Franco Fabbro

Motor facilitation during action observation: topographic mapping of the target muscle and influence of the onlooker's posture

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) studies report that viewing a given action performed by a model activates the neural representation of the onlookers muscles that are activated during the actual execution of the observed action. Here we sought to determine whether this mirror observation‐execution facilitation reflects only muscular specificity or whether it is also influenced by postural congruency between onlooker/model body parts. We recorded motor potentials evoked by single‐pulse TMS from the first dorsal interosseous (FDI) and abductor digiti minimi (ADM) muscles during observation of the right index and little finger abduction/adduction movements of models who kept their hands in a palm‐down or palm‐up position. Moreover, in different experiments observers kept their right hand palm down or palm up. Selective motor facilitation was observed during observation of movements that map the motor function of the targeted muscles, regardless of the posture of the observed hand. Modulation of FDI, however, was obtained only when participants kept their hand palm down; by contrast, modulation of ADM was obtained only when participants kept their hand palm up. Interestingly, electromyographic recordings showed that FDI is mostly active when index abduction/adduction movements are performed in the palm‐down position, whereas ADM is mostly active when little finger abduction/adduction movements are performed in the palm‐up position. Results show that the influence of the onlookers hand posture is comparable in action execution and observation, thus indicating a fine‐grain functional correspondence between these two processes.

Narrative language in Williams Syndrome and its neuropsychological correlates

Abstract The cognitive profile of individuals with Williams Syndrome (WS) shows peaks and troughs, with fairly good linguistic performance and a well described weakness in visual-spatial abilities. This study aims to describe in detail the narrative abilities of a group of 9 WS participants who underwent careful cognitive evaluation to assess their visual-spatial abilities, sustained attention, phonological short-term memory and lexical as well as grammatical skills in tests of expressive and receptive language. Furthermore, they performed a picture-description task in order to elicit more fluid and communicative speech samples, which were then compared with those provided by a group of 29 children with typically developing language (TD) matched for mental age. The WS participants showed visual-spatial deficits but scored within the normal range, according to their mental age, in the linguistic assessment. For the narrative task, they showed good phonological, lexical and syntactic skills, but their story descriptions were less effective than those produced by the TD group on measures assessing global coherence and lexical informativeness, showing dissociation between macro and microlinguistic abilities. These impairments were not correlated to the visual-spatial disturbances. These data suggest that the domain of discourse processing is a relative weakness in WS individuals.

Mindfulness-oriented meditation improves self-related character scales in healthy individuals

Previous studies have shown that mindfulness meditation may improve well-being in healthy individuals and be effective in the treatment of mental and neurological disorders. Here, we investigated the effects of an 8-week mindfulness-mediation program on the personality profiles of three groups of healthy individuals with no previous experience with meditation as compared to a control group not enrolled in any training. Personality profiles were obtained through the Temperament and Character Inventory (Cloninger et al., 1993). In the experimental groups, significant increments after the training were obtained in all the three character scales describing the levels of self maturity at the intrapersonal (Self-Directedness), interpersonal (Cooperativeness), and transpersonal (Self-Transcendence) levels. No changes were found in the control group. Strikingly, these effects were significant only in those groups who were engaged in consistent daily meditation practice but not in the group who attended the meditation training but were less consistent in home practice. Since higher scores in the character scales are associated to a lower risk of personality disorder, we propose that the increase of self maturity after the training may be an important mechanism for the effectiveness of mindfulness-oriented meditation in psychotherapeutic contexts.

Neural convergence for language comprehension and grammatical class production in highly proficient bilinguals is independent of age of acquisition

In bilinguals, native (L1) and second (L2) languages are processed by the same neural resources that can be modulated by age of second language acquisition (AOA), proficiency level, and daily language exposure and usage. AOA seems to particularly affect grammar processing, where a complete neural convergence has been shown only in bilinguals with parallel language acquisition from birth. Despite the fact that proficiency-related neuroanatomical differences have been well documented in language comprehension (LC) and production, few reports have addressed the influence of language exposure. A still unanswered question pertains to the role of AOA, when proficiency is comparably high across languages, with respect to its modulator effects both on LC and production. Here, we evaluated with fMRI during sentence comprehension and verb and noun production tasks, two groups of highly proficient bilinguals only differing in AOA. One group learned Italian and Friulian in parallel from birth, whereas the second group learned Italian between 3 and 6 years. All participants were highly exposed to both languages, but more to Italian than Friulian. The results indicate a complete overlap of neural activations for the comprehension of both languages, not only in bilinguals from birth, but also in late bilinguals. A slightly extra activation in the left thalamus for the less-exposed language confirms that exposure may affect language processing. Noteworthy, we report for the first time that, when proficiency and exposure are kept high, noun and verb production recruit the same neural networks for L1 and L2, independently of AOA. These results support the neural convergence hypothesis.

Mindfulness-Oriented Meditation for Primary School Children: Effects on Attention and Psychological Well-Being

Mindfulness-based interventions are increasingly being used as methods to promote psychological well-being of clinical and non-clinical adult populations. Much less is known, however, on the feasibility of these forms of mental training on healthy primary school students. Here, we tested the effects of a mindfulness-meditation training on a group of 16 healthy children within 7–8 years of age from an Italian primary school. An active control condition focused on emotion awareness was employed on a group of 15 age-matched healthy children from the same school. Both programs were delivered by the same instructors three times per week, for 8 total weeks. The same main teacher of the two classes did not participate in the trainings but she completed questionnaires aimed at giving comprehensive pre-post training evaluations of behavior, social, emotion, and attention regulation skills in the children. A children’s self-report measure of mood and depressive symptoms was also used. From the teacher’s reports we found a specific positive effect of the mindfulness-meditation training in reducing attention problems and also positive effects of both trainings in reducing children’s internalizing problems. However, subjectively, no child in either group reported less depressive symptoms after the trainings. The findings were interpreted as suggestive of a positive effect of mindfulness-meditation on several children’s psychological well-being dimensions and were also discussed in light of the discrepancy between teacher and children’s reports. More generally, the results were held to speak in favor of the effectiveness of mindfulness-based interventions for healthy primary school children.

Differences in native and foreign language repetition tasks between subjects with William's and Down's syndromes

Abstract The capacity to repeat verbal stimuli in the mother tongue (Italian) and in unfamiliar (or scarcely familiar) foreign languages (English and German) was compared across Williams Syndrome (WS) subjects, Downs Syndrome (DS) subjects and mental-age-matched control subjects. In all repetition tasks (words, nonwords and sentences) in the mother tongue WS subjects performed significantly better than DS subjects. In the sentence repetition task in Italian WS subjects scored significantly lower than controls. In the sentence repetition task in unfamiliar (or scarcely familiar) foreign languages WS subjects performed significantly better than DS subjects but scored significantly lower than controls. The lower performances of WS subjects may be related to a dysfunction of the basal ganglia involved in syntactic processing, while the lower performances of DS subjects may be explained in terms of an impairment of the fronto-cerebellar structures involved in articulation and working memory.

Motor simulation during action word processing in neurosurgical patients

The role that human motor areas play in linguistic processing is the subject of a stimulating debate. Data from nine neurosurgical patients with selective lesions of the precentral and postcentral sulcus could provide a direct answer as to whether motor area activation is necessary for action word processing. Action-related verbs (face-, hand-, and feet-related verbs plus neutral verbs) silently read were processed for (i) motor imagery by vividness ratings and (ii) frequency ratings. Although no stimulus- or task-dependent modulation was found in the RTs of healthy controls, patients showed a task × stimulus interaction resulting in a stimulus-dependent somatotopic pattern of RTs for the imagery task. A lesion affecting a part of the cortex that represents a body part also led to slower RTs during the creation of mental images for verbs describing actions involving that same body part. By contrast, no category-related differences were seen in the frequency judgment task. This task-related dissociation suggests that the sensorimotor area is critically involved in processing action verbs only when subjects are simulating the corresponding movement. These findings have important implications for the ongoing discussion regarding the involvement of the sensorimotor cortex in linguistic processing.

Mental spatial transformations of objects and bodies: Different developmental trajectories in children from 7 to 11 years of age.

Despite the large body of knowledge on adults suggesting that 2 basic types of mental spatial transformation--namely, object-based and egocentric perspective transformations--are dissociable and specialized for different situations, there is much less research investigating the developmental aspects of such spatial transformation systems. Here, an own body transformation paradigm and a letter transformation task were employed in a group of children ranging from 7 to 11 years of age to respectively investigate the development of egocentric perspective transformations and object-related transformations. A group of 30 young adults was also administered the 2 experimental tasks. Moreover, the Temperament and Character Inventory (Cloninger, Przybeck, Svrakic, & Wetzel, 1994) was also administered to children and adults with the goal of testing for possible influences of personality traits on imagined perspective transformation abilities. We found that egocentric perspective transformations develop later than object-based transformations--namely, from 8 rather than 7 years of age. We also found that high scores on temperament and character scales reflecting the acceptance of others (i.e., cooperativeness) were positively related to the ability to engage in imagined perspective transformations, especially when such ability first appears (i.e., at 8 years of age). These findings were held to support the view that the 2 mental spatial transformation systems are separated in that they follow 2 different developmental trajectories and are differentially influenced by personality traits in children.

Mortality salience in virtual reality experiences and its effects on users attitudes towards risk

Virtual reality (VR) is increasingly used as a persuasive technology for attitude and behavior change. This paper considers Terror Management Theory (TMT), one of the notable theories that have not been considered so far in persuasive technology, and aims at exploring its use in VR experiences. First, we show that a VR experience can be used to effectively elicit mortality salience (MS), which makes TMT applicable. Then, we evaluate the effects of the VR experience on attitudes towards risk. Wearing a head-mounted display (HMD), participants explored one of two virtual environments (VEs). In a first group of participants, the VE represented a cemetery with MS cues like tombs and burial recesses. In a second group of participants, the MS cues were removed, and the VE looked like a public park. Results show that the MS cues manipulation changed the effects of the VR experience on users attitudes towards risk, as TMT would predict. Moreover, results revealed a relationship between MS elicited through VR and physiological correlates of arousal. Finally, we show that users personality traits can moderate the effects of the VR experience on attitudes towards risk. Virtual reality (VR) is increasingly used as a persuasive technology.This paper explores the use of Terror Management Theory (TMT) in VR experiences.We show that mortality salience (MS) can be elicited in VR, making TMT applicable.The MS manipulation had an effect on users attitudes towards risk and arousal.Personality traits of users can moderate the effects of the VR experience.

A multimodal mapping study of conduction aphasia with impaired repetition and spared reading aloud

The present study explores the functional neuroanatomy of the phonological production system in an Italian aphasic patient (SP) who developed conduction aphasia of the reproduction type following brain surgery. SP presented with two peculiar features: (1) his lesion was localized in the superior temporal gyrus, just posterior to the primary auditory cortex and anterior/inferior to and neighboring the Sylvian parietal temporal (Spt) area, and (2) he presented with severely impaired repetition and spelling from dictation of words and pseudowords but spared reading-aloud of words and pseudowords. Structural, functional, fiber tracking and intraoperative findings were combined to analyze SPs pattern of performance within a widely used sensorimotor control scheme of speech production. We found a dissociation between an interrupted sector of the arcuate fasciculus terminating in STG, known to be involved in phonological processing, and a part of the arcuate fasciculus terminating in MTG, which is held to be involved in lexical-semantic processing. We argue that this phonological deficit should be interpreted as a disorder of the feedback system, in particular of the auditory and somatosensory target maps, which are assumed to be located along the Spt area. In patient SP, the spared part of the left arcuate fasciculus originating in MTG may support an unimpaired reading performance, while the damaged part of the left arcuate fasciculus originating in STG may be responsible for his impaired repetition and spelling from dictation.