Exploring divergent kinematics in autism across social and non-social vitality forms.

Vitality Forms (VFs) constitute the dynamic essence of human actions, providing insights into how individuals engage in activities. The ability to perceive and express VFs during interpersonal interactions is pivotal for understanding others' intentions, behaviors, and fostering effective social communication. Despite their ubiquity in all actions, research exploring the role of VFs in neurodivergent conditions related to social and communicative skills, particularly in autism, remains limited.

The role of embodied cognition in action language comprehension in L1 and L2.

In this study we carried out a behavioral experiment comparing action language comprehension in L1 (Italian) and L2 (English). Participants were Italian native speakers who had acquired the second language late (after the age of 10). They performed semantic judgments on L1 and L2 literal, idiomatic and metaphorical action sentences after viewing a video of a hand performing an action that was related or unrelated to the verb used in the sentence.

The role of motor inhibition in implicit negation processing: two Go/No-Go behavioral studies.

Several studies demonstrated that explicit forms of negation processing (e.g., "I don't know") recruits motor inhibitory mechanisms.

On the Embodiment of Negation in Italian Sign Language: An Approach Based on Multiple Representation Theories.

Negation can be considered a shared social action that develops since early infancy with very basic acts of refusals or rejection. Inspired by an approach to the embodiment of concepts known as Multiple Representation Theories (MRT, henceforth), the present paper explores negation as an embodied action that relies on both sensorimotor and linguistic/social information. Despite the different variants, MRT accounts share the basic ideas that both linguistic/social and sensorimotor information concur to the processes of concepts formation and representation and that the balance between these components depends on the kind of concept, the context, or the performed task.

Communicative And Affective Components in Processing Auditory Vitality Forms: An fMRI Study.

In previous studies on auditory vitality forms, we found that listening to action verbs pronounced gently or rudely, produced, relative to a neutral robotic voice, activation of the dorso-central insula. One might wonder whether this insular activation depends on the conjunction of action verbs and auditory vitality forms, or whether auditory vitality forms are sufficient per se to activate the insula. To solve this issue, we presented words not related to actions such as concrete nouns (e.

Exposure to Literary Fiction Is Associated With Lower Psychological Essentialism.

We investigated the impact of exposure to literary and popular fiction on psychological essentialism. Exposure to fiction was measured by using the Author Recognition Test, which allows us to separate exposure to authors of literary and popular fiction. Psychological essentialism was assessed by the discreteness subscale of the psychological essentialism scale in Study 1, and by the three subscales of the same scale (such as discreteness, informativeness, and biological basis) in Study 2 that was pre-registered.

Is motor inhibition involved in the processing of sentential negation? An assessment via the Stop-Signal Task.

In the last decades, the embodied approach to cognition and language gained momentum in the scientific debate, leading to evidence in different aspects of language processing. However, while the bodily grounding of concrete concepts seems to be relatively not controversial, abstract aspects, like the negation logical operator, are still today one of the main challenges for this research paradigm. In this framework, the present study has a twofold aim: (1) to assess whether mechanisms for motor inhibition underpin the processing of sentential negation, thus, providing evidence for a bodily grounding of this logic operator, (2) to determine whether the Stop-Signal Task, which has been used to investigate motor inhibition, could represent a good tool to explore this issue.

A Peircean account of concepts: grounding abstraction in phylogeny through a comparative neuroscientific perspective.

The nature of concepts has always been a hotly debated topic in both philosophy and psychology and, more recently, also in cognitive neuroscience. Different accounts have been proposed of what concepts are. These accounts reflect deeply different conceptions of how the human mind works.

The neural exploitation hypothesis and its implications for an embodied approach to language and cognition: Insights from the study of action verbs processing and motor disorders in Parkinson's disease.

As it is widely known, Parkinson's disease is clinically characterized by motor disorders such as the loss of voluntary movement control, including resting tremor, postural instability, and bradykinesia (Bocanegra et al., 2015; Helmich, Hallett, Deuschl, Toni, & Bloem, 2012; Liu et al., 2006; Rosin, Topka, & Dichgans, 1997).

Language for action: Motor resonance during the processing of human and robotic voices.

In this fMRI study we evaluated whether the auditory processing of action verbs pronounced by a human or a robotic voice in the imperative mood differently modulates the activation of the mirror neuron system (MNs). The study produced three results. First, the activation pattern found during listening to action verbs was very similar in both the robot and human conditions.

How the context matters. Literal and figurative meaning in the embodied language paradigm.

The involvement of the sensorimotor system in language understanding has been widely demonstrated. However, the role of context in these studies has only recently started to be addressed. Though words are bearers of a semantic potential, meaning is the product of a pragmatic process.