Spatial navigation is a multifaceted cognitive function essential for planning and finding routes in one's environment [...
View Article and Find Full Text PDF: Gambling Disorder (GD) is a bio-psycho-social disorder resulting from the interaction of clinical, cognitive, and affective factors. Impulsivity is a crucial factor in addiction studies, as it is closely linked to cognitive distortions in GD by encompassing impulsive choices, motor responses, decision-making, and cognitive biases. Also, emotions, mood, temperament, and affective state are crucial in developing and maintaining GD.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn recent years, virtual reality (VR) has become a widely used tool with a plethora of applications in neuroscience [...
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPeople often make inefficient decisions for themselves and the community (e.g. they underuse medical screenings or vaccines and they do not vote) also because of their individual characteristics, such as their level of avoidance or anxiety.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFVisual illusions have long been used to study visual perception and contextual integration. Neuroimaging studies employ illusions to identify the brain regions involved in visual perception and how they interact. We conducted an Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) meta-analysis and meta-analytic connectivity modeling on fMRI studies using static and motion illusions to reveal the neural signatures of illusory processing and to investigate the degree to which different areas are commonly recruited in perceptual inference.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe study of the relationships between mood and creativity is long-standing. In this study, the effects of mood states on artistic creativity were investigated in ninety non-artist participants. Mood states were induced by instructing participants to listen to self-selected happy, sad, or neutral music for ten minutes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe last decade has seen an increase in compulsive behaviours among young adults worldwide, particularly in 2020, during restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Importantly, even if shopping is an ordinary activity in everyday life, it can become a compulsive behaviour for certain individuals. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of working memory and decision-making style in compulsive behaviour.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDivergent thinking is widely recognised as an individual creative potential and an essential factor in fostering creativity since the early stages of life. Albeit previous research revealed that creativity could be pursued through controlled mental processes (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the last decade, several cases affected by Developmental Topographical Disorientation (DTD) have been described. DTD consists of a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting the ability to orient in the environment despite well-preserved cognitive functions, and in the absence of a brain lesion or other neurological or psychiatric conditions. Described cases showed different impairments in navigational skills ranging from topographic memory deficits to landmark agnosia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany automotive industries are developing technologies to assist human drivers in suggesting wiser choices to improve drivers' behaviour. The technology that makes use of this modality is defined as a "digital nudge". An example of a digital nudge is the GPS that is installed on smartphones.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStudies that have shown a distinction between object and spatial imagery suggest more than one type of aphantasia and hyperphantasia, yet this has not been systematically investigated in studies on imagery ability extremes. Also, if the involuntary imagery is preserved in aphantasia and how this condition affects other skills is not fully clear. We collected data on spatial and object imagery, retrospective, and prospective memory, face recognition, and sense of direction (SOD), suggesting a distinction between two subtypes of aphantasia/hyperphantasia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIndividuals with agoraphobia exhibit impaired exploratory activity when navigating unfamiliar environments. However, no studies have investigated the contribution of visuospatial working memory (VSWM) in these individuals' ability to acquire and process spatial information while considering the use of egocentric and allocentric coordinates or environments with or without people. A total of 106 individuals (53 with agoraphobia and 53 controls) navigated in a virtual square to acquire spatial information that included the recognition of landmarks and the relationship between landmarks and themselves (egocentric coordinates) and independent of themselves (allocentric coordinates).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Military pilots show advanced visuospatial skills. Previous studies demonstrate that they are better at mentally rotating a target, taking different perspectives, estimating distances and planning travel and have a topographic memory. Here, we compared navigational cognitive styles between military pilots and people without flight experience.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIndividual factors like gender and familiarity can affect the kind of environmental representation that a person acquires during spatial navigation. Men seem to prefer relying on map-like survey representations, while women prefer using sequential route representations. Moreover, a good familiarity with the environment allows more complete environmental representations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBondi, Danilo, Vittore Verratti, Raffaella Nori, Laura Piccardi, Giulia Prete, Tiziana Pietrangelo, and Luca Tommasi. Spatial abilities at high altitude: Exploring the role of cultural strategies and hypoxia. .
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn the present study, we employed the dual task technique to explore the role of language in topographical working memory when landmarks are present along the path. We performed three experiments to mainly test the effects of language but also motor, spatial motor and spatial environment interferences on topographical working memory. We aimed to clarify both the role of language in navigational working memory per se and the extent to which spatial language interferes with the main task more than the other types of interference.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe role of emotional landmarks in navigation has been scarcely studied. Previous findings showed that valence and arousal of landmarks increase landmark's salience and improve performance in navigational memory tasks. However, no study has directly explored the interplay between valence and arousal of emotionally laden landmarks in embodied and not-embodied navigational tasks.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPeople orient themselves in the environment using three different, hierarchically organized, spatial cognitive styles: landmark, route, and survey. Landmark style is based on a representation encompassing only visual information (terrain features); route style is based on a representation that connects landmarks and routes using an egocentric (body-centred) frame of reference; survey style is based on a global map-like representation that mainly involves an allocentric (world-centred) frame of reference. This study was aimed at investigating whether individual spatial cognitive style affected the way to plan a path when searching for a lost object.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe issue of the format of mental imagery is still an open debate. The classical analogue (depictive)-propositional (descriptive) debate has not provided definitive conclusions. Over the years, the debate has shifted within the frame of the embodied cognition approach, which focuses on the interdependence of perception, cognition and action.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPsychometric and emotional intelligence are considered as two separate theoretical constructs, although each one has been found to correlate to a certain degree with measures of creativity. The aim of the present study was to analyze whether individual differences such as age and gender, together with psychometric intelligence and emotional competence (EC) predicted creativity. We selected a sample of 376 participants aged 12-88 (mean age = 30.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAerosp Med Hum Perform
October 2018
Background: Reading a map requires the ability to judge one's position in a large-scale space from information presented in a small-scale representation. Individuals are more accurate and faster in making judgments when the "up" direction on the map is the same as the "forward" direction of the environment, which is when a map is aligned with the perspective of the spatial layout they have learned (alignment effect). The aim of this study was to explore whether military pilots, who have high spatial abilities, would not show the alignment effect compared with nonpilots.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF