Physical but not virtual presence of others potentiates implicit and explicit learning.

E-learning activities are becoming more and more common. Whilst it is well known that the physical presence of others motivates individuals to engage in perceptual and learning tasks, systematic investigations comparing the effects of physical and virtual co-presence of others on knowledge acquisition are still scarce. Here we investigate the effects of physical and virtual co-presence of others on explicit and implicit learning.

Beauty and Uncertainty as Transformative Factors: A Free Energy Principle Account of Aesthetic Diagnosis and Intervention in Gestalt Psychotherapy.

Drawing from field theory, Gestalt therapy conceives psychological suffering and psychotherapy as two intentional field phenomena, where unprocessed and chaotic experiences seek the opportunity to emerge and be assimilated through the contact between the patient and the therapist (i.e., the intentionality of contacting).

Preferred music listening is associated with perceptual learning enhancement at the expense of self-focused attention.

Can preferred music listening improve following attentional and learning performances? Here we suggest that this may be the case. In Experiment 1, following preferred and non-preferred musical-piece listening, we recorded electrophysiological responses to an auditory roving-paradigm. We computed the mismatch negativity (MMN - the difference between responses to novel and repeated stimulation), as an index of perceptual learning, and we measured the correlation between trial-by-trial EEG responses and the fluctuations in Bayesian Surprise, as a quantification of the neural attunement with stimulus informational value.

The rubber hand illusion in microgravity and water immersion.

Our body has evolved in terrestrial gravity and altered gravitational conditions may affect the sense of body ownership (SBO). By means of the rubber hand illusion (RHI), we investigated the SBO during water immersion and parabolic flights, where unconventional gravity is experienced. Our results show that unconventional gravity conditions remodulate the relative weights of visual, proprioceptive, and vestibular inputs favoring vision, thus inducing an increased RHI susceptibility.

Nice and easy: Mismatch negativity responses reveal a significant correlation between aesthetic appreciation and perceptual learning.

Neurocomputational models of cognition have framed aesthetic appreciation within the domain of knowledge acquisition and learning, suggesting that aesthetic appreciation might be considered as a hedonic feedback on successful perceptual learning dynamics. Such hypothesis, however, has never been empirically demonstrated yet. In order to investigate the relationship between aesthetic appreciation and learning, we measured the EEG mismatch negativity (MMN) response to more or less appreciated musical intervals, which is considered as a reliable index of perceptual learning.

Diametrical modulation of tactile and visual perceptual thresholds during the rubber hand illusion: a predictive coding account.

During the rubber hand illusion (RHI), the synchronous stroking of the participants' concealed hand and a visible rubber hand induces a conflict among visuo-tactile inputs, leading healthy subjects to perceive the illusion of being touched on the rubber hand, as if it were part of their body. The predictive coding theory suggests that the RHI emerges to settle the conflict, attenuating somatosensory inputs in favour of visual ones, which "capture" tactile sensations. Here, we employed the psychophysical measure of perceptual threshold to measure a behavioural correlate of the somatosensory and visual modulations, to better understand the mechanisms underpinning the illusion.

Seeming confines: Electrophysiological evidence of peripersonal space remapping following tool-use in humans.

The peripersonal space (PPS) is a special portion of space immediately surrounding the body, where the integration between tactile stimuli delivered on the body and auditory or visual events emanating from the environment occurs. Interestingly, PPS can widen if a tool is employed to interact with objects in the far space. However, electrophysiological evidence of such tool-use dependent plasticity in the human brain is scarce.

Memorisation and implicit perceptual learning are enhanced for preferred musical intervals and chords.

Is it true that we learn better what we like? Current neuroaesthetic and neurocomputational models of aesthetic appreciation postulate the existence of a correlation between aesthetic appreciation and learning. However, even though aesthetic appreciation has been associated with attentional enhancements, systematic evidence demonstrating its influence on learning processes is still lacking. Here, in two experiments, we investigated the relationship between aesthetic preferences for consonance versus dissonance and the memorisation of musical intervals and chords.

Right and left inferior frontal opercula are involved in discriminating angry and sad facial expressions.

Background: Neuroimaging studies suggest that the inferior frontal operculum (IFO) is part of a neuronal network involved in facial expression processing, but the causal role of this region in emotional face discrimination remains elusive.

Objective: We used cathodal (inhibitory) tDCS to test whether right (r-IFO) and left (l-IFO) IFO play a role in discriminating basic facial emotions in healthy volunteers. Specifically, we tested if the two sites are selectively involved in the processing of facial expressions conveying high or low arousal emotions.

"Stopping for knowledge": The sense of beauty in the perception-action cycle.

According to a millennial-old philosophical debate, aesthetic emotions have been connected to knowledge acquisition. Recent scientific evidence, collected across different disciplinary domains, confirms this link, but also reveals that motor inhibition plays a crucial role in the process. In this review, we discuss multidisciplinary results and propose an original account of aesthetic appreciation (the stopping for knowledge hypothesis) framed within the predictive coding theory.

Following the gold trail: Reward influences on spatial exploration in neglect.

Spatial attention is guided by the perceived salience and relevance of objects in the environment, a process considered to depend on a broad parieto-frontal cortical network. Signals arising from the limbic and nigrostriatal pathways conveying affective and motivational cues are also known to modulate visual selection, but the nature of this contribution and its relation to spatial attention remain unclear. We investigated the role of reward information in 15 patients with left hemispatial neglect and 15 control subjects playing multiple rounds of a virtual foraging game.

Aesthetic appreciation of musical intervals enhances behavioural and neurophysiological indexes of attentional engagement and motor inhibition.

From Kant to current perspectives in neuroaesthetics, the experience of beauty has been described as disinterested, i.e. focusing on the stimulus perceptual features while neglecting self-referred concerns.

Beauty in mind: Aesthetic appreciation correlates with perceptual facilitation and attentional amplification.

Neuroaesthetic research suggests that aesthetic appreciation results from the interaction between the object perceptual features and the perceiver's sensory processing dynamics. In the present study, we investigated the relationship between aesthetic appreciation and attentional modulation at a behavioural and psychophysiological level. In a first experiment, fifty-eight healthy participants performed a visual search task with abstract stimuli containing more or less natural spatial frequencies and subsequently were asked to give an aesthetic evaluation of the images.

Everything is illuminated: Prismatic adaptation lowers visual detection threshold in normal subjects.

Prismatic adaptation (PA) results from repeated ballistic movements of the dominant arm toward visual targets while wearing prisms shifting the visual field laterally (visuomotor prismatic training [VPT]). Following PA, subjects' pointing movements are deviated contralaterally to prismatic shift (aftereffect). The question of whether spatial attention is also biased in the same direction remains controversial in the scientific literature.

Object width modulates object-based attentional selection.

Visual input typically includes a myriad of objects, some of which are selected for further processing. While these objects vary in shape and size, most evidence supporting object-based guidance of attention is drawn from paradigms employing two identical objects. Importantly, object size is a readily perceived stimulus dimension, and whether it modulates the distribution of attention remains an open question.

Oculomotor prismatic training is effective in ameliorating spatial neglect: a pilot study.

Visuomotor prismatic training has been demonstrated to be among the most effective rehabilitative techniques of spatial neglect, a neurological syndrome manifested by a number of right brain-damaged patients characterized by unawareness of the egocentric left half of the world. In the present study, we demonstrate that a novel oculomotor prismatic training procedure only consisting in a sequence of gaze shifts to visual targets, can reduce spatial neglect symptoms. Following oculomotor prismatic training, patients show a significant decrease in neglect severity in straight ahead and paper and pencil tasks.

Leftward oculomotor prismatic training induces a rightward bias in normal subjects.

Wedge prisms shifting the visual field laterally create a mismatch between the straight ahead position signalled by vision and that encoded by extraretinal and head-on-trunk proprioceptive information. Short-term adaptation to left-deviating prisms in normal subjects results in a visuomotor attentional bias towards the right-hand side (aftereffect). Prismatic adaptation (PA) is usually induced through a training consisting in repeated ballistic movements of the dominant arm towards visual targets, while participants are wearing prismatic goggles.

Empathy or Ownership? Evidence from Corticospinal Excitability Modulation during Pain Observation.

Recent studies show that motor responses similar to those present in one's own pain (freezing effect) occur as a result of observation of pain in others. This finding has been interpreted as the physiological basis of empathy. Alternatively, it can represent the physiological counterpart of an embodiment phenomenon related to the sense of body ownership.

Effects of attentional and cognitive variables on unilateral spatial neglect.

Patients with visuospatial neglect when asked to cancel targets partially or totally omit to cancel contralesional stimuli. It has been shown that increasing the attentional demands of the cancellation task aggravates neglect contralesionally. However, some preliminary evidence also suggests that neglect might be worsened by engaging the patient in a demanding, non-spatial, cognitive activity (i.

When your arm becomes mine: pathological embodiment of alien limbs using tools modulates own body representation.

Previous evidence has shown that active tool-use can reshape one's own body schema, extend peripersonal space and modulate the representation of related body parts. Here we investigate the effect of tool-use training on length representation of the contralesional forearm in brain-damaged hemiplegic patients who manifested a pathological embodiment of other people body parts. Four patients and 20 aged-matched healthy-controls were asked to estimate the mid-point of their contralesional forearm before and after 15 min of tool-use training (i.

Long-lasting amelioration of walking trajectory in neglect after prismatic adaptation.

In the present study we explored the effect of prismatic adaptation (PA) applied to the upper right limb on the walking trajectory of a neglect patient with more severe neglect in far than in near space. The patient was asked to bisect a line fixed to the floor by walking across it before and after four sessions of PA distributed over a time frame of 67 days. Gait path was analyzed by means of an optoelectronic motion analysis system.

The Oppel-Kundt illusion is effective in modulating horizontal space representation in humans.

A modified version of the Oppel-Kundt illusion (i.e., a filled space is perceived as more expanded than an empty space of the same length) has been previously employed to distort space representation both in patients with neglect (i.