Publications by authors named "Giuseppe di Pellegrino"

Background: Aging can lead to a decline in motor control. While age-related motor impairments have been documented, the underlying changes in cortico-cortical interactions remain poorly understood.

Methods: We took advantage of the high temporal resolution of dual-site transcranial magnetic stimulation (dsTMS) to investigate how communication between higher-order rostral premotor regions and the primary motor cortex (M1) influences motor control in young and elderly adults.

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Article Synopsis
  • Motivational cues, whether appetitive (reward-related) or aversive (punishment-related), influence how people make value-based decisions and can alter the intensity and direction of their actions.
  • A study comparing males and females found that while both sexes are similarly influenced in the direction of their actions by these cues, only males showed an increased intensity of response to appetitive cues.
  • The findings suggest that biological sex plays a significant role in how motivation impacts decision-making, highlighting the need for future research to consider sex differences in these processes.
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Amidst the replicability crisis, promoting transparency and rigor in research becomes imperative. The Pavlovian-to-Instrumental Transfer (PIT) paradigm is increasingly used in human studies to offer insights into how Pavlovian cues, by anticipating rewards or punishments, influence decision-making and potentially contribute to the development of clinical conditions. However, research on this topic faces challenges, including methodological variability and the need for standardized approaches, which can undermine the quality and robustness of experimental findings.

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Pain-related motor adaptations may be enacted predictively at the mere threat of pain, before pain occurrence. Yet, in humans, the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying motor adaptations in anticipation of pain remain poorly understood. We tracked the evolution of changes in corticospinal excitability (CSE) as healthy adults learned to anticipate the occurrence of lateralized, muscle-specific pain to the upper limb.

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It is still unclear how the human brain consolidates aversive (e.g., traumatic) memories and whether this process can be disrupted.

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Background And Hypothesis: Humans develop a constellation of different representations of the external environment, even in the face of the same sensory exposure. According to the Bayesian framework, these differentiations could be grounded in a different weight assigned to prior knowledge vs. new external inputs in predictive inference.

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Fear conditioning is used to investigate the neural bases of threat and anxiety, and to understand their flexible modifications when the environment changes. This study aims to examine the temporal evolution of brain rhythms using electroencephalographic signals recorded in healthy volunteers during a protocol of Pavlovian fear conditioning and reversal. Power changes and Granger connectivity in theta, alpha, and gamma bands are investigated from neuroelectrical activity reconstructed on the cortex.

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The ability to flexibly adjust one's threat predictions to meet the current environmental contingencies is crucial to survival. Nevertheless, its neural oscillatory correlates remain elusive in humans. Here, we tested whether changes in theta and alpha brain oscillations mark the updating of threat predictions and correlate with response of the peripheral nervous system.

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Prompt response to environmental threats is critical to survival. Previous research has revealed mechanisms underlying threat-conditioned physiological responses, but little is known about how threats shape action. Here we tested if threat learning shapes the kinematics of reaching in human adults.

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Predictive coding theory suggests that prior knowledge assists human behavior, from simple perceptual formation to complex decision-making processes. Here, we manipulate prior knowledge by inducing uninformative vs. informative (low and high) target probability expectation in a perceptual decision-making task while simultaneously recording EEG.

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When repeatedly paired with rewarding outcomes (i.e., Pavlovian conditioning), environmental cues may acquire predictive and motivational significance and later enhance instrumental responding for the same (i.

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Understanding transient dynamics of the autonomic nervous system during fear learning remains a critical step to translate basic research into treatment of fear-related disorders. In humans, it has been demonstrated that fear learning typically elicits transient heart rate deceleration. However, classical analyses of heart rate variability (HRV) fail to disentangle the contribution of parasympathetic and sympathetic systems, and crucially, they are not able to capture phasic changes during fear learning.

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Growing evidence suggests that humans and other animals assign value to a stimulus based not only on its inherent rewarding properties, but also on the costs of the action required to obtain it, such as the cost of time. Here, we examined whether such cost also occurs for mentally simulated actions. Healthy volunteers indicated their subjective value for snack foods while the time to imagine performing the action to obtain the different stimuli was manipulated.

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Despite the widespread use of the delay discounting task in clinical and non-clinical contexts, several task versions are available in the literature, making it hard to compare results across studies. Moreover, normative data are not available to evaluate individual performances. The present study aims to propose a unified version of the delay discounting task based on monetary rewards and it provides normative values built on an Italian sample of 357 healthy participants.

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The brain is a predictive machine. Converging data suggests a diametric predictive strategy from autism spectrum disorders (ASD) to schizophrenic spectrum disorders (SSD). Whereas perceptual inference in ASD is rigidly shaped by incoming sensory information, the SSD population is prone to overestimate the precision of their priors' models.

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Environmental cues may anticipate the availability of rewards, thus acting as a guide towards a specific choice (i.e., cue-guided choices).

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Previous research indicates that the size of interpersonal space at which the other is perceived as intrusive (permeability) and the ability to adapt interpersonal distance based on contextual factors (flexibility) are altered in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). However, the neurophysiological basis of these alterations remains poorly understood. To fill this gap, we used fMRI and assessed interpersonal space preferences of individuals with ASD before and after engaging in cooperative and non-cooperative social interactions.

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Interpersonal space (IPS) is the area around the body that individuals maintain between themselves and others during social interactions. When others violate our IPS, feeling of discomfort rise up, urging us to move farther away and reinstate an appropriate interpersonal distance. Previous studies showed that when individuals are exposed to closeness of an unknown person (a confederate), the skin conductance response (SCR) increases.

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The role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in human pavlovian threat conditioning has been relegated largely to the extinction or reversal of previously acquired stimulus-outcome associations. However, recent neuroimaging evidence questions this view by also showing activity in the vmPFC during threat acquisition. Here we investigate the casual role of vmPFC in the acquisition of pavlovian threat conditioning by assessing skin conductance response (SCR) and declarative memory of stimulus-outcome contingencies during a differential pavlovian threat-conditioning paradigm in eight patients with a bilateral vmPFC lesion, 10 with a lesion outside PFC and 10 healthy participants (each group included both females and males).

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In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in research examining interpersonal space, i.e., the sector of space immediately around the body in which we interact with other people.

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Erasing maladaptive memories has been a challenge for years. A way to change fear memories is to target the process of reconsolidation, during which a retrieved memory transiently returns to a labile state, amenable to modification [1, 2]. Disruption of human fear-memory reconsolidation has been classically attempted with pharmacological [3] or behavioral (e.

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By anticipating potential rewards, external cues can guide behavior to achieve a goal. Whether the conscious elaboration of these cues is necessary to elicit cue-guided choices is still unknown. The goal of the present study is to test whether the subliminal presentation of a visual cue previously paired with a reward is sufficient to bias responses that can lead to the same or a similar reward.

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