Publications by authors named "F Doricchi"
Introduction: Time is a crucial abstract construct, allowing us to perceive the duration of events. Working memory (WM) plays an important role in manipulating and storing the different features of environmental stimuli, including temporal features. Different brain structures, including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, are involved in time processing.
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- The study investigates how our brains associate small and large numbers with spatial positions (left for smaller, right for larger) using fMRI technology and a go/no-go task.
- It found that this space-number association (SNA) only appeared when tasks were framed in a joint-code format, where participants responded faster to congruent conditions (e.g., small number with left arrows).
- The research highlights that SNA is linked to increased brain activity and connectivity in specific regions, suggesting that the association is driven by top-down cognitive processes rather than an inherent spatial coding of numbers.
Humans use space to think of and communicate the flow of time. This spatial representation of time is influenced by cultural habits so that in left-to-right reading cultures, short durations and past events are mentally positioned to the left of long durations and future events. The STEARC effect (Space Temporal Association of Response Codes) shows a faster classification of short durations/past events with responses on the left side of space and of long durations/future events with responses on the right side.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Previous investigations on healthy humans showed conflicting evidence regarding the impact of mood on working memory performance. A systematic investigation of how mood affects apathy levels in healthy participants is currently missing.
Methods: We administered a visuospatial (VS) and a numerical (N) n-back task to a sample of 120 healthy individuals.
Previous studies have reported that larger visual stimuli are perceived as lasting longer than smaller ones. However, this effect disappears when participants provide a qualitative judgment, by stating whether two stimuli have the "same or different" duration, instead of providing an explicit quantitative judgment (which stimulus lasts longer). Here, we extended these observations to the interaction between the numerosity of visual stimuli, i.
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