousness has recently been investigated by an increasing number of studies. Also, it has recently been suggested that interoceptive dysfunction can prove to be an important component of many neurological and psychiatric disorders (i.e. dissociative disorders, eating disorders, PTSD, somatic disorders),...
In this multi-lab study, we explored goal attribution in infants using various data analysis pipelines for pupillometry data from seven laboratories in Europe, the USA, and Canada. The main focus was on the multiverse approach, where data preprocessing is conceptualised as a garden of forking paths, each of which can dramatically affect subsequent statistical outcomes. This method shifts the...
Historically, aging has been associated with personality impoverishment and cognitive decline. The dedifferentiation hypothesis of cognitive aging suggests that the structure of individuals' cognitive abilities becomes less differentiated in old age. Critically, however, only a few studies considered the changes occurring in personality, cognition, and in their relationship with aging.
This...
L’accuratezza dei ricordi è una delle questioni cruciali in ambito forense. Infatti, nei procedimenti in cui non è possibile avere prove oggettive, i ricordi dei testimoni sono fondamentali per cercare di ricostruire il crimine. I dati mostrano che spesso le condanne ingiuste sono dovute all'accettazione di testimonianze inaccurate (cioè, i ricordi) come vere. Ciò avviene a causa di due...
When analyzing data, researchers make some choices that are either arbitrary, based on subjective beliefs about the data-generating process, or for which equally justifiable alternative choices could have been made. This wide range of data-analytic choices can be abused and has been one of the underlying causes of the replication crisis in several fields. Recently, the introduction of...
Substantial evidence supports a causal influence of bodily signals on the experience of time. Here, a series of studies will be presented investigating how interoceptive and sensorimotor processing affect time perception from the range of seconds to the long-term representation of memories across time. First, evidence will be discussed supporting a dynamic perspective on mechanisms involved in...
Interoception, the process by which signals originating from within the body are perceived and integrated, is crucial for constructing mental body representations. Despite its significance, the relationship between interoception and higher-order functional body representations (BR), particularly in Parkinson's disease (PD), remains understudied.
This study aims to investigate potential...
Il ritiro sociale e lavorativo in giovani adulti può portare a ridotte funzioni esecutive (Jin & Suk-Hyun Hwang, 2024), ridotta densità di materia bianca al lobulo parietale inferiore bilaterale, l'insula anteriore destra, la giunzione temporoparietale posteriore, il solco temporale superiore posteriore sinistro, la corteccia prefrontale dorsomediale e la corteccia prefrontale rostrolaterale...
La memoria autobiografica (ABM) è fondamentale per il mantenimento di un concetto di sé positivo e di conseguenza può essere caratterizzata da distorsioni (Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000). Prime evidenze hanno dimostrato che i ricordi di azioni immorali possono essere distorti fino a produrre una cosiddetta “amnesia immorale”, la quale sembra essere anche responsabile della persistenza di...
Remembering when events occurred is a key component of episodic memory, but the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying this ability remain poorly understood. In a series of studies, we investigated the role of prior knowledge and event representation on temporal memory for complex events. Different groups of participants were asked to report when short video clips extracted from a previously...
Interoception, i.e. the process through which the brain perceives, interprets, and integrates signals originating from the viscera has profound implications not only for cognition and behaviour, but also for physical and mental health. Although research has focused on interoceptive impairments in psychiatric disorders, a variety of medical conditions may show altered perception of visceral...
La memoria autobiografica (MA) ricopre un ruolo fondamentale per il funzionamento sociale e per lo sviluppo dell’individuo; secondo Tulving (2002) permette di viaggiare mentalmente nel passato e nel futuro, contribuendo all’acquisizione di una rappresentazione coerente di "sé". La MA è un costrutto multidimensionale con una componente episodica autobiografica (che supporta il recupero di...
Musicians are often regarded as models of brain plasticity and associated cognitive benefits. This emerges when expert musicians are compared with nonmusicians. A frequently observed finding is a short-term memory advantage of the former over the latter. Although meta-analyses report that the effect size of this advantage is medium, no study was adequately powered to estimate reliably an...
In the realm of personal and professional growth, role models exert substantial influence, shaping behaviors and aspirations. Immersive virtual reality gets us closer to role models in an otherwise impossible way, allowing us to "wear" virtual bodies resembling successful characters whose valuable traits we aim to emulate. In previous research, we investigated the attitudinal changes following...
Un fattore che interviene sul senso di sazietà e di controllo della fame durante l’assunzione di cibo è l’abituazione sensoriale, intesa come una riduzione della risposta fisiologica alla presentazione ripetuta nel tempo di cibo. L’obiettivo di questa ricerca è stato quello di esaminare la relazione tra profili di percezione ed abituazione a stimoli di varia natura, non necessariamente...
Nella ricerca in psicologia, la variabilità e la forma delle distribuzioni dei dati sono fattori potenzialmente rilevanti e significativi. Tuttavia, nei test inferenziali più usati, proprio la variabilità e la forma sono oggetto di assunzioni, mentre le ipotesi statistiche riguardano pressoché esclusivamente le medie. Per superare questo stato di cose proponiamo l’utilizzo di un indice,...
Tempo in music context is defined as the speed of an auditory sequence. Recent findings revealed a SNARC-like effect for tempo, suggesting that tempo and space are associated (De Tommaso & Prpic, 2020; Mariconda et al., 2024). Indeed, people tend to respond faster with a left-key to relatively slow tempos and faster with a right-key to relatively fast tempos. In particular, a work by De...
Some populations, such as older people, struggle with the cognitive load involved in daily activities. This is related to the limits of human working memory when mental resources are simultaneously stressed by a task. In this scenario, artificial agents have been increasingly integrated in several environments by designing supportive human-robot interactions (HRI), but most of literature...
The Left Cradling Bias (LCB) or preference entails preference in positioning an infant on the left side of the body. LCB seems to facilitate the monitoring of the expressive left side of both the infant’s and mother's faces, thereby activating the right hemisphere specialized for socio-affective processing and face perception and suggesting cradling as an index of hemispheric...
Gamma oscillations (γ, 30-120 Hz) have been implicated in various cognitive functions and are associated with multiple neuropsychiatric disorders. Non-invasive gamma entrainment using sensory stimuli has emerged as a potential therapeutic approach, particularly for Alzheimer’s Disease patients. However, the comparative efficacy of different gamma frequencies sensory stimulation in entraining...
Aim: To assess circadian fluctuations in healthy subjects in single attentional components (selective/divided) and switching between them, using the new AD-Task instrument. Materials: 18 participants (16 F) completed the AD-Task at different times of the day and were monitored on indices of sleep quality and sleepiness level. Method: The entire experimental protocol was conducted over two...
Spatial navigation is a complex, fundamental ability crucial to daily life and it develops gradually during childhood. Some studies showed that it is possible to promote the development of spatial navigational abilities through specific training. In a recent study, we demonstrated that training based on observational learning - implemented in a real environment - fostered an earlier...
The sense of body ownership (i.e., the belief that the body belongs to oneself) is fundamental in body perception, involving the integration of different sensory inputs. Virtual Reality (VR) manipulations facilitate the alteration of body ownership. Notably, a decrease in ownership sensations occurs over the virtual body in the presence of a visual discontinuity between the hand and the body...
Virtual reality, in both 2D and 3D formats, has become increasingly prevalent in psychological research, providing immersive environments to explore human behavior, emotion, and cognition. While studies often highlight the restorative benefits of virtual nature environments over urban ones, the effects on affect and cognitive outcomes are still debated. Additionally, there is limited research...
Despite significant progress in understanding human navigation, debates persist regarding the role of different sensory inputs and their contribution to individual differences in navigational performance. While recent research indicates that humans predominantly rely on visual information (Huffman and Ekstrom, 2019), empirical evidence supports the significance of body-based cues as well. The...
Measurement models based on Item Response Theory (IRT) have garnered substantial credit in the field of psychometrics and psychological testing. When dealing with items on a polytomous response scale, opting for a IRT model requires considering a number of theoretical assumptions, such as the nature of the measurement scale or the type of investigated construct. A typically adopted solution is...
Non-compliance encompasses various behaviours and attitudes, ranging from outright rejection of drug therapy to incorrect usage or premature discontinuation, potentially impacting symptom severity. In psychiatric settings, patients' reluctance to adhere to medication may stem from a lack of insight, fostering unfavourable views on pharmacotherapy. This study explores the connections between...
La pandemia di COVID-19 ha generato interrogativi sugli antecedenti ideologici e personologici, delle risposte comportamentali rispetto alla prevenzione della minaccia pandemica. Dopo aver osservato che l’autoritarismo di destra (RWA) prediceva positivamente risposte di contrasto alla pandemia, mentre, l’orientamento alla dominanza sociale (SDO) prediceva negativamente tali risposte, abbiamo...
Tipicamente, il “far di conto” è considerata un’abilità che ci permette di svolgere velocemente e accuratamente le operazioni aritmetiche. In realtà, il calcolo esatto è solo il più noto e tardivo dei processi solutivi, mentre stimare il risultato di un operazione (e.g., 28 +17 < o > 50?) o di una grandezza (e.g., Quante albicocche ci sono in 1 kg?) sono competenze che seguono traiettorie...
L’Affective Touch (AT) è una modalità tattile affettiva mediata dalle fibre C-tattili (CT), le quali rispondono a stimoli tattili lenti, simili a carezze, evocando una sensazione di piacevolezza e promuovendo un incrementato Heart Rate Variability (HRV). Secondo il classico modello di Braak, il processo neurodegenerativo nella malattia di Alzheimer (AD) coinvolgerebbe le cortecce sensoriali...
The emergence of network models allowed researchers to investigate the structure of semantic memory, with recent studies highlighting that highly creative people are characterized by more flexible semantic networks compared to low creatives, with more connected, less modular, and less distance between nodes (Kenett et al., 2014). Other evidence pointed out that semantic networks are subjected...
Con questo contributo ci proponiamo di illustrare un approccio semplice per condurre una power analysis in un contesto sperimentale frequente nell'ambito della psicologia cognitiva. Nello specifico l'obiettivo è di illustrare la procedura in riferimento ad una interazione 2x2. L'aspetto innovativo del nostro approccio si basa sulla stima dei parametri e su prior definite su un intervallo che...
The interaction of sensory-motor features in the emergence of categorical audio-visual speech remains underexplored. Recent intracranial electrocorticography recordings suggest that discrete portions of dorsal premotor and motor cortices might represent acoustic phonetic features of speech. However, it is unclear whether pure acoustic or visual features are represented in these regions since...
Scientific reasoning (SR) is a crucial aspect in daily life, influencing individuals' ability to pose scientific questions, collect data, critically evaluate information, and draw informed conclusions. There are few tools for measuring SR, tailored to specific age groups or countries, which limits the comparability of results due to the unique characteristics of these tools. The Scientific...
L’integrazione dei segnali viscerali interocettivi corporei sembra avere un ruolo centrale nell'esperienza fisiologica del tempo. Per approfondire tale relazione, abbiamo impiegato la stimolazione non invasiva del ramo auricolare del nervo vago (taVNS), che sembra avere un effetto modulatorio su diversi processi cognitivi di alto livello. Il sistema vagale, infatti, essenziale nel mantenere...
Posto che il recupero di ricordi autobiografici emotivi susciti risposte fisiologiche, la ricerca suggerisce che questo fenomeno possa verificarsi anche nel caso di eventi fabbricati. Nel nostro studio, utilizzando dispositivi biometrici non invasivi volti a rilevare il battito cardiaco (HR) e la conduttanza galvanica della pelle (SCL), abbiamo esaminato il recupero di esperienze...
Il malingering è un fenomeno ben noto che consiste nella simulazione, esagerazione o minimizzazione intenzionale dei sintomi medici e/o psicologici motivata dal voler ottenere un guadagno esterno. Questo fenomeno è assai frequente in contesti psicologici, quando, ad esempio, una persona è sottoposta a valutazione psicologica, avendo pertanto forti implicazioni sociali. Il rilevamento di...
Ejaculatory disorders (EjD), while represent a prevalent male sexual issue, are often misdiagnosed due to clinical/psychometric biases. EjD encompasses a broad spectrum of issues, ranging from premature to delayed ejaculation, and even anejaculation. The present study aimed identify specific orgasmic profiles in a non-clinical sample of males by using latent profile analysis (LPA) to classify...
In line with the Construal Level Theory, in recent years psychological distance (PD) from climate change have been appointed as one of the most relevant barriers to risk perception of climate change and motivation toward sustainable behaviors, thus suggesting that changing PD may play a critical role in determining individuals engagement in pro-environmental actions. Despite growing research,...
La N170 è un indice elettrofisiologico affidabile che indica una risposta cerebrale specificamente correlata alla codifica del volto. Sebbene numerosi studi si siano concentrati sulla registrazione dell’attività corticale associata alla visione di volti, la maggior parte di questi ha utilizzato immagini che compaiono improvvisamente in corrispondenza di un punto di fissazione e che tengono...
L'adolescenza è un'età di maggiore esplorazione sociale durante la quale si sviluppano strategie sociali sempre più sofisticate per interagire con i coetanei. Utilizzando un nuovo compito di economia comportamentale adattato per gli adolescenti, abbiamo studiato i miglioramenti nella capacità di coordinarsi "mentalmente" con gli altri, cioè di coordinare le scelte senza comunicare,...
The application of the bi-factor model is frequently implemented to assess the latent structure of psychological tests. However, this “bi-factor vogue” in many cases led to anomalous results, in particular, despite models displaying excellent fit indices had also anomalous loading patterns (Eid et al, 2016). In this work, the latent structure of the Prospective and Retrospective Memory...
Although the context-embedded nature of creativity has been confirmed by newest theories, laboratory studies cannot easily address it due to a lack of tools for measuring it. Based on the Space-Time continuum theoretical framework (Corazza and Lubart 2021), we modeled the context on two dimensions: the conceptual space in which an action or idea is conceived and the time interval available for...
This study investigates visuo-spatial working memory in healthy adults (n = 61, mean age = 25 years, SD = 3.45) using virtual reality (VR) and traditional methods.
We adapted the Radial Arm Maze task (RAM) in VR to assess working memory dynamically. Participants navigated a maze to find hidden objects. Concurrently, we administered classical measures (Corsi and Digit Span tests) and...
Item Response Theory (IRT) provides the ideal framework for generating short test forms (STFs) from item banks or from full-length tests thanks to the possibility of obtaining detailed information on the precision with which each item measures the latent trait. As such, the most precise items can be selected for inclusion in the STF and the number of items can be minimized while the...
When tackling sensory ambiguity, our brains employ diverse strategies to navigate and resolve challenges, such as using contextual information and prior experiences, which are pivotal in shaping our perceptions. Central tendency is a phenomenon where perception gravitates towards the average stimuli encountered in prior experiences, especially within the same sensory modality. An intriguing...
Humans excel in the interpretation of facial cues, which allows them to anticipate others and respond accordingly. Nonetheless, it remains unclear whether an advantage in the detection of those cues arises from the categorization of facial expressions, such as happy or angry, or from the magnitude of the deformation of the face, regardless of the emotion category.
Here, we sought to clarify...
Il paradigma Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) è uno degli strumenti più utilizzati per indagare i fattori che causano le false memorie. Tipicamente, in questo compito, i partecipanti memorizzano prima una lista di parole e poi devono indicare se le parole presentate in una nuova lista erano presenti nella lista memorizzata. Utilizzando questo paradigma, gli studi precedenti hanno dimostrato il...
Clustering, or cluster analysis, is a family of unsupervised machine learning methods that allow researchers to group sets of observations into smaller subsets (clusters) based on some sort of similarity. As cluster analysis is becoming popular in psychological and social sciences, it comes the need to point out some risks in performing cluster analysis. Even though these methods are mostly...
Le mutazioni genetiche BRCA (BReast Cancer susceptibility gene) sono direttamente collegate con un aumento del rischio di sviluppare tumori al seno e all’ovaio. Attualmente il test per verificare un’eventuale mutazione viene proposto, nell’ambito del SSN, solo a pazienti che presentano specifici fattori di rischio.
Il presente studio si pone l’obiettivo di indagare la percezione, da parte...
Le teorie predominanti della rappresentazione cognitiva dei numeri descrivono l'effetto SNARC come risultato di una rappresentazione spaziale stabile dei numeri lungo un asse orizzontale. Nello specifico, i numeri piccoli e grandi sarebbero stabilmente associati con la parte sinistra e destra dello spazio, rispettivamente. Proprio in virtù della stabilità di tale rappresentazione, sembra...
Adaptive cognitive control (CC), a flexible interplay between reactive and proactive CC modalities, changes during development. Previous studies employed separate tasks to investigate the effect of contextual predictability on adapting distinct mechanisms of CC, including shifting, response inhibition or control interference. However, less is known about the developmental trajectories of...
Most neuroscientists often neglect that the soundest motivation for excluding EEG epochs contaminated by saccades from analysis does not entail only signal quality but also signal meaning. Saccades can in fact be an overt manifestation of spurious cognitive processing that may distort the interpretation of event-related potentials (ERP). We evaluated this potential risk by comparing two...
The incorporation of reverse-worded items in the development of psychometric instruments has been a longstanding practice. Indeed, reverse-worded items are routinely utilized to mitigate response style biases, including acquiescence bias, extreme response bias, and unthinking responding. The present study aimed to contribute novel insights regarding the wording effect. Specifically, we...
The duration and vividness of the memory trace in visual short-term memory stages remains a debated issue in consciousness studies. The present study sought to investigate which is the fate of a trace stored in visual short-term memory when time passes and how retrospective spatial attention interacts with this process. Twenty subjects performed a change detection task in which the focus of...
Time can be conceptualized in spatial dimensions, as evidenced by the STEARC effect (Bonato et al., 2012). In recent work by Dalmaso et al. (2023), Western participants categorized the age of a central target male face as either younger or older than a reference face. The findings revealed that the perceived age was mapped from left to right. In the present study, we further examined whether a...
Response inhibition is a multifaceted process involving either the ability to withhold a speeded motor response prior to its initiation, or the ability to cancel a response after it has been initiated (Wright et al., 2014). Individual differences in the ability to withhold inappropriate responses have been extensively investigated with different variants of the Go/No-Go task (e.g., Chowdhury...
Aim: The study aims to validate a revised version of the SCRAM questionnaire, called rSCRAM, which incorporates items to measure anxious mood alongside sleep quality, chronotype, and depressive symptomatology. Materials and Methods: Data from 486 Italian participants aged 18 to 77(343 F, Age M = 26.9 ± 10.1) underwent two distinct analyses. In Study 1, a principal component analysis (PCA) was...
In the verbal Stroop Task, the interference induced by irrelevant information was observed to have a graded impact on the Stroop Effect, dependent on the strength of semantic relationships between relevant and irrelevant stimulus dimensions (i.e., Semantic Gradient). While some studies have shown the predictive power of continuous similarity measures at the item level, others have...
Interoception, the perception of the body’s physiological condition, underlies fundamental emotional and cognitive processes. However, how the conscious representation of bodily signals influences the understanding of others' minds remains unclear. This study aims to investigate whether individual differences in the interoceptive processing, in terms of interoceptive accuracy (IAcc),...
Reading plays an important role in functional maintenance, preserving significantly cognitive functions in ageing individuals and allowing people to keep up to date, ensure continuous training for a complex task, and experience emotions.
To investigate the relationship between normal ageing and reading skills, we tested a novel experimental protocol that combines measures of visual crowding...
La Motivation to have a Child Scale (MCS; Brenning et al., 2015; Gauthier et al., 2007) rileva la motivazione ad avere un figlio nell’ottica della Self-Determination Theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 2000). La scala comprende 20 item che valutano 5 tipi di motivazione. Vari studi hanno fornito evidenze empiriche a supporto di buone proprietà psicometriche della stessa, suggerendo che possa essere uno...
Forensic psychiatric evaluations are mandatory for the insanity assessment but face significant challenges related to their accuracy, accountability, and transparency. The lack of standardised methods makes it extremely difficult for experts to agree on insanity evaluations. A comprehensive understanding of the assessment processes and the biases influencing forensic psychologists and...
Theoretical models of autobiographical memory often describe two distinct retrieval modes which can be utilised to retrieve past events. Direct retrieval is considered effortless and immediate, whilst generative retrieval requires a deliberate search process to successfully access a memory. To our knowledge, no study has explored how these two retrieval modes differ in relation to their neural...
Our brain deals with visual impressions that change continually. Nonetheless, we experience the world as fairly stable. The neural basis of size constancy, i.e., the ability to achieve a stable experience of size even if the images projected onto the retina vary with viewing distance, remains largely unknown. In this study, we explored the temporal dynamics of the neural networks responsible...
The psychological perception of time can expand or contract based on various non-temporal dimensions, one of which is motion. Prior research has established that moving subjects are perceived to last longer than static ones, even when motion is implied through static images depicting dynamic scenes. This study further examines how implied motion and subject category - distinguishing between...
Individuals constantly exert inhibitory control over their thoughts and behaviors to plan actions that compete with habits and impulses. Cognitive inhibition enhances the selection of task-relevant stimuli and is closely related to neural changes that occur across the lifespan.
Since few studies have focused on the entire lifespan, this study aimed to assess cognitive inhibition abilities in...
Al giorno d’oggi siamo obbligati a interagire con la tecnologia per accedere a molti servizi essenziali come le operazioni bancarie, quelle amministrative e quelle anagrafiche. Mentre le nuove generazioni hanno acquisito la capacità di svolgere tali attività direttamente nel mondo digitale, le vecchie generazioni, abituate a eseguirle nel mondo fisico, si trovano costrette a adattarsi alla...
Un recente filone di ricerca si è focalizzato nella comprensione dei meccanismi e dei processi alla base dei bias cognitivi, all’interno di contesti sperimentali ove tali fenomeni risultano ridotti nella loro entità.
Con particolare riferimento all'euristica di causalità, per la quale le persone sono portate ad inferire una relazione causale anche quando questa non è presente, il nostro...
L’Affective Computing (AC) è una branca dell'Intelligenza Artificiale (IA) che si occupa di studiare e sviluppare sistemi e dispositivi in grado di riconoscere, interpretare, elaborare e simulare le emozioni umane, con l’aiuto di interfacce informatiche. Negli ultimi decenni, l’AC è stata adoperata in diversi ambiti applicativi, incluso il contesto bancario, per fornire migliori servizi...
All’interno dell’indagine scientifica sulle emozioni, si sta affermando un approccio che valorizza il ruolo della cultura e del contesto nel dare forma alle emozioni (es., il paradigma costruttivista). Tuttavia, l’influenza di cultura e contesto restano complessi da analizzare e tale impresa diviene ancora più ardua se ci si focalizza su concetti emotivi complessi. È il caso della nostalgia,...
Mixed transcortical aphasia (MTA) represents an uncommon aphasic syndrome, characterized by severe deficits in both comprehension and production across oral and written linguistic modalities. Individuals affected by MTA typically demonstrate retention of repetition abilities, often manifesting as echolalia. In the present single case study, we report the case of a woman who presented with MTA...
The field of dream engineering aims to develop techniques to modify nocturnal dreams systematically to investigate their significance and function. The so-called targeted memory reactivation (TMR) protocol involves pre-sleep associative conditioning, where a memory task is learned while sensory cues are presented. Presenting these cues during sleep has been shown to bias memory consolidation...
Evidence shows that physical exercise (PE) improves psychological wellbeing. PE induces the release of endorphins, which in turn increase the production of dopamine. This rising has been associated with increased risk-taking and reward-seeking behavior. However, some evidence points out that physical exercise acutely reduces risk-taking related to substances abuse, decreasing cravings.
To...
This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of a program specifically designed to address anxiety related to the practical driving test. A total of seventy candidates from a driving school course were selected from a larger group of 250 students based on their high test anxiety scores. These participants were randomly divided into two groups: the experimental group, which received training...
Metacognition, defined as the awareness and regulation of one's cognitive abilities, plays a crucial role in academic performance. Recent studies have highlighted how metacognition significantly influences academic outcomes through students' ability to monitor and regulate their own learning. Despite these insights, there remains a notable gap in the availability of psychometric tools...
Schizophrenia (SZ) is one of the most debilitating psychiatric disorder, in which the crucial role of cognitive deficits has been increasingly identified. However, the neural correlates underlying these impairments are still largely unknown. The cerebellum, conventionally tied to motor functions, is now recognized as a key region for cognition, and evidence of cerebellar abnormalities has been...
Introduction. Creativity is the capacity to conceive original ideas, solutions, and new concepts, this includes divergent thinking, defined as the ability to think outside of established patterns1. Previous studies had examined the connection between creativity and schizophrenia, but the results were heterogeneous and contradictory2.
In this study, we aim to explore the association between...
While a robust body of studies suggests that motor performance and imagery share similar cortical networks, it remains unclear whether they also share the same representational organization. A previous study investigated the representational structure of three hand-action types during execution or imagery in motor-related areas. The results showed distinguishable response patterns but a...
I deficit di memoria episodica hanno una elevata prevalenza nei pazienti con stroke.
Riportiamo i risultati di un trial che ha indagato gli effetti sulla memoria episodica di un dispositivo medico che combina adattamento prismatico con training cognitivo mediante serious games (Mindlenses Professional) in pazienti con stroke.
Il trial ha reclutato 60 pazienti con stroke focale unilaterale:...
Nelle relazioni di aiuto, i processi di regolazione emotiva rappresentano l’obiettivo terapeutico, influenzato dalla modalità di sincronizzazione tra terapeuta e paziente. Numerosi studi hanno esplorato i processi di sincronizzazione, integrando misure esplicite con indicatori fisiologici come battito cardiaco (HR) e conduttanza cutanea (SC). Il presente studio coinvolge studenti che accedono...
Interpersonal communication in the twenty-first century is increasingly taking place within digital media. This poses the problem of understanding the factors that may facilitate or hinder communication processes in virtual contexts. Digital media require a human-machine interface, and the analysis of human-machine interfaces traditionally focuses on the dimension of usability. However,...
Obiettivi. Nella letteratura scientifica esistono diverse misure di esito riportate dai pazienti (PROMs) che misurano la qualità della vita (QoL) e la qualità della vita associata alla salute (HRQoL) delle persone con sclerosi multipla (SM). Tuttavia, non si ha conoscenza di quali tra questi strumenti siano i migliori in termini di validità, attendibilità, responsiveness ed interpretabilità....
The term "additive bias" refers to the typically human tendency to favor choices or actions that involve adding new elements, rather than eliminating pre-existing elements. Previous research and historical anecdotes across multiple fields have demonstrated that this tendency toward addition can significantly impair decision-making and problem-solving abilities, often leading to suboptimal...
According to the Dual Mechanism of Control (DMC), two cognitive control mechanisms exist, proactive and reactive control. Nonetheless, our recent electrophysiological findings potentially pave the way to three mechanisms, with two of them falling under reactive control: an early one engaged before conflict based on stimulus-attention associations and a late one engaged after conflict detection...
Many studies suggest that numerical abilities develop through sensorimotor interaction with the environment. In line with this view, it has been shown that repeated execution of grasping or pointing action impacted the performance in a subsequent number magnitude task. Specifically, the distance effect, a typical numerical effect consisting in faster response times when comparing farer (e.g.,...
Background
Fibromyalgia is characterized by chronic, widespread pain that is often accompanied by fatigue, sleep disturbances, and cognitive and mood impairment. Pain is a complex and multidimensional experience that significantly impacts personal, social, and professional functioning. Psychological factors known to be associated with chronic pain include catastrophizing and self-efficacy in...
Cognitive impairment (CI) in Multiple Sclerosis (MS) affects between 40 and 65 percent of people with MS (pwMS), impacting memory, attention, information processing speed, and language (Amato et al., 2010). High levels of depression worsen cognitive symptoms: pwMS with depression perform poorly in working memory or information processing speed (van Geest et al., 2019). However, some studies...
Social media, an integral component of daily life, can affect psychological well-being and lead to a state known as social media fatigue (SMF). This study investigates the structure and psychometric properties of the Social Media Fatigue Scale (SMFS) and examines its relationships with related psychological constructs. Our sample comprised 329 individuals (Mage = 26, SD = 8.46; 26.1% males)...
Body representation is quite plastic and may even allow to incorporate external effectors, such as tools, prosthesis, or virtual avatars into our body representation. The process of representing these elements as parts of us is known as ‘embodiment’. Various factors can improve the possibility of embodying an effector to the upper limb: among these, tactile feedback is recently acquiring...
Depression, one of the most frequently diagnosed conditions, leads to significant cognitive deficits and comorbidity. In recent decades, scientific research has focused on biomarker identification and technological advancements like virtual reality (VR) for diagnosis support. This study evaluates the role of theta band power recorded through a Geodesic cup during 5 minutes of resting state,...
Could yoga, with its mind-body approach, improve cognitive and emotional well-being in young adults? Research indicates that yoga provides mental health benefits, but studies on young adults are still scarce. The growing popularity of yoga among young adults - a population undergoing significant cognitive and emotional changes and adaptations - supports the importance of studying its effects...
Cognitive control (CC) is a crucial tool for adaptation in daily life (Diamond, 2020; Moffitt et al., 2011). While traditionally viewed as a top-down mechanism (Diamond, 2020; Miyake & Friedman, 2012), recent evidence shows that implicit learning shapes CC in a bottom-up manner, optimizing cognitive resources based on environmental changes (Abrahamse et al., 2016; Braem & Egner, 2018). This...
Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show impairments in communication and social interaction and patterns of restricted and stereotyped behaviors and interests. Literature suggests that alterations of functional connectivity (FC) in brain networks may contribute to the manifestation of the clinical features of ASD. In our study, we focused on the Salience Network (SN), as playing a...
Network psychometrics aims to model correlational patterns in psychological phenomena, such as traits, affects, behaviors, cognitions, desires, abilities, and environments, in terms of interactions among their basic constituents. Network psychometrics has become central to several subfields of Psychology, offering a novel perspective on several phenomena, including personality traits....
Psychometric Network Analysis represents a cutting-edge methodology for modeling psychological phenomena as interconnected systems of variables. This approach allows for the exploration of relationships among variables across individuals and over time (Borsboom et al., 2021). The fundamental structure of a psychometric network comprises nodes, which denote variables within a dataset, and...
Nonostante il “problema mente-corpo” affondi le radici in un’antica tradizione filosofica e psicofisiologica, il crescente interesse verso le neuroscienze cognitive e affettive ha determinato una crescente sproporzione del concetto di “corpo” in favore del solo cervello.
Sebbene il sistema nervoso centrale (SNC) svolga un ruolo fondamentale e imprescindibile a supporto dei processi mentali...
Il recupero dei ricordi autobiografici è un processo che supporta la formazione dell’identità personale, con periodi di maggiore o minore salienza rispetto alle varie fasi di vita. È, pertanto, un processo influenzato dalle differenze individuali e culturali, in cui l’elaborazione emotiva gioca un ruolo essenziale. Il presente simposio presenterà le più recenti prospettive teoriche,...
We investigated the link between individual differences in personality traits (measured with the HEXACO-100 and the HAS) and the Vicarious Approach/Avoidance (VAA) effect.
Three hundred twenty-three participants (age: M = 31.60, SD = 10.00) answered the HEXACO-100 and the HAS personality inventories. They then read two vignettes describing a model approaching or avoiding a target (i.e., a...
The COVID-19 pandemic forced governments to trace the contacts and places visited by those infected. This process of event reconstruction was designed to influence the transmission of the virus and relied primarily on the retrieval of personal memories of infected individuals. In our study, we investigated whether participants could provide contact tracing details and whether their memories...
Questo simposio si propone di esaminare alcune sfide e opportunità nell'esplorare il ruolo giocato dalle differenze individuali nei contesti sperimentali. Dal punto di vista della psicologia sperimentale, introdurre le variabili di differenze individuali nella ricerca e studiarne gli effetti in interconnessione con le manipolazioni può essere di beneficio per comprendere meglio l’impatto delle...
Studi recenti suggeriscono che il nostro senso del tempo è legato all'attività dell'area sensoriale primaria dell'enterocezione. Pertanto, un migliore accesso ai segnali corporei, misurati oggettivamente (accuratezza enterocettiva) e riferiti soggettivamente (sensibilità enterocettiva), potrebbe spiegare una percezione più accurata del tempo. Tuttavia, le evidenze a favore di un legame tra...
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) comprises a heterogeneous group of neurodevelopmental conditions that pose a major public health challenge due to their increasing prevalence and the need for early diagnosis. Extensive research is currently focused on identifying susceptibility and diagnostic psychophysiological markers for these conditions using neuroimaging and other advanced computational...
From tapping our foot while we listen to our preferred music to coordinating movements with others, rhythm plays a vital role in our lives. This symposium offers a multifaceted exploration of rhythm perception and performance, examining its evolutionary origins (phylogeny), development throughout life (ontogeny), and potential for clinical applications. Andrea Ravignani (Sapienza University of...
Who’s got rhythm? Why are we such musical, chatty animals? Human music and speech, almost anomalies for evolutionary biology, both feature rhythm among their building blocks. Many hypotheses try to explain the origins of rhythm capacities, but few are empirically tested and compared. Because music and speech do not fossilize, the comparative approach provides a powerful tool to tap into human...
Capire come e perché gli individui differiscono nelle loro risposte alle manipolazioni sperimentali è cruciale per avanzare nella conoscenza scientifica.
Partendo da alcune evidenze empiriche circa il ruolo giocato da tratti di personalità, stili cognitivi e valori culturali nel plasmare le risposte degli individui alle situazioni e alle manipolazioni (es. personalità e attenzione, Mathews...
Fully idiographic network analysis (FINA) is a network analysis approach that allows the examination of within-person processes by assessing dynamic relationships between symptoms and symptom progression within individuals over time. FINA has shown promising results as an analytical tool to better describe psychopathology in an idiographic way across a wide array of disorders. Nevertheless,...
Rhythm perception and production start very early in human ontogeny as already the foetus can appreciate rhythmic patterns (e.g., maternal movements) and produce rhythmic behaviours (e.g., Non-Nutritive Sucking, NNS). This early sensitivity to rhythm is thought to be crucial for later development of various cognitive functions, including language, but the link to attention is unclear. Here, we...
Il tatto svolge un ruolo vitale nello sviluppo sociale ed individuale, e nel mantenimento del benessere psicologico negli esseri umani. Studi recenti hanno mostrato che gli aspetti affettivi del contatto tattile interpersonale sono elaborati da un sistema neurofisiologico specializzato di fibre afferenti CT, che proietta alla corteccia insulare, una regione cerebrale centrale per la...
Introduzione. L’educazione alimentare è un fattore chiave nel promuovere il consumo di frutta e verdura di stagione. Tuttavia, spesso non abbiamo tempo e risorse cognitive per scelte alimentari oculate e questo potrebbe rendere meno efficaci gli interventi basati sulle informazioni.
Obiettivi. Il presente studio sperimentale (preregistrato) intendeva testare l’effetto combinato delle...
Structural magnetic resonance imaging techniques such as voxel-based morphometry (VBM) have identified heterogeneous gray matter variations in individuals diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) compared to typically developing controls. However, it remains unclear whether and to what extent disorder-selective brain variations occur in this spectrum. This research gap, along with the...
Il presente contributo intende offrire una valutazione critica delle ricerche condotte da otto eminenti studiosi della memoria che hanno indagato empiricamente il funzionamento della propria memoria autobiografica: Francis Galton (1822-1911), Madorah Smith (1887-1965), Alan Baddeley (1934-), Richard White (1935-), Marigold Linton (1936-), Willem Wagenaar (1941-2011), Steen Larsen (1944-1999) e...
Nel presente contributo, abbiamo esaminato in che modo la relazione tra l'adesione a certi valori culturali, quali quelli legati all'onore mascolino, e la giustificazione della connivenza con la criminalità organizzata sia influenzata dalla salienza dell’identificazione sociale. Comprendere questi meccanismi è importante per comprendere come i gruppi criminali organizzati stabiliscono funzioni...
Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) consists of a cognitive impairment that does not affect a person’s activities of daily living and progresses to dementia at a rate of approximately 12% per year. In cross-sectional studies, the complexity of the cognitive organisation was explored using Network Analysis to evaluate the relationships between cognitive functions. The present study aims to...
Sebbene i segnali corporei siano essenziali per mantenere l’omeostasi, attuali modelli teorici ed evidenze empiriche suggeriscono che essi influenzano anche processi emotivi e cognitivi di più alto livello. Tra questi, la consapevolezza corporea, ossia la sensazione di avere un corpo, che occupa una specifica posizione nello spazio e agisce secondo la propria volontà, deriva dalla costante...
Il recupero di ricordi autobiografici è influenzato da variabili individuali e culturali. Ad esempio, diverse strategie di regolazione emozionale si traducono nella qualità e quantità di elementi recuperati dalla propria memoria; tali contenuti possono essere specifici e dettagliati, oppure più generali (detailed vs. overgeneral memories). Fornire narrazioni generali e astratte funge da...
Rhythm naturally emerges in humans from infancy and significantly impacts various cognitive functions (e.g., memory, attention) and emotional processes (e.g., emotions, sense of connection). Moreover, it is thought to modulate music reward responses through its strong movement-inducing component. Consistent evidence has highlighted the pivotal role of rhythm complexity in eliciting pleasurable...
The current diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) focus on the characteristics individuals share in terms of social-communicative difficulties and the presence of restricted and repetitive behaviors. However, phenotypic heterogeneity in non-core features, such as early language, intellectual, motor, and adaptive functioning (LIMA), is among the most prominent aspects that...
Introduzione: Per incoraggiare l’Adozione di Diete Sane e Sostenibili (ADSS), le tecnologie digitali potrebbero essere un utile strumento.
Obiettivi: Nel presente studio, abbiamo testato l’efficacia di cinque comunicazioni che incentivano il download di un’app che promuove l'ADSS. Inoltre, abbiamo verificato se il focus regolatorio modera la persuasività della comunicazione...
Introduction: Orthorexia Nervosa (ON) is a proposed clinical condition characterised by a pathological obsession with healthy eating. Despite ongoing research, it has yet to be clarified whether ON could be considered a part of Feeding and Eating Disorders (FED) or a manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and whether it warrants recognition as a unique diagnostic entity. To...
Numerosi studi hanno dimostrato che le persone ricordano persistentemente sia eventi pubblici che privati vissuti durante l’adolescenza e la prima età adulta, in particolare eventi con contenuto emotivo positivo. Attraverso 5 studi, il presente lavoro indaga il Reminiscence Bump (RB) per ricordi di eventi pubblici positivi e negativi (studi 1 e 2), di eventi privati (studio 3), di eventi...
Based on the transfer effects of music training on the phonological and reading abilities of children with dyslexia, a computerized rhythmic intervention—the Rhythmic Reading Training (RRT)—was developed, in which reading exercises are combined with a rhythmic synchronization task. This rehabilitation program was previously tested in multiple controlled clinical trials, which confirmed its...
La complessa comunicazione tra cervello e cuore esercita un'influenza sostanziale sul comportamento umano. Le interruzioni di questo dialogo possono compromettere le capacità di autoregolazione ed esacerbare i sintomi di disturbi mentali quali depressione e ansia. L'interazione cervello cuore (Brain-Heart Interplay, BHI) costituisce una misura completa che cattura l'interazione tra il sistema...
Given the enormous amount of discourse in popular media and in research around gender differences, a person could be excused for believing the cliché that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Many other categorial individual differences, such as ethnicity, nationality, and religion, are met with similar beliefs about the enormity of differences. In this presentation, I will show the...
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is linked to a hyper-focused visuo-attentional style, impacting higher-order affective and social domains. To disentangle the neurocognitive signatures underlying such attentional anomalies, we recorded EEG in typically developing children (TD; N=20) and in children with ASD (N=19) during a visuo-spatial attentional task where attention was exogenously captured...
Il funzionamento della memoria umana è stato classicamente studiato in individui con prestazioni normotipiche o in pazienti con deficit di memoria. La scoperta di individui con capacità di memoria aumentata, la cosiddetta ipermemoria autobiografica (Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory, HSAM), offre l'opportunità di indagare il funzionamento mnestico da una prospettiva nuova. In questo...
Flourishing indicates the extent to which all aspects of a person’s life, including the context in which they live, are considered good. As a multi-dimensional construct, recent work has begun to explore the interrelatedness among flourishing constituents and their contribution to the achievement and maintaining of individual well-being. Using the national representative survey data from the...
La maggior parte degli studi sulla attenzione spaziale uditiva hanno esaminato gli effetti attentivi su stimoli presentati nello spazio anteriore, mentre rimane da stabilire se effetti analoghi possano essere osservati anche nello spazio posteriore.
A questo scopo, abbiamo chiesto ad un gruppo di partecipanti di completare un compito attentivo tipo Posner in cui uno stimolo uditivo veniva...
The aging population is rapidly growing across the world, with the number of people aged 65 or older projected to reach 1.6 billion by 2050. As such, it is essential to consider how to develop sustainable transport systems that are age-friendly. This perspective proposal investigates how to foster an age-friendly transport system with a particular focus on public and sustainable transport...
Abstract
L'articolo passa in rassegna le recenti ricerche sulle nuove tecnologie di assistenza agli anziani basate sull'intelligenza artificiale: Utilità per case accoglienti e ambienti di vita assistiti, dispositivi indossabili e di monitoraggio, realtà virtuale e aumentata e robotica assistiva.
Questi strumenti tecnologici intelligenti possono ridurre l'isolamento degli anziani...
The study aimed to investigate associations between the Big Five personality dimensions with the susceptibility of distracted driving (i.e., engagement in voluntary distraction, attitudes toward distraction, and susceptibility to involuntary distraction) comparing samples of Australian and Italian drivers. Distracted driving remains a significant global challenge to road safety, contributing...
Le allucinazioni uditive (AU: udire voci in assenza di stimolo esterno) sono presenti in molte condizioni psichiatriche, ma sono relativamente frequenti anche nella popolazione sana (4-15%). A differenza delle AU cliniche, nella popolazione sana sono spesso descritte come esperienze a valenza positiva e non intrusive, o come un modo per essere connessi con "qualcun altro". Abbiamo indagato la...
Saper riportare il disagio provato durante un’esperienza di ascolto rumorosa implica che gli ascoltatori siano in grado di riconoscere le condizioni ambientali avverse e di monitorare i propri stati interni, come lo sforzo percepito e la sicurezza percepita durante l’ascolto. La capacità di monitorare i propri stati interni è stata spesso indagata valutando giudizi retrospettivi, trascurando...
The aging population continues to grow, necessitating increased healthcare, social security, and support. In response, Active Aging (AA) initiatives have been established to foster well-being and successful aging. AA refers to the engagement in physical, mental, and social activities to improve quality of life, independence, and social participation. However, engagement in activities (e.g....
Cue-to-target spatial correspondence in the Posner cueing task is known to facilitate responses under conditions of short asynchrony between a peripheral cue and a target shape. How this benefit is modulated by target properties, such as faces expressing either the most positive or negative emotion in a set, remains an open question. We addressed this issue with the expectation that the...
Le abilità attentive sono fondamentali in ogni disciplina sportiva. Tuttavia, i benefici cognitivi specifici al tipo di sport praticato sono stati fino ad ora scarsamente indagati. Il presente progetto di ricerca, strutturato in due studi, ha l’obiettivo di indagare i benefici sull’attenzione selettiva confrontando atleti esperti e non atleti, considerando sia sport di invasione, i.e....
Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by inattention, impulsivity, and hyperactivity, with onset during childhood. It is usually comorbid with different psychopathological conditions, resulting in a global functioning impairment. Moreover, available evidence suggests that lower birth weight could be a risk factor for development of ADHD...
Negli ultimi anni, il benessere è diventato un argomento di crescente e intenso dibattito nelle politiche pubbliche e socio-economiche, e il suo miglioramento è considerato una chiave fondamentale per il progresso sociale. Sebbene una definizione universale di benessere non sia ancora presente in letteratura, i modelli multicomponenziali riconoscono tipicamente la sua natura multifaccettata e...
La capacità umana di percepire la direzione dello sguardo altrui è fondamentale per le interazioni sociali, potendo coinvolgere meccanismi attentivi specializzati. In uno studio che utilizza una variante del compito di Stroop spaziale, Marotta, Caballero e Lupiáñez (2018) hanno osservato che lo sguardo, a differenza delle frecce, provoca un effetto di congruenza invertito (ECI), con tempi di...
Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a complex mental health condition characterized by persistent feelings of sadness, loss of interest, and impaired daily functioning across cognitive, social, and occupational domains. Research has consistently highlighted dysregulation of biological rhythms in individuals with depression, exacerbating depressive symptoms and impairing overall functioning....
Sequential control of action relies on both cognitive control and decision-making processes. Flexible task control is also supported by inhibition of recently abandoned task sets so that performance is slower in N-2 task repetition sequences (e.g., ABA) versus N-2 task switch sequences (CBA). However, it is not clear whether the mechanisms supporting sequential control of task sets generalize...
Il rendimento scolastico è da tempo al centro dell’interesse della comunità educativa. Numerosi studi hanno esaminato i fattori che lo influenzano, esplorando non solo l’impatto delle abilità cognitive, ma anche il ruolo di fattori non cognitivi come i tratti di personalità. Tali studi hanno evidenziato che i tratti di personalità e il rendimento scolastico sono significativamente correlati....
L'afasia è un deficit acquisito a seguito di un danno acuto al sistema nervoso centrale che comporta la difficoltà o l'impossibilità di comprendere e formulare il linguaggio. Un disturbo tipico delle forme di afasia non fluente è l'anomia. L'anomia si riferisce alla difficoltà di trovare le parole, in particolare quando si cerca di nominare oggetti e azioni. Secondo l'approccio della Embodied...
First experiences with rhythm occur in the womb, with different rhythmic sources being available to the human fetus. Among sensory modalities, vestibular, tactile, and somatosensory perception (VTS; Provasi et al., 2014) plays a crucial role in early processing. However, a limited number of studies so far has focused on VTS rhythms in language development, due to the difficulties of assessing...
Every image we see first enters our brain through the pupil. This dynamic window in the iris regulates its opening and closing as a function of luminance and, importantly, psychosensory stimulation (Loewenfeld,1958). During the last decades, the birth and development of pupillometry techniques investigating this psychosensory response has shed light on the cognitive underpinning of a vast...
Several studies testing cognitive control in the general population using images of food of varying palatability showed that cognitive performance was increased for high- than low-calorie food suggesting a fine-tuning of cognitive processing for foods with different salience. The interaction between dealing with different degrees of rewarding stimuli and cognitive performance highlights the...
La letteratura dimostra capacità rigenerative degli ambienti naturali ed effetti positivi dell'esposizione alla natura sul benessere psicologico e sui processi cognitivi, affettivi e sociali, con crescente interesse verso i meccanismi sottostanti e i benefici correlati. Ci si propone di approfondire ciò con quattro presentazioni sul potenziale rigenerativo dell'ambiente naturale, esperito in...
Eating is fundamental to survival and well-being and already at the dawn of experimental psychology the role of food in learning processes was recognized in seminal works of Pavlov and Skinner. In modern society, the innate urge to eat is often overridden by the abundance of nutrients. In this contest eating disorders are constantly increasing and difficult to treat, thus neuroscientists have...
Questo contributo indaga la relazione tra indizi percettivi dello spazio tridimensionale (IPTS), proprietà strutturali globali (PSG) di un’immagine e percezione di rigeneratività (PR), ipotizzando che otto IPTS (e.g., prospettiva lineare, prospettiva aerea, gradiente di tessitura, altezza relativa) siano alla base di tre PSG delle immagini (i.e., apertura, espansione, profondità) che, a loro...
L'obiettivo di questo simposio è presentare evidenze sperimentali che descrivono l'interazione tra i processi cognitivi e quelli sensomotori, nella cornice teorica dell’ Embodied Cognition.
Questa prospettiva, infatti, propone una visione altamente integrata di mente e corpo in cui le operazioni mentali, come la comprensione di una parola o la sua memorizzazione, sono strettamente connesse e...
For decades, several studies using a wide range of approaches attributed a pivotal role to the prefrontal cortex (PFC) for maintaining multiple information during memory periods in working memory (WM). However, there is still a heated debate about the neural schema involved in WM maintenance of information over time, with the classical doctrine proposing a persistent coding mechanism and...
Memory incorporates the abilities to generate, recall, and store active and manipulable representations that are the functional backbone for planning goal-directed behavior, supporting a wide range of cognitive processes such as logical reasoning, learning, and problem-solving. A multidisciplinary approach incorporating both animal models and human subject studies guarantees in-depth...
Lo sviluppo dell’Embodied Cognition (EC), la cui nascita viene solitamente fatta risalire ai primi
anni 90’, ha ruotato intorno all’idea secondo cui vi sia una profonda interdipendenza tra la
cognizione e quelli che vengono definiti i processi sensomotori. La traiettoria dell’EC è stata per
certi aspetti sorprendenti, a tal punto da venire considerata “una nuova psicologia” (Caruana...
Concentrating to perform listening tasks in a noisy environment requires to re-allocate mental resources to overcome the interference of noise. This process and the resulting fatigue, i.e., listening effort, can be detrimental to cognitive performance.
Research has shown that eye pupil dilation and high blink rates can be considered psychophysiological markers of cognitive effort, making...
La ricerca ha dimostrato benefici della natura sul benessere psicologico, evidenziando effetti positivi sulle emozioni. Tra le teorie proposte per spiegare tali effetti, alcuni studi riguardano i processi di regolazione emotiva, suggerendo che l’esposizione alla natura aumenta l’utilizzo di strategie adattive, e riduce quelle disadattive.
Questo contributo propone due studi sugli effetti...
Food is a key reward stimulus that drives human behaviour according to individual preferences. Behavioural mechanisms and neural processing underpinning food attitudes and reward values have been investigated independently from one another, but a more detailed investigation of the processes involved in individual food preferences and of the potential relationship with food and monetary reward...
Relational inference using previously memorized information is one of the aspects of intelligence in humans and non-human animals. Provided that the premises A>B and B>C are well memorized, the subject is able to infer that A>C. This ability to use overlapping information and extend it to deduce a novel relationship forms the basis of Transitive Inference (TI) capability. To solve these...
Evidence suggests that specific motor plans linked to potential hand-object interactions are activated when semantically processing graspable object nouns. Furthermore, it has also been demonstrated that adjectives expressing object features can modulate these motor plans. Since semantics and syntax are learned together during the lifespan, it is conceivable that syntax can have a role in...
Studi suggeriscono che condurre attività fisica in ambienti naturali rispetto ad ambienti urbani offra maggiori benefici per il benessere psicologico (Gladwell et al., 2012; Wicks, 2022). Questo studio ha valutato i benefici sinergici dell’esposizione alla natura e dell’attività fisica attraverso un disegno crossover randomizzato.
Quindici partecipanti maschi (M=28; SD=5) hanno camminato per...
Memory capacity refers to the limited quantity of information that short-term memory can hold, proposed by Miller to be around 7 +/- 2 elements. In contrast, long-term memory is believed to have an unlimited capacity, though this holds true primarily for information that can be rehearsed, rather than spontaneously encoded. In this study, we investigated the neurobiology of memory capacity...
Eyetracking serves as a valuable method for objectively assessing early theory of mind and related social cognitive processes in preverbal infants. Recent studies have extended this approach by analyzing pupillary responses, offering deeper insights into infants' processing of others' mental states. This shift responds to critiques of traditional measures like looking time, which have been...
The ability to control impulses is considerably challenged by appetising food. Converging neuroimaging evidence suggests a crucial role of cerebellum in feeding and inhibitory control.
We explored the effects of different protocols of cerebellar non-invasive stimulation on food specific inhibitory performance. Moreover, we explored the dynamics of fronto-cerebellar effective connectivity in...
The Body-Specificity Hypothesis suggests that the area around the dominant hand is perceived positively, contrasting with a negative perception around the non-dominant hand. Given the increasing interest in embodied cognition for interactive technologies, our study aimed to investigate body-specific associations in real-world settings, examining whether these extend to mainstream digital...
While literature suggests that both performing congruent actions and emotional stimuli can enhance memory, their combined impact on memory for action phrases remains largely unexplored. This contribution presents and discusses recent findings from an experimental study investigating the effect of enactment encoding with emotionally charged stimuli on memory performance. Fifty-six participants...
Individuals with eating disorders, particularly Anorexia Nervosa (AN), often experience distortions in bodily self-awareness, possibly due to difficulties integrating multisensory information. In this symposium, I will present evidence supporting the existence of this deficit underlying alterations in the corporeal self. We examined 22 women with AN alongside 22 healthy controls using the...
Atteggiamenti e comportamenti pro-ambientali sono di fondamentale importanza ai fini della sostenibilità (Liu & Green, 2024). Ne consegue l’importanza di promuoverli fin dall’infanzia e durante il percorso scolastico, affinché diventino disposizioni stabili, eventualmente trasmesse anche alle future generazioni (Hosany et al., 2022). Una modalità potrebbe consistere nell’introdurre, nei...
Recognition memory tests are pivotal in the examination of episodic memory. The paradigm commonly utilizes two primary testing formats: the yes/no and forced-choice tests. The yes/no paradigm typically involves participants being presented with a series of stimuli and later asked whether each stimulus was previously encountered (yes) or not (no). The forced-choice paradigm presents...
Since the ontogeny of object permanence was proclaimed an important developmental milestone in Piaget’s seminal work on cognitive development (Piaget, 1954), much research has been dedicated to investigating the emergence of object concepts. The growing interest gave rise to a variety of methods that were developed or adapted to measure different aspects of object understanding in preverbal...
Ensuring the replicability of scientific experiments is crucial for advancing knowledge and establishing the credibility of research findings. However, the increasing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to create responsive and more natural experimental conditions based on participants' verbal and behavioral responses presents new challenges for experiment replicability.
Researchers can use...
Nell’uomo è stata postulata l’esistenza di un fattore generale di intelligenza, il g-factor, in grado di spiegare perché i punteggi ai test cognitivi siano correlati tra di loro (positive manifold). La positive manifold è stata individuata anche in bambini di sei anni, ma, data l’impossibilità di testare neonati o individui senza alcuna esperienza non è possibile trarre conclusioni...
Anorexia Nervosa (AN) is a mental health condition marked by reduced food consumption, intense fear of weight gain, and distorted body experience. Virtual Reality (VR) based techniques – i.e., Body-Swapping and Mirror Exposure techniques - offer promising avenues for addressing body disturbance in AN, allowing patients to embody virtual bodies varying in size and shape. We used a...
Vuoi danzare con me? Una ricerca sull’arte e la regolazione emotiva
Stella Conte, Marc Aurelio Gouin, Gabriele Cossu, Alessandra Busonera, Stefania Cataudella
Dipartimento di Pedagogia, Psicologia e Filosofia – Università di Cagliari
La regolazione emotiva consiste nella capacità di gestire le emozioni negative con stravedrò atte alla modifica dei propri schemi interpretativi.
La...
One of the studies of the active brain-computer interface (BCI) focuses on identifying movements from human neurophysiological signals to control external devices such as robotic arms. In the literature, EEG-based BCI is utilized to decode user's information to perform action or fill the gap from the brain to the arms in the case of illness. The purpose of this work is to understand, among the...
L’Autoefficacia Scolastica (AS), ovvero la convinzione di poter raggiungere risultati positivi a scuola, è un fattore importante per l’apprendimento, la motivazione e il benessere degli studenti.
Il presente studio si basa su un campione rappresentativo di studenti italiani del secondo anno di scuola secondaria superiore (N = 26564). Un primo obiettivo è quello di stabilire le proprietà...
The present pilot study tested and reports the Italian adaptation of the Reading the Mind in Film test (RMF) by Golan et al. (2006) as an ecological test for assessing, in Italian adults with and without Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC), complex emotion recognition in natural settings and everyday situations. A sample of young adults with Autism Spectrum Condition (with ASC; n=22), attending a...
Spatial Anxiety (SA) can be defined as the fear and apprehension experienced during tasks that require spatial thinking and may negatively impact the execution of daily actions. Although it has been explored in several research fields, limited research has explored the effects of SA on specific driving behaviours. In the current study, it was hypothesised that the severity of SA affects risky...
La ricerca scientifica nello studio delle interazioni uomo-robot ha fatto notevoli progressi negli ultimi anni. I social robots sono stati implementati in una varietà di contesti, tra cui gli istituti scolastici, le strutture sanitarie e i centri di assistenza per anziani. Il loro utilizzo è inoltre stato valutato in diversi gruppi di popolazione. Tuttavia la ricerca è ancora scarsa sui...
Everyday tasks require a series of actions aimed at achieving goals, with decision-making processes guiding timing, execution, and adjustment of actions in response to changes. We investigated how decision-making processes relate to motor-control, and – in particular – to motor-response execution. Participants completed visual lexical decision tasks where they were instructed to categorize...
Many non-communicable diseases result from combinations of risk factors, which sometimes interact to produce risks going beyond their sum, called synergistic risks. For instance, smoking and alcohol consumption interact synergistically to increase the risk of head and neck cancers. Our previous studies show that only a minority of people judge synergistic risks for non-communicable diseases...
Social support is a key predictor of well-being, but not everyone experiences mental health benefits from receiving it. However, given that a growing number of interventions are based on social support, it is crucial to identify features that make individuals more likely to benefit from social ties. Emerging evidence suggests that neural responses to positive social feedback (i.e., social...
Classification tasks where raters have to classify objects into predefined classes have been gaining popularity in science. Therefore, accuracy and reliability of classification are two necessary conditions. Any classification process is partly based on an evidence-based evaluation and partly on the subjective evaluation of the rater. This last component is crucial for the reliability of the...
The content of dreams appears to reflect the sleeper’s experiences and concerns, but also their psychophysical well-being. We implemented Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools for the quantitative and reproducible analysis of dream content to investigate dream changes as a function of age and sex in a large cohort of participants.
Two-hundred healthy Italian individuals (87M, 18-70y)...
Climate change worry (CCW) is a motivating factor for the implementation of pro-environmental behaviors, especially among youth. Consequently, it is particularly relevant to identify the best item response scale to assess this trait among adolescents to plan preventive interventions. We focused on the Climate Change Worry Scale (CCWS), a unidimensional instrument with ten items having a...
Attention is a multifaceted process that involves several components, including alerting, orienting, and conflict resolution. These components have been extensively studied using the Attention Network Test (ANT), also to characterize attentional decline with physiological aging. However, there are several inconsistencies in the literature regarding which components are most affected by aging....
Obiettivi: L'espressione Recovery Capital (RC) può essere definita come l’insieme delle risorse interne ed esterne che facilitano la ripresa da un disturbo da uso di sostanze e rappresenta un costrutto indispensabile per valutare i progressi dei pazienti nei percorsi di recupero. La scala ARC (The Assessment of Recovery Capital) è un questionario breve e di facile somministrazione usato per...
Self-esteem, a fundamental aspect of an individual's perception of their own worth, has been extensively examined in psychological research. Based on a large and representative sample of 47,974 participants (mean age: 26.59 years; SD: 12.3; 61% female), and using the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, one of the most widely used measures of self-esteem in psychological research, this study takes a...
Fairness and altruism are fundamental aspects of human social behavior, often observed across various contexts and age groups. Previous research has suggested that time constraints can influence decision-making processes, particularly in scenarios involving resource allocation. This study investigates the developmental origins of fairness in preschool children (aged 4 to 5) through a modified...
Virtual Reality (VR) allows the implementation of innovative rehabilitation, offering greater ecological validity in the context of motor functions. To be effective, these treatments should foster virtual embodiment, the process of becoming rooted in the virtual body, including a sense of agency towards the avatar’s movements.
Here, we investigated the different dimensions of the agency...
L'esposizione a stimoli alimentari induce una complessa reazione psicofisiologica che modella i comportamenti di alimentazione ed è potenzialmente influenzata dalla modalità di rappresentazione del cibo (immagini o parole) e dall'associazione con esperienze autobiografiche.
Il presente studio pilota, con raccolta dati in corso, mira a confrontare l'efficacia di un intervento breve di...
Literature suggests that people facing financial scarcity - the perception of insufficient economic resources to meet their needs - often show disadvantageous behaviors, such as increased willingness to borrow money (WTB). Two observational studies based on representative Italian samples investigated the role of psychological ownership of borrowed money (POBM), perceived risk of indebtedness...
The present study investigates ChatGPT's self-description and world-description in both present and future contexts. A corpus of texts produced by ChatGPT was analyzed through Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to detect the linguistic markers indicating self-concept, self-reflection, cognitive, emotional and social processes.
Repeated measures ANOVA unveiled significant differences. In...
Background ed obiettivi: La Drexel Defusion Scale (DDS) è uno strumento valido ed attendibile, utilizzato per misurare la defusione, che è l’abilità di prendere le distanze dai pensieri disfunzionali piuttosto che considerarli come veri e reali. Questo è un aspetto legato alla flessibilità, concetto chiave nella cornice dell’Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), che è un framework...
A growing body of research is focusing on the role of interoception – the sensing of the physiological condition of the body - in cognitive processes. Here, we asked whether the physiological changes experienced by women during pregnancy might affect conceptual representation, particularly of abstract concepts (for whom the interoceptive dimension seems particularly relevant).
A sample of...
In questo lavoro abbiamo studiato lo pseudoneglect (i.e., bias attenzionale fisiologico verso l’emispazio sinistro) mediante l’anortoscopia.
L’anortoscopia è una tecnica di presentazione visiva di un’immagine per sezioni successive. Nell’anortoscopia “statica” uno stimolo viene fatto scorrere dietro una fessura fissa al centro dello schermo: l’impressione di forma globale dello stimolo è...
Shortening instruments is a highly required procedure, as short scales may be advantageous over their lengthier counterparts, especially when time and resources are constrained. However, these abbreviated forms may be weaker than their original versions for both content coverage and psychometric robustness. Also, the abridgment of measures often suffers from methodological strictness, and the...
The relationship between cognitive abilities and olfactory function (FO) has been a subject of great research interest. Previous studies highlighted that both olfactory and specific cognitive processes are regulated by the orbitofrontal cortex, and suggested associations between declines in cognitive abilities and alterations in olfactory perception. However, the majority of investigations...
Nonostante le forti somiglianze tra ambiente marittimo mercantile e ambienti comunemente definiti “ICE” (isolati e confinati), con particolare riferimento alla condizione di isolamento, il tema dell’adattamento è stato in gran parte trascurato nella popolazione marittima. Tuttavia, la nave rappresenta non solo il luogo di lavoro, ma anche lo spazio vitale dell’individuo per mesi e mesi, motivo...
Over the past decades, the construct of cognitive flexibility (CF) has been defined in different ways. The multiplicity of definitions not only reflects its inherent complexity, but also presents a challenge in experimental assessment. The definition of CF is contingent upon the approach taken to its investigation and this renders difficult to establish a universally accepted definition. Some...
Questo studio presenta i risultati di un intervento di alfabetizzazione sanitaria, condotto su studenti adolescenti, avente lo scopo di promuovere abitudini alimentari sane. L’intervento mirava a potenziare la conoscenza degli adolescenti sulla nutrizione, a sviluppare abilità di autoregolazione e, in definitiva, a migliorare la loro salute complessiva, incluso l’Indice di Massa Corporea...
Until now it has been difficult to examine the cognitive decline related to hypertension and to identify predictive variables of the progression to cognitive impairment in people with hypertension. With renaissance of heart rate variability as a marker of autonomic functionality, a series of researchers have underlined its role in cognitive functions. In line with evidence about autonomic...
Molti strumenti utilizzati per misurare costrutti in psicologia utilizzano stimoli verbali, spesso self-report, che si basano sulla capacità delle persone di rispondere in modo preciso ed accurato ad una serie di domande o affermazioni su di sé. Tali misure, sono soggette ad alcuni bias tra cui la desiderabilità sociale, limiti nella capacità introspettiva dei rispondenti, e l’inaccessibilità...
Resilience is an adaptation process to maintain or restore well-being following an
adverse event. In sports psychology, this term indicates the capability of athletes to
counteract situations of adversity as challenges for improvement rather than as
insurmountable obstacles (Fletcher and Sarkar, 2012). Therefore, resilience
becomes an indispensable prerequisite for achieving sporting...
Studies based on the “emotional” variants of the Stroop task (eStroop) have shown that stimulus valence shapes response latency to salient stimuli. This modulation likely reflects the different implicit attentional capture by negatively vs. positively valenced words, with these stimulus categories being typically associated with longer and shorter response times (RTs), respectively, compared...
Background: Cocaine Use Disorder (CUD) is a chronic condition with implications on cognitive functions such as decision-making and impulse control. Intertemporal choice paradigms, measuring temporal discounting, offer insight into decision-making of addictive behaviors; mouse kinematics, a process-tracing method, provide a deeper understanding of decision dynamics. Here, mouse kinematics was...
Negli ambiti degli studi sull’Imagery, Immaginazione Motoria, o Motor Imager si intende comunemente il processo di esecuzione mentale che porta allo svolgimento di una certa azione, che però poi non viene fisicamente realizzata da parte di chi la produce. 24 atleti professionisti di Taekwondo hanno preso parte alla ricerca che prevedeva una prima fase di addestramento al protocollo di...
Problematic behavioral patterns with video games can arise or be maintained by maladaptive game-related cognitions, even in adolescents. Thus, for preventive and clinical purposes, it is important to have instruments specifically able to relieve high levels of maladaptive cognitions. The Internet Gaming Cognition Scale (IGCS) is a new and promising scale to assess problematic gaming cognitions...
Recenti studi suggeriscono di considerare l’ipercontrollo genitoriale come una forma di maltrattamento infantile. L’esperienza di maltrattamento infantile è stata associata ad alterazioni della connettività nel Salience Network (SN), un insieme di aree cerebrali cruciali per l'individuazione, l'elaborazione e l'integrazione delle informazioni ritenute rilevanti. In questo studio indaghiamo la...
Everyday listening conditions are very often far from the quiet settings provided in the laboratory when studying spoken language processing. Daily communication via speech often happens through noisy channels, e.g., phone call with a bad line or face-to-face in a crowd. In such noisy contexts, mouth movements and face cues facilitates comprehension, likely by exploiting predictive processing...
Environmental issues represent one of the most important topics on the world's political agendas today. Specific features of art, such as its ability to evoke emotions or the space for reflection offered to the spectator, are said to differentiate this form of communication from standard climate change communication (Klöckner, 2015), functioning as an emotional motor of behavior change (Roosen...
As novel techniques for engaging with systems emerge within virtual reality, it becomes crucial to evaluate their impact on user experience. Several tools are available for assessing user experience, computer interfaces, or displayed content (e.g. Brooke 1996, Lewis 1995, and Sauro and Dumas 2009), as well as the sense of presence within an environment (e.g., Lessiter et al 2001). However, few...
Aging is a progressive physiological degeneration associated to a decline in chemosensory processes, cognitive abilities, and reduction in synaptic plasticity. Biological bases of ageing are still not completely understood, and many theories have been proposed. This study aimed to evaluate the occurrence of age-related changes affecting the chemosensory function (gustatory and olfactory) and...
Moral dilemmas often force individuals into high-conflict situations where reaching a satisfactory resolution proves elusive. Sacrificial dilemmas, particularly, require individuals to grapple with the prospect of sacrificing one or more lives, often endorsing a utilitarian approach to prioritize the greater good. Despite contemporary challenges necessitating individuals to make utilitarian...
Several studies show that spatial cognition interacts with numerical cognition in various ways. For instance, numbers interact with space through manual movements, where smaller numerical magnitudes are associated with precision vs. power grips. One of the tasks used to probe mental number space associations is random number generation (RNG). Studies show that participants generate larger...
Sight is considered the primary sensory modality through which humans interact with and represent the world. However, several studies have indicated that the brain, to a great extent, can still develop its morphological and functional architecture even in the congenital absence of sight (supramodality). Congenital blindness (CB) also causes cross-modal plastic phenomena that sustain...
Humans possess remarkable abilities to comprehend spoken language during face-to-face interactions. This can occur thanks to the brain’s ability to take advantage of linguistic and extra-linguistic cues to continuously integrate incoming information and predict elements at various levels [1]. Previous research has shown dissociable neural signatures of meaning and sound predictions of...
The subjective perception of time is known to be influenced by our emotional states, yet the precise mechanisms governing this relationship remain elusive. This exploratory study aims to shed light on the intricate relationship between emotionally induced physiological arousal and our temporal perception, focusing specifically on pupil dilation as a physiological indicator.
Through a...
Le emozioni ricoprono un ruolo cruciale nel plasmare le modalità con cui gli individui si adattano all’ambiente circostante. Nell’ambito dell’assessment psicologico, le competenze di riconoscimento delle proprie emozioni sono per lo più state indagate attraverso questionari self-report. Tali strumenti richiedono agli individui sufficienti abilità di auto-consapevolezza e astrazione per poter...
The idiopathic Normal-Pressure Hydrocephalus it’s a condition of quadri-ventricular active distension associated with cerebrospinal fluid in absence of other identifiable cause. Symptomatology is characterized by balance impairment, urinary incontinence and cognitive impairment and it’s attenuated by shunt-surgery with a positive response in 80-84% of cases. There are some improvements in...
The translation of emotional experience into words is associated with language style, as narratives fully reflect emotional processes. During narration, while a symbolic verbal dimension organizes the word sequence, a sub-symbolic verbal dimension influences prosody, meter, and rhythm. Therefore, the symbolic and sub-symbolic verbal analysis of narratives provided through an interview...
In social attention research, the spatial interference paradigm reveals distinct congruency effects with gaze and arrow targets. Arrows typically induces a standard congruency effect (SCE), where responses are faster when the target’s direction aligns with its location. Conversely, gaze targets yield a reversed congruency effect (RCE), with slower responses under these conditions. It is...
Background: Cognitive reserve (CR) offers a compensatory mechanism for cognitive decline in the elderly, incorporating education, occupation, and leisure activities. Emerging evidence highlights the role of whole social context, life experiences, emotional states and leisure actitivies on cognitive abilities. This study aims to explore the role of emotional states in the complex...
Background: Following contraction of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection, commonly known as Covid-19, and experiencing its symptoms for extended periods (a condition termed “long Covid”), many individuals subjectively report experiencing "brain fog" (e.g., cognitive, and psychiatric disorders, etc.). Among these symptoms, it has been observed that 20%-30% of...
Minimally Conscious State (MCS) is a Disorders of Consciousness (DoC) characterized by inconsistent signs of consciousness and fluctuations of responsiveness.
The objective of this study was to investigate the relationship between electroencephalographic (EEG) and electrocardiographic (ECG) indicis and responsiveness in MCS patients.
We involved 15 MCS patients in a multimodal (EEG and ECG)...
Beyond Top-down and Bottom-up attention, growing evidence has highlighted that neutral stimuli could earn attentional priority when paired with stimuli – appetitive or aversive – that are highly relevant to the individual. This phenomenon, called Value-Driven Attentional Capture (VDAC), has been attested across a wide range of procedures. However, little is known about how broadly this...
L’OMS identifica la scarsa aderenza alla terapia come una delle principali cause di aumento delle ospedalizzazioni e della mortalità nei pazienti cronici, inclusi coloro che soffrono di ipertensione arteriosa. Dal 43% al 65.5% dei pazienti che non aderiscono alle terapie prescritte sono ipertesi. Per queste ragioni l'obiettivo dello studio è di identificare le possibili barriere all’aderenza...
Emotional processing is closely linked with spatial attention, which tends to prioritize emotional stimuli over neutral ones. The brain network responsible for directing spatial attention towards different sectors of the space also play a role in processing emotional stimuli. Recent evidence has identified a connection between the rightward shift in spatial attention, assessed through the line...
One of the most influential models of visual information processing describes the dorsal visual pathway as not involved in object perception. However, growing evidence highlights the engagement of the dorsal stream in processing some object proprieties, such as global shape. Therefore, there is a lively debate concerning the role of the dorsal stream in this context.
Our work aims to...
Background. Vaccine hesitancy encompasses a complex attitude intertwined with social, cognitive, and affective processes not clearly understood. We aimed to provide new insights to the field by focusing on the role of ethical appraisal in vaccine hesitancy.
Methods. We utilized the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ) and a set of moral dilemmas to investigate potential links...
Secondo la teoria della Prospettiva Temporale di Zimbardo e Boyd, cinque dimensioni latenti esprimono il rapporto fra time frame mentali e comportamenti, emozioni e cognizione. Recenti progressi teorici hanno però proposto ulteriori dimensioni; nonostante tali proposte impieghino soprattutto costrutti legati all'autoregolazione, come ansia per il futuro e mindfulness, manca però un un quadro...
The body image is the conscious visual representation of body parts' size and shape, and it reflects how one's own body is perceived. A distorted body image characterizes various psychiatric disorders, such as anorexia nervosa; however, even healthy individuals show distortions, for instance in estimating the length of their limbs. As body image, interoception, i.e., signals originating from...
Increasing evidence suggests that cognitive stimulation (CS) can be beneficial for people with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and Mild Dementia (MD)[1]. However, there are only a few computerised cognitive stimulation programmes available in Italian and some of them require long training sessions or expensive softwares and devices (e.g. virtual reality)[2]. We developed a free and easy-to-use...
Comprendere quali fattori possano essere predittori di drop-out è un tema sul quale la letteratura si interroga da decenni. Agire preventivamente sui fattori di successo o di insuccesso accademico porta con sé la possibilità di poter attuare interventi efficaci a supporto dello studente.
Negli ultimi anni, un fattore che è subentrato nelle vite di tutti è l’utilizzo massivo dello smartphone....
Recent advancements in virtual reality (VR) have provided new avenues for investigating cognitive processes, particularly spatial orientation and creating cognitive maps. This study aims to develop and validate a Virtual Spatial Configuration Task (VSCT) within a VR environment using the established Spatial Configuration Task (SCT) paradigm. The classical SCT involves participants identifying...
Assessing measurement invariance is crucial for ascertaining whether observed differences in a construct genuinely represent differences between groups or arise from inconsistencies in the measurement process. Among the various types of measurement invariance, dyadic invariance represents an important assumption to test before comparing values among individuals within a dyad. Dyadic invariance...
This study explores physiological indicators associated with consumer preferences through the use of electromyography (EMG) of the submental muscle in a virtual supermarket context. By observing 60 healthy participants in a simulated environment, the EMG of the submental muscle is analyzed to determine its correlation with preferences scores rated by participants. The submental muscle, part of...
Creating humanoid robots is an engineering longstanding goal. Yet a significant psychological obstacle stands in the way: the Uncanny Valley (UV). This phenomenon describes the abrupt shift in people’s affective reactions towards robots, from affinity to discomfort, when the robot closely resembles a human, but fails to achieve true human-like appearance. Some scholars propose that this...
Remembering where negative events occur has undeniable value, but how emotional memories are encoded remains elusive. It is widely recognized that information in working memory (WM) is consciously processed. During the encoding, emotion-related information attracts attention more quickly or occupies more attention resources and has an emotional bias effect. However, evidence that WM can...
The DIPPS project endeavors to construct a digital platform aimed at supporting psychological and psychiatric interventions to improve mental health. The DIPPS platform encompasses various functionalities, from the digitalized assessment data to a predictive system for potential symptom exacerbation.
Utilizing the digitalized assessment data, Bayesian network (BNs) can be informed to forecast...
Il corretto riconoscimento delle espressioni emotive è fondamentale per l’interpretazione del comportamento umano e la conseguente pianificazione e produzione di risposte nei processi di interazione sociale. Le informazioni provenienti dall’ambiente, di natura visiva ed uditiva, insieme alle specifiche caratteristiche dell’individuo, sono alla base dell’interpretazione dello stimolo. Un ruolo...
Previous findings show a strong involvement of the right dominant limb on the Body Schema (BS), a sensorimotor body map: a dominant body part is recognized faster than the non-dominant one in a mental rotation task (e.g., 'feet dominance effect’). Although the reorganization in the left hemisphere strongly impacts the body processes involved in motor control, further investigations must...
Approaching (AP) and avoiding (AV) tendencies are basic behavioral aptitudes in responding to rewarding and aversive stimuli, and their balancing (BA) is critical for successful adaptation to the environment. The AP tendency, associated with novelty seeking, plays an important evolutionary role in identifying new sources of reward but also heightens the risk of externalizing behaviors like...
Insect-based foods represent an intriguing solution to address issues associated with traditional meat diets. However, in Western cultures, there is a predominantly negative attitude towards such foods.
We conducted an experimental study implementing a Vicarious Approach-Avoidance procedure, a subtype of social learning. The aim was to investigate whether and how attitudes towards...
Creativity is defined as a process that involves both generation and evaluation of ideas.Cognitive style refers to how people acquire, organize, and use information and is related to creativity.Amongst all cognitive styles, the explanatory power of the field-dependent (global) or independent (local) cognitive style has been widely recognized. Unlike field-dependent subjects, field-independent...
In recent years, there has been growing interest in exploring alternative, objective, and transparent measures as adjuncts to conventional diagnostic tools in the field of clinical and rehabilitative cognitive neurodegeneration. This interest stems from promising findings regarding the application of artificial intelligence (AI) systems for motor pattern analysis, which offer insights into the...
The investigation of affect has become pivotal across various fields of psychological research, yet measuring affective experience poses some pitfalls. First, affective states, by their fleeting and idiosyncratic nature, are often challenging to define and capture. Second, the intricate interplay between psychophysiological changes and subjective experience has many implications for the...
Over the past two decades, the field of emotion research has experienced significant growth and diversification, resulting in a proliferation of conflicting notions and results. This contribution explores various methodologies and tools for capturing emotions in vocal communication, guided by four prominent theoretical perspectives on emotion: basic emotions theory, dimensional approach,...
The main assumption for our studies on perceptiona and memory for actions is that the observation of an action creates a sensorimotor activation/resonance that creates a mental representation of that action that is 'moved forward' in time. The prediction is thus that seeing a person getting ready to perform an action might also create, after a delay, the memory of having seen the forward part...
Questo simposio è dedicato all'esplorazione del profondo impatto dell'innovazione tecnologica sulla salute cognitiva attraverso vari ambiti di intervento. La prima presentazione approfondirà i metodi di intelligenza artificiale per lo screening precoce e il monitoraggio continuo dei disturbi neurocognitivi negli adulti e negli anziani.
Successivamente, la seconda presentazione si concentrerà...
Social interactions in primates are possible through the ability to extract relevant information from voices, for example their identity. The anterior Temporal Voice Area (aTVA) is a region in the anterior temporal lobe of humans, macaques and marmosets specialized in the processing of voices, but the exact voice information represented by individual neurons in the aTVA remains obscure.
Here...
Nell'ambito della psicologia cognitiva, negli ultimi decenni si è fatta sempre più spazio l’idea che la cognizione non possa essere studiata indipendentemente dalla corporeità. Il simposio presenta studi recenti condotti in questa ottica di cognizione situata allo scopo di coprire più approcci teorici e riportarne le ricadute in ambito sociale e applicato. Si farà particolare riferimento alla...
Every day we interact with the world around us, and our ability to have successful social interaction depends on our ability to integrate different information coming from different social contexts. To this end, studies on animal models can provide valuable insights, offering a controlled environment to investigate neural mechanisms, explore behavioral dynamics, and understand the evolutionary...
Recent years have witnessed a surge in interest in interoception, the body's internal signaling system. This goes far beyond its well-known role in regulating our physiology and energy demands. It's now understood to be a critical factor in shaping our sense of self and how we think and feel. This symposium delves into the complex relationships between our internal bodily sensations, emotions,...
Over the past few decades, interoception, often referred to as the "gut feeling" aspect of being embodied, has gained recognition as a crucial building block for our sense of self and mind. Its importance extends far beyond its well-established role in regulating complex physiological processes and managing energy demands. In my presentation, I will discuss empirical findings from our lab...
Psychological research frequently relies on Likert-type questionnaires to collect data on psychological traits. While cost-effective and straightforward, the cognitive effort required to complete these questionnaires and the related stress response, known as "response burden," can affect data quality. Response burden includes factors like questionnaire length, complexity, emotional intensity,...
I falsi ricordi hanno importanti conseguenze nel contesto forense, specialmente in relazione alla valutazione della testimonianza di azioni ed eventi che coinvolgono toccamenti a livello corporeo (es., molestie). Su questo tema vi è, tuttavia, un gap in letteratura che il presente studio intende colmare, indagando il misinformation effect nella formazione dei falsi ricordi per il tocco. A 112...
Whether we might distinguish emotional experiences by highlighting specific physiological markers is a debated question. Besides cardiac and respiratory indices, gastrointestinal (GI) signals are emerging as crucial indicators of emotional processes. However, direct evidence of this link remains elusive. To assess the impact of endoluminal markers of GI activity on emotions, we asked a group...
Primates have a complex social life that requires monitoring and understanding the actions and choices of the other group members and learning from others' behavior. While previous behavioral studies have shown monkeys' remarkable observational learning abilities, how the information learned by observation is encoded at the neural level has not been studied yet. In this study, we recorded...
In un mondo che invecchia sempre più rapidamente le tecnologie robotiche trovano sempre più applicazioni. Da una parte per rimpiazzare la forza lavoro mancante nei settori produttivi e, dall’altra, come strumenti di assistenza per una popolazione che dovrebbe perseguire un invecchiamento di successo. I robot assistivi consentono di implementare degli interventi, non farmacologici, per...
Social interactions require predicting and anticipating others’ actions from observation of their movements. Several studies have shown that observer’s motor system is activated by observing others’ actions (motor resonance) and is sensitive to subtle kinematic cues that may allow understanding of the overarching intention. However, the context in which actions are embedded may support social...
The evolution of frontopolar cortex (FPC) has been linked to advanced social skills typical to primates. Until recently, lesion and electrophysiological studies in macaques have revealed its role in exploratory behaviors and self-generated actions. Two of our previous electrophysiological works confirmed and broadened this role. FPC neurons encoded the different stages of a learning process...
As compared to verbal thinking, mental imagery acts as an amplifier since it is based on mechanisms of simulation, but it is not clear whether it may also augment emotion complexity through richer descriptions of emotion experience. Thus, our study aimed to analyze differences in self-reported emotional experience, by comparing affect intensity and indexes of emotion complexity in response to...
The development of brain imaging techniques, particularly fMRI, has fueled a growing body of research on the neural correlates of affect. This field has flourished, with a vast literature investigating the relationship between in-vivo brain activity and the experience, inference, and regulation of emotions, contributing to the "rise of affectivism" (Dukes et al., 2021).
In this talk, I will...
Emotional granularity (EG), the ability to differentiate between specific emotions with a high level of complexity and precision, is commonly assessed behaviorally through experience sampling methods (ESM). Participants rate the intensity of their momentary emotions over several days, and their ratings are then used to compute an EG index via within-person intraclass correlations (ICCs)....
Social interactions imply dynamic and synergic feedback loops in which actions, reactions, and internal states of each partner is modulated by the others. In this framework, interacting brains appear to operate as an integrated system, showing shared neural dynamics coevolving over time. In-phase brain oscillation alignment have been found in interacting people, but also in monkeys, bats, and...
Stress triggers a complex cascade of physiological and psychological responses, affecting not only bodily functions like the gastrointestinal (GI) system but also cognitive processes such as self-focused attention, and eventually social interactions. Despite the common experience of stress-related GI symptoms, objective evidence on its impact on enteric functions in humans remains scarce,...
È noto da tempo che lo scopo finale dell’azione influenza la sua esecuzione. Ad esempio, quando afferriamo una bottiglia, la posizione delle dita cambia a seconda della nostra intenzione, come versare, spostare, o lanciare. Siamo inconsapevoli di queste differenze in esecuzione, e siamo inconsapevoli che l’osservazione delle medesime azioni attiva il nostro sistema sensorimotorio in modo...
Intendiamo indagare e approfondire le importanti connessioni tra riserva cognitiva, invecchiamento e tecnologie assistive nell'ambito della salute mentale degli anziani. La riserva cognitiva si riferisce alla capacità del cervello di compensare il declino cognitivo associato all'invecchiamento, offrendo una preziosa possibilità di posticipare i sintomi della demenza. Tuttavia, per sostenere...
In our daily lives, we are constantly bombarded by a vast amount of information that often appears chaotic. Philosophers and cognitive scientists have long questioned how this apparently chaotic input is transformed into knowledge or mental representations, enabling us to process, store, and manipulate information about the world itself. In my talk, I will first propose that the information we...
Perceptual inaccuracies, such as body size distortions, are key aspects of eating disorders (EDs) and are linked to illness severity. However, it is unclear if this association is related to anhedonia to gentle touch or if perceptual inaccuracies are the prime contributor to EDs risks. Here, we explored whether lower preference for C-Tactile (CT)-mediated gentle touch is a moderator of the...
The Activation-Decision-Construction-Action-Theory (ADCAT), offers a promising avenue for refining malingering detection. ADCAT is a cognitive model for high-stakes deception that employs a cost-benefit formula to elucidate the cognitive, motivational, and social mechanisms underlying the decision to lie or tell the truth. Building upon existing research, the present study aims to explore the...
Perception, awareness, and time have a close relationship that has been investigated for a long time. Here, we replicated a study by Zhu and colleagues (2016), to examine the specific frequency at which CFS can effectively suppress 3D stimuli from consciousness. In CFS experiments, rapidly flashing patterns are typically presented to the dominant eye, while the other eye is directed towards a...
Human responsibility for the environmental crisis has been documented by increasing scientific evidence, and climate change is today a major subject of public concern. Numerous studies have investigated what drives pro-environmental behaviours (i.e. behaviours that seek to minimize the impact of one’s actions on the ecosystem), yet most explanations have been criticised for failing to explain...
Social dilemmas are described as “wicked” when they involve additional obstacles to cooperation, such as unclear individual impact, doubts about the link between cooperation and outcomes, and difficulties tracking contributions. We study the effectiveness of norm-nudging interventions in promoting cooperation in such a scenario: waste sorting. Given the difficulties in implementing economic...
Multi-lab studies, studies that involve different labs in many countries, are a powerful tool to increase the external validity of our results - they increase cultural diversity - and for testing hypotheses whose effect sizes could hardly be studied in a single lab. However, an international collaboration also implies potential sources of heterogeneity in the effect studies, which poses novel...
Background: La relazione positiva tra uno stile di attaccamento sicuro e relazioni soddisfacenti, unite a una migliore regolazione emotiva, in età adulta è ampiamente riconosciuta. Le stesse variabili sono anche state riportate come fattori importanti nello sviluppo della riserva cognitiva (RC), che predice un invecchiamento più sano dal punto di vista cognitivo, fisico ed emotivo. Come queste...
Current psychological models of human reasoning use a small set of assumptions to explain and predict the pattern of competence and errors in solving deductive reasoning problems. Here, we test those theories on a large dataset derived from the CISIA TOLC-PSI test, which collected answers to a wide range of deductive problems from over 40000 prospective university students.
The test included...
The aim of the present study was to explore the link between 2D and 3D indicators of green and grey spaces and the prevalence of psychiatric disorders in a large population-based group from Rome, Italy. Data from 593,894 adults (≥30 years) participating in the Rome Longitudinal Study were analyzed. Mental health outcomes were determined through drug prescriptions (such as antidepressants,...
