Il concetto di plasticità cerebrale è quasi entrato a far parte del linguaggio comune, comparendo ormai frequentemente tanto nelle comunicazioni scientifiche quanto nei mezzi di comunicazione di massa. Viene usato genericamente per indicare il fatto che il cervello cambia durante l'arco della vita e che può essere plasmato dall'apprendimento; e viene usato per promuovere tecniche di appr...
Il recente sviluppo di sofisticate metodologie di esplorazione funzionale del cervello, quali la risonanza magnetica funzionale (fMRI), ha permesso di esaminare i correlati neurali delle attività cerebrali in maniera non invasiva direttamente nelluomo, in condizioni fisiologiche o in presenza di patologie mentali. Mediante paradigmi sperimentali sempre più raffinati si è cominciato a stud...
Philosophers have traditionally addressed the issue of theory unification in terms of theoretical reduction. Reductive models, however, cannot explain the occurrence of unification in areas of science where successful reductions are hard to find. The goal of this talk is to present a concrete example of unication in biology - the Developmental Synthesis - as a general model of scientic unication, ...
Motor Simulation is thought to be a mechanism allowing automatic mapping of the observed actions from visual to motor domain, i.e., the visual information activates correspondent motor representations of the action observed, as the observer was to perform the action himself. However In light of these considerations how is it possible that we can perform actions that are different from those observ...
In the past, the major focus of research defining the brain-behavior relationship was to identify the segregated brain regions recruited by a given task. More recent developments have emphasized the importance of distributed networks at all levels, from individual neurons to neural populations and brain regions. Defining the human brain connectome has become one of the major goals of neuroscience,...
Vision typically provides the most reliable information about our surrounding space. What happens when you cannot rely on this sensory input due to blindness? I will explore the behavioral and brain reorganizations that occur in blind people for the processing of space. Aside from quantitative differences, I will demonstrate that congenitally blind individuals have a qualitatively different way of...
ilateral symmetry is a prominent feature of the visual world. Not only are human faces and bodies symmetric, but most other living organisms have at least one axis of symmetry, as do manufactured items, such as tools and buildings. I’ll present the results of a series of experiments that shed light on the neural correlates of visual (and haptic) symmetry detection, also considering the case...
According to the ‘embodied cognition’ approach several facets of selfhood are causally related to the physical body and its properties. In cognitive neuroscience, primary sensorimotor signals are thought as integrated and re-represented in various levels of the neurocognitive hierarchy to form a number of neurocognitively distinct bodily models, including unconscious and conscious fac...
The dexterity of the hand in grasping and manipulating objects is one of the distinctive properties of human and non human primates. Grasping movements involve transforming the visual properties of the object into the coordinated activation of arm and hand muscles to move the upper limb in a coherent way. The cerebral cortex, with its descending outputs to the brainstem and the spinal cord is the ...
Several previous studies have shown a muscle-specific facilitation of cortico-spinal excitability during observation of others’ actions (motor resonance). While motor resonance has been shown to be automatically triggered independently from the observer’s effort to simulate the actions, high-level aspects of actions, including the actor’s intention and context, can modulate it...