Conveners
Mini-talks: ACTION & MOTION (1)
- MODERATORE: Federica Bencivenga (Université de Montréal)
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
