I like the way you move: how animate motion affects visual attention in early human infancy.

The ability to detect animates (as compared with inanimates) rapidly is advantageous for human survival. Due to its relevance, not only the adult human brain has evolved specific neural mechanisms to discriminate animates, but it has been proposed that selection finely tuned the human visual attention system to prioritize visual cues that signal the presence of living things. Among them, animate motion-i.

Bioprinting Soft 3D Models of Hematopoiesis using Natural Silk Fibroin-Based Bioink Efficiently Supports Platelet Differentiation.

Hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPCs) continuously generate platelets throughout one's life. Inherited Platelet Disorders affect ≈ 3 million individuals worldwide and are characterized by defects in platelet formation or function. A critical challenge in the identification of these diseases lies in the absence of models that facilitate the study of hematopoiesis ex vivo.

The Acceptability of a Psychoeducation and Skill-Based Training for Carers and Teachers to Cope with Risky Behaviours in Adolescence.

Childhood and adolescence psychopathology is associated with an increased risk of psychological difficulties in adulthood. Early interventions for youth should provide carers and teachers with knowledge and skills to respond to adolescents' risky behaviours. This study evaluated the acceptability and effectiveness of a single 3-h workshop, combining psychoeducation and skills training to promote knowledge about, and confidence to address, adolescents' risky behaviours in carers and teachers of adolescents aged 10-14.

Abnormal visual attention to simple social stimuli in 4-month-old infants at high risk for Autism.

Despite an increasing interest in detecting early signs of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), the pathogenesis of the social impairments characterizing ASD is still largely unknown. Atypical visual attention to social stimuli is a potential early marker of the social and communicative deficits of ASD. Some authors hypothesized that such impairments are present from birth, leading to a decline in the subsequent typical functioning of the learning-mechanisms.

Impact of the COVID-19 Italian Lockdown on the Physiological and Psychological Well-Being of Children with Fragile X Syndrome and Their Families.

On 10 March 2020, in Italy, a total lockdown was put in place to limit viral transmission of COVID-19 infection as much as possible. Research on the psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted detrimental effects in children and their parents. However, little is known about such effects in children with neurodevelopment disorders and their caregivers.

Newborns' sensitivity to speed changes as a building block for animacy perception.

The human visual system can discriminate between animate beings vs. inanimate objects on the basis of some kinematic cues, such as starting from rest and speed changes by self-propulsion. The ontogenetic origin of such capability is still under debate.

Covert orienting of attention in 3-month-old infants: The case of biological motion.

Humans attend to different positions in the space either by moving their eyes or by moving covertly their attention. The development of covert attention occurs during the first year of life. According to Colombo's model of attention (2001), within the first years there is a significant change in infants' visuo-spatial orienting mechanisms, from a predominantly overt form to a covert orienting starting from 4 to 5 months of life.

Two-day-old newborns learn to discriminate accelerated-decelerated biological kinematics from constant velocity motion.

Already in uterus the hand moves with the typical accelerated-decelerated kinematics of goal-directed actions and, from the twenty-second week of pregnancy, the unborn shows the ability to modulate the velocity of the movement depending on the nature of the target. According to the direct matching hypothesis, this motor knowledge may be sufficient to attune neonates' motion perception-like adults'-to biological kinematics. Using dots configuration motions which varied with respect to the kinematics of goal-directed actions, we observed that two-day-old human newborns did not show any spontaneous preference for either biological accelerated-decelerated motion or non-biological constant velocity motion when these were simultaneously presented in a standard preferential looking paradigm.

The neural correlates of orienting to walking direction in 6-month-old infants: An ERP study.

The ability to detect social signals represents a first step to enter our social world. Behavioral evidence has demonstrated that 6-month-old infants are able to orient their attention toward the position indicated by walking direction, showing faster orienting responses toward stimuli cued by the direction of motion than toward uncued stimuli. The present study investigated the neural mechanisms underpinning this attentional priming effect by using a spatial cueing paradigm and recording EEG (Geodesic System 128 channels) from 6-month-old infants.

A mental number line in human newborns.

Humans represent numbers on a mental number line with smaller numbers on the left and larger numbers on the right side. A left-to-right oriented spatial-numerical association, (SNA), has been demonstrated in animals and infants. However, the possibility that SNA is learnt by early exposure to caregivers' directional biases is still open.

Newborns are sensitive to the correspondence between auditory pitch and visuospatial elevation.

Amodal (redundant) and arbitrary cross-sensory feature associations involve the context-insensitive mapping of absolute feature values across sensory domains. Cross-sensory associations of a different kind, known as correspondences, involve the context-sensitive mapping of relative feature values. Are such correspondences in place at birth (like amodal associations), or are they learned from subsequently experiencing relevant feature co-occurrences in the world (like arbitrary associations)? To decide between these two possibilities, human newborns (median age = 44 hr) watched animations in which two balls alternately rose and fell together in space.

Visual cues of motion that trigger animacy perception at birth: the case of self-propulsion.

Self-propelled motion is a powerful cue that conveys information that an object is animate. In this case, animate refers to an entity's capacity to initiate motion without an applied external force. Sensitivity to this motion cue is present in infants that are a few months old, but whether this sensitivity is experience-dependent or is already present at birth is unknown.

Walking direction triggers visuo-spatial orienting in 6-month-old infants and adults: An eye tracking study.

The present study investigates whether the walking direction of a biological motion point-light display can trigger visuo-spatial attention in 6-month-old infants. A cueing paradigm and the recording of eye movements in a free viewing condition were employed. A control group of adults took part in the experiment.