Search results for "Psicobiologia"

COGNITIVE PROCESSING OF SENSORY STIMULI IN CERVICAL DYSTONIA

2015

Objective: Investigation of spatial and temporal recognition in Cervical Dystonia (CD). Methods: Four neuropsychological tasks, based on perception in time and space domains of visual and acoustic stimuli, were given to twenty-two CD patients and twenty-two age-matched healthy controls (C). Repeated measure ANOVA was run on group (CD, C), either pooling type of task (spatial, temporal) and type of stimuli (visual, acoustic) factors coming from all tasks either investigating single tasks. Results: In pooled analysis we found that CD were less accurate than C (F¼6.080, p¼0.018). In particular CD were worse in spatial-acoustic task (F¼5.839, p¼0.020). Significant differences were detected, eva…

Effetti della TMS parietale e dei prismi nella percezione di intervalli temporali

2011

Reducing Visuospatial Pseudoneglect in Healthy Subjects by Active Video Gaming

2023

Pseudoneglect phenomenon refers to a condition in which healthy subjects tend to perceive the left side of exactly bisected lines as being slightly longer than the right one. However, behavioural data showed that athletes practising an open-skill sport display less pseudoneglect than the general population. Given the fact that so-called exergames (also known as active video games) are platforms designed to fully mimic sport activity, this work intends to investigate whether and how a one-week training period of exergame open-skill sport can determine a similar decrease in pseudoneglect. Fifteen healthy participants (non-athletes) responded to a visuospatial attention task and a control memo…

Functional somatic complaints in pediatric age: alexithymia or anxiety and depression? An outstanding debate

2020

Recent studies suggest that just focusing on the direct relationship between emotional awareness and somatic complaints may be a simplified perspective, as functional somatic complaints are often associated with anxiety and depression symptoms, increased levels of stress, stronger negative affect, supporting the hypothesis that poor emotion awareness might have an impact on anxiety and depression and secondarily on somatic complaints.

Inhibition, set-shifting and working memory in Global Developmental Delay preschool children

2018

Executive functions (EFs) allow to planning and voluntarily and autonomously produce targeted behaviors, in unusual or complex conditions in which the automated response schemes are not appropriate or sufficient to achieve behavior goal. The aim of this study was to evaluate EFs in preschool children presenting with Global Developmental Delay (GDD). Fifty-two preschool children participated in this study: 20 GDD children and 32 typical developing children (TDC) as control group, enrolled in the schools of Campania and Sicily Regions. All subjects underwent evaluation of the executive functioning through the administration of the Battery for the Assessment of Preschool Executive Functions (B…

Fiat lux: the light became therapy. An overview on the Bright Light Therapy in Alzheimer’s Disease sleep disorders

2020

Background: A system of photosensitive retinal ganglion cells provides ‘non-visual’ information on the circadian sequences of light to the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), which, as the ‘master clock’, synchronizes the chronobiological mechanisms of all the biological clocks. Damage to SCN structure alters circadian behavioral and hormonal rhythms and interferes with a regular sleep-wake pattern. Several studies have shown that, in aging and in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), circadian rhythms change their synchronization with the environment and behavior loses sync with light. Objective: The current overview aims to examine research studies showing the effect of bright light therapy (BLT) on sleep…

ASYMMETRY OF SELECTIVE ATTENTION IN HEALTHY SUBJECTS AND PATIENTS WITH CERVICAL FOCAL DYSTONIA

The environment continuously provides a wealth of information through our senses. This poses a major challenge to our brains to effectively process the relevant pieces of information over space and time, involving attentional processes. Attention selects, modulates and sustains focus on information most relevant for behaviour going beyond our limited capacity to process competing options. Voluntary allocation of attention to features, objects, or regions in space is controlled by top-down mechanisms. On the other hand, salient stimuli can automatically attract attention, even though the subject does not have intentions to attend to these stimuli. A key question is how attention is shaped by…

Dynamic aphasia and the generation of language

2004

Severely reduced propositional speech in the context of intact nominal language skills (i.e., repetition, naming, comprehension, and reading) is the hallmark of dynamic aphasia (Luria, 1970). Recent evidence suggests there may be different types of dynamic aphasia as some patients do not produce any response on verbal generation tasks, whilst others are able to perform normally on verbal genera- tion tasks. For example, Robinson and colleagues (Robinson, Blair, & Cipolotti, 1998; Robinson, Shallice, & Cipolotti, 2004) reported two dynamic aphasics who failed to produce a verbal response when many verbal response options were activated by a stimulus, but not when a dominant response was avai…

A failure of high level verbal response selection in progressive dynamic aphasia.

2005

Different theoretical interpretations have been offered in order to account for a specific language impairment termed dynamic aphasia. We report a patient (CH) who presented with a dynamic aphasia in the context of nonfluent progressive aphasia. CH had the hallmark of reduced spontaneous speech in the context of preserved naming, reading, and single word repetition and comprehension. Articulatory and grammatical difficulties were also present. CH had a very severe verbal generation impairment despite being able to describe pictorial scenes and action sequences well. In the experimental investigations CH was severely impaired in word, phrase, and sentence generation tasks when many competing…

An investigation of the neural circuits underlying reaching and reach-to-grasp movements: from planning to execution

2014

Experimental evidence suggests the existence of a sophisticated brain circuit specifically dedicated to reach-to-grasp planning and execution, both in human and non-human primates (Castiello, 2005). Studies accomplished by means of neuroimaging techniques suggest the hypothesis of a dichotomy between a "reach-to-grasp" circuit, involving the anterior intraparietal area, the dorsal and ventral premotor cortices (PMd and PMv - Castiello and Begliomini, 2008; Filimon, 2010) and a "reaching" circuit involving the medial intraparietal area and the superior parieto-occipital cortex (Culham et al., 2006). However, the time course characterizing the involvement of these regions during the planning …