Giuseppe Cossu

Impairment of actions chains in autism and its possible role in intention understanding.

Experiments in monkeys demonstrated that many parietal and premotor neurons coding a specific motor act (e.g., grasping) show a markedly different activation when this act is part of actions that have different goals (e.g., grasping for eating vs. grasping for placing). Many of these “action-constrained” neurons have mirror properties firing selectively to the observation of the initial motor act of the actions to which they belong motorically. By activating a specific action chain from its very outset, this mechanism allows the observers to have an internal copy of the whole action before its execution, thus enabling them to understand directly the agents intention. Using electromyographic recordings, we show that a similar chained organization exists in typically developing children, whereas it is impaired in children with autism. We propose that, as a consequence of this functional impairment, high-functioning autistic children may understand the intentions of others cognitively but lack the mechanism for understanding them experientially.

Motor Cognition and Its Role in the Phylogeny and Ontogeny of Action Understanding.

Social life rests in large part on the capacity to understand the intentions behind the behavior of others. What are the origins of this capacity? How is one to construe its development in ontogenesis? By assuming that action understanding can be explained only in terms of the ability to read the minds of others--that is, to represent mental states--the traditional view claims that a sharp discontinuity occurs in both phylogeny and ontogeny. Over the last few years this view has been challenged by a number of ethological and psychological studies, as well as by several neurophysiological findings. In particular, the functional properties of the mirror neuron system and its direct matching mechanism indicate that action understanding may be primarily based on the motor cognition that underpins ones own capacity to act. This article aims to elaborate and motivate the pivotal role of such motor cognition, providing a biologically plausible and theoretically unitary account for the phylogeny and ontogeny of action understanding and also its impairment, as in the case of autistic spectrum disorder.

Acquisition of Reading and Written Spelling in a Transparent Orthography: Two Non-Parallel Processes?.

Reading and written spelling skills for words and non-words of varying length and orthographic complexity were investigated in normal Italian first and second graders. The regularity and transparency of the mapping between letters and phonemes make Italian orthography an unlikely candidate for discrepancies between reading and spelling to emerge. This notwithstanding, the results showed that reading accuracy is significantly better than spelling. The difference is particularly striking in first graders, but it is still evident in 2nd graders, though most strongly on non-words. The data show that reading and written spelling are non parallel processes and that the developmental asynchrony reflects a partial structural independence of the two systems.

Motor Representation of Actions in Children with Autism

Background Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are frequently hampered by motor impairment, with difficulties ranging from imitation of actions to recognition of motor intentions. Such a widespread inefficiency of the motor system is likely to interfere on the ontogeny of both motor planning and understanding of the goals of actions, thus delivering its ultimate effects on the emergence of social cognition. Methodology/Principal Findings We investigate the organization of action representation in 15 high functioning ASD (mean age: 8.11) and in two control samples of typically developing (TD) children: the first one, from a primary school, was matched for chronological age (CA), the second one, from a kindergarten, comprised children of much younger age (CY). We used nine newly designed behavioural motor tasks, aiming at exploring three domains of motor cognition: 1) imitation of actions, 2) production of pantomimes, and 3) comprehension of pantomimes. The findings reveal that ASD children fare significantly worse than the two control samples in each of the inspected components of the motor representation of actions, be it the imitation of gestures, the self-planning of pantomimes, or the (verbal) comprehension of observed pantomimes. In the latter task, owing to its cognitive complexity, ASD children come close to the younger TD children’s level of performance; yet they fare significantly worse with respect to their age-mate controls. Overall, ASD children reveal a profound damage to the mechanisms that control both production and pre-cognitive “comprehension” of the motor representation of actions. Conclusions/Significance Our findings suggest that many of the social cognitive impairments manifested by ASD individuals are likely rooted in their incapacity to assemble and directly grasp the intrinsic goal-related organization of motor behaviour. Such impairment of motor cognition might be partly due to an early damage of the Mirror Neuron Mechanism (MNM).

Are cognitive skills a prerequisite for learning to read and write

Abstract This paper reports a single case study of a severely retarded Italian boy. TA has a full-scale I.Q. of 47, a digit span of 2 items, and gross deficits in many praxic tasks. His spoken language is phonologically and syntactically well formed, although in terms of semantic and thematic structure it is highly impaired. There is comparable disorder of verbal comprehension. Despite this background of cognitive failure, TA has acquired excellent reading and writing skills at the level of print-to-sound and sound-to-print transcoding. We discuss the implications of the data for the modularity hypothesis, the vexed issue of cognitive prerequisites for reading, and the role of “metalinguistic awareness” as a determinant of “reading readiness”.

Visual and Phonological Determinants of Misreadings in a Transparent Orthography

Growth of word reading skills was examined in first and second year Italian school children by analysis of the pattern of reading errors. The study was designed to investigate the role of visual vs phonological similarities as causes of misreadings in a transparent orthography. The selection of reading material was tailored to permit a meaningful cross-language comparison with pre-existing findings on English-speaking children. The results showed that, in Italian as in English, spatially-related errors (such as confusingb andd) constituted a minor proportion of the total errors. Errors on vowel and consonant letters that are not spatially confusable accounted for the greater proportion of the total. Moreover, the co-occurrence of spatial and phonological confusability resulted in appreciably more errors than when either occurred without the other. Vowel position in the syllable had no systematic effect on errors. In beginning readers of Italian, consonant errors outnumbered vowel errors by a wide margin; the reverse pattern was found in previous studies on English-speaking children at the same level of schooling. It is proposed that differences between Italian and English in the phonological structure of the lexicon and in the consistency of grapheme-phoneme correspondences account in large part for the differences in quantity and distribution of the errors.

Upper limb children action-observation training (UP-CAT): a randomised controlled trial in Hemiplegic Cerebral Palsy

BackgroundRehabilitation for children with hemiplegic cerebral palsy (HCP) aimed to improve function of the impaired upper limb (UL) uses a wide range of intervention programs. A new rehabilitative approach, called Action-Observation Therapy, based on the recent discovery of mirror neurons, has been used in adult stroke but not in children. The purpose of the present study is to design a randomised controlled trial (RCT) for evaluating the efficacy of Action-Observation Therapy in improving UL activity in children with HCP.Methods/DesignThe trial is designed according to CONSORT Statement. It is a randomised, evaluator-blinded, match-pair group trial. Children with HCP will be randomised within pairs to either experimental or control group. The experimental group will perform an Action-Observation Therapy, called UP-CAT (Upper Limb-Children Action-Observation Training) in which they will watch video sequences showing goal-directed actions, chosen according to children UL functional level, combined with motor training with their hemiplegic UL. The control group will perform the same tailored actions after watching computer games. A careful revision of psychometric properties of UL outcome measures for children with hemiplegia was performed. Assisting Hand Assessment was chosen as primary measure and, based on its calculation power, a sample size of 12 matched pairs was established. Moreover, Melbourne and ABILHAND-Kids were included as secondary measures. The time line of assessments will be T0 (in the week preceding the onset of the treatment), T1 and T2 (in the week after the end of the treatment and 8 weeks later, respectively). A further assessment will be performed at T3 (24 weeks after T1), to evaluate the retention of effects. In a subgroup of children enrolled in both groups functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, exploring the mirror system and sensory-motor function, will be performed at T0, T1 and T2.DiscussionThe paper aims to describe the methodology of a RCT for evaluating the efficacy of Action-Observation Therapy in improving UL activity in children with hemiplegia. This study will be the first to test this new type of treatment in childhood. The paper presents the theoretical background, study hypotheses, outcome measures and trial methodology.Trial RegistrationNCT01016496

Biological Constraints on Literacy Acquisition.

This paper investigates some of the biological constraints that shape the process of literacy acquisition. It explores the possibility of isolating processing components of reading which correspond to computational units of equivalent size in the neural architecture. After reviewing and evaluating the current approaches to the biology of literacy acquisition, the paper considers three interconnected topics: (a) developmental dissociations, (b) early stages of literacy acquisition (in a transparent orthography), and (c) effects of remedial intervention for children with reading disorders. Developmental dissociations between reading and severe mental retardation, motor impairment, congenital anarthria and inaccuracy in phonemic awareness tasks reveal the functional independence of the reading processes. The early stages of literacy acquisition in a transparent orthography show a very steep increase in word and non-word reading accuracy; a speed that could hardly be accounted for by unconstrained learning. Finally, rehabilitation treatments of reading disorders either produce no specific effects, or marginal improvements in reading accuracy, which fade away in the long term. Concurrently, these data suggest that the process of literacy acquisition is largely constrained by a specific biological architecture which mimics the functional properties of a modular system. It is speculated that the core component of reading is a metaphonological parser, designed to perform automatic cross-modal associations between visual and sublexical units, according to the paradigms set up by any orthographic system. The phylogenetic implications of the ‘specificity hypothesis’ are discussed.

Deep dyslexia and the right hemisphere hypothesis: Spoken and written language after extensive left hemisphere lesion in a 12-year-old boy

Abstract The subject of this study was a right-handed Italian boy who sustained extensive left hemisphere damage after a massive subarachnoid haemorrhage at age 12 years; the right hemisphere was fully intact. Two years later, he had a residual anomic aphasia with good sentence construction and comprehension of speech. His reading aloud showed all the characteristics of deep dyslexia, although some minimal ability to read pseudowords remained. Writing and spelling were severely impaired, but without clear qualitative signs of deep dysgraphia. The overall pattern of performance is discussed with regard to the written language capacity of the nondominant right hemisphere and its contribution to normal reading. We conclude that in this case (and perhaps some other cases of acquired deep dyslexia), reading and writing may be mediated by a combination of left and right hemisphere sites.

Reading is reading is reading

We were deeply distressed to find our views on phonological awareness attacked by scholars whose first languages include French and, above all, English. We thought it well known that English orthography bears a striking resemblance to Chinese (Butter-worth & Yin, 1991; Chen, 1993). But should anyone still doubt the analogy, we respectfully submit the following verse (or worse), with apologies to Whitford (1966) and the late, great Ogden Nash: