Across two experiments, we sought to investigate the necessity of the right Prefrontal Cortex in successful control over interfering memories during se-lective retrieval, as indexed by the retrieval-induced forgetting effect (RIF), and... more
Across two experiments, we sought to investigate the necessity of the right Prefrontal Cortex in successful control over interfering memories during se-lective retrieval, as indexed by the retrieval-induced forgetting effect (RIF), and the relationship between this ability and efficient motor stopping. To this end, we recruited 53 (experiment 1) and 72 (experiment 2) healthy volun-teers, which were randomly assigned to three groups that received either an-odal, cathodal, or sham trascranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) to the right Inferior Frontal Gyrus while performing a standard retrieval-practice paradigm with category-exemplars word pairs, which is typically employed to induce RIF. In experiment 2 participants also performed a stop-signal task (SST) during tDCS. We analyzed memory performance data by fitting logis-tic mixed effects models in R, with item type, stimulation group, and the pos-sible interaction term as fixed effects, and subject and category as random intercept terms, in order to account for both subject- and item-related var-iability. In both experiments, RIF was impaired under real tDCS compared to sham tDCS, but only for a subset of the stimulus categories. In addition to that, we did not find neither effects of tDCS on motor stopping perfor-mance in the SST, nor a relationship between motor stopping and memory control abilities. Overall, our results support the notion that tDCS over the right Prefrontal Cortex can alter memory control performance as indexed by RIF. However, further studies are needed in order to clarify the factors that moderate the effects of tDCS on RIF across different stimulus categorie
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Prognostication after cardiac arrest and target temperature management (TTM) is challenging. A multimodal approach including somatosensory evoked potentials (SSEPs) has been proposed. Early positive predictors of neurological recovery are... more
Prognostication after cardiac arrest and target temperature management (TTM) is challenging. A multimodal approach including somatosensory evoked potentials (SSEPs) has been proposed. Early positive predictors of neurological recovery are lacking. The aim of the study was to determine the association between N20 waveform amplitude of SSEPs and good neurological outcome in comatose cardiac arrest survivors.
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People with mental disorders often suffer from physical and social disabilities and need help in their daily life activities [1]. Development of their autonomy in these activities (e.g., personal and home cleanliness, meal preparation) is... more
People with mental disorders often suffer from physical and social disabilities and need help in their daily life activities [1]. Development of their autonomy in these activities (e.g., personal and home cleanliness, meal preparation) is positively associated with their rehabilitation process. Research has shown that community-based rehabilitation is effective in supporting the development of different forms of autonomy and improving life quality for this kind of patients [2].
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Background and aimsMany psychopathologies, including addictions, are characterized by inhibitory control deficits. In this regard, recent studies on substance-related disorders (SRD) have shown an impairment in the ability to inhibit... more
Background and aimsMany psychopathologies, including addictions, are characterized by inhibitory control deficits. In this regard, recent studies on substance-related disorders (SRD) have shown an impairment in the ability to inhibit potentially interfering memories, despite preserved motor inhibition. To investigate whether the same dissociation could also characterize gambling disorder (GD) in a transdiagnostic perspective, we tested both cognitive and motor inhibitory processes through dedicated tasks, for the first time in this behavioral addiction.Methods30 outpatients with GD and 30 healthy controls performed a go/no-go task addressing the integrity of motor inhibition, and the Retrieval Practice Paradigm, a task addressing the integrity of memory inhibition as indexed by the Retrieval-Induced Forgetting (RIF) effect. Self-report questionnaires assessing impulsivity were also administered.ResultsWhereas RIF was similar across the two groups, patients showed more commission err...
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Individuals with schizophrenia face important life decisions about their health and finances. However, deficits in inhibitory and attentional processes may undermine their decision-making competence. Research on decision making in... more
Individuals with schizophrenia face important life decisions about their health and finances. However, deficits in inhibitory and attentional processes may undermine their decision-making competence. Research on decision making in schizophrenia has mainly focused on decisions under risk or ambiguity, identifying selective impairments in rewards processing, but several important facets of decision-making competence have not been investigated. The present research aims to address this knowledge gap by investigating two key aspects of decision-making competence: (1) the ability to correctly apply strategies for choosing among options with multiple attributes, such as consumer products or health care plans, and (2) the ability to choose options with the best future outcomes regardless of irrecoverable past investments \u2013 also referred to as \u201csunk costs\u201d
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Retrieving information from episodic memory may result in later inaccessibility of related but task-irrelevant information. This phenomenon, known as retrieval-induced forgetting, is thought to represent a specific instance of broader... more
Retrieving information from episodic memory may result in later inaccessibility of related but task-irrelevant information. This phenomenon, known as retrieval-induced forgetting, is thought to represent a specific instance of broader cognitive control mechanisms, that would come into play during memory retrieval, whenever non-target competing memories interfere with recall of target items. Recent neuroimaging studies have shown an association between these mechanisms and the activity of the right Prefrontal Cortex. However, so far, few studies have attempted at establishing a causal relationship between this brain region and behavioural measures of cognitive control over memory. To address this missing link, we delivered transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) over the right Inferior Frontal Gyrus (rIFG) during a standard retrieval-practice paradigm with category-exemplar word pairs. Across two experiments, tDCS abolished retrieval-induced forgetting to different degrees, co...
Research Interests: Neuroscience, Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Working Memory, Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, and 12 moreMedicine, Prefrontal Cortex, Episodic Memory, Humans, Female, Male, Young Adult, Inhibition, Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation, Adult, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, and Medical and Health Sciences
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Substance-related and addictive disorders have been strongly linked to inhibitory control impairment. However, inhibitory deficits in this class of psychiatric disorders have been tested almost exclusively with measures of inhibition of... more
Substance-related and addictive disorders have been strongly linked to inhibitory control impairment. However, inhibitory deficits in this class of psychiatric disorders have been tested almost exclusively with measures of inhibition of motor, overt behavior. Here, instead, we investigated inhibitory deficits in these disorders by assessing the integrity of inhibitory control over internal, covert responses. Two groups of patients with alcohol and drug addiction and a control group of healthy individuals were administered a retrieval-practice paradigm assessing inhibition of competing memories. All groups showed comparable beneficial effects of retrieval practice. In contrast, successful suppression of competing memories was achieved by the control group only. This indicates that the deficit in clinical groups can be ascribed to an impairment in inhibitory control over memory retrieval rather than to a general memory impairment. In conclusion, inhibitory deficits in addiction are mo...
Research Interests: Psychology and Forgetting
Riassunto. Recuperare un’informazione dalla memoria episodica può avere l’effetto paradossale di danneggiare il successivo ricordo di informazioni associate. Il fenomeno prende il nome di Retrieval-Induced Forgetting ed è stato indagato... more
Riassunto. Recuperare un’informazione dalla memoria episodica può avere l’effetto paradossale di danneggiare il successivo ricordo di informazioni associate. Il fenomeno prende il nome di Retrieval-Induced Forgetting ed è stato indagato in via preferenziale tramite il paradigma di pratica del recupero. Il presente lavoro tenta di sintetizzare vent’anni di ricerca su questo fenomeno, illustrandone le caratteristiche fondamentali e analizzando il dibattito intorno ai modelli interpretativi, con particolare riguardo per le teorie che prevedono l’esistenza di meccanismi inibitori attivi in tutti i sistemi di memoria. Sono inoltre presentate evidenze recenti sui correlati neurali di tale effetto e alcune delle sue possibili applicazioni in diversi ambiti di competenza psicologica.
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Electrophysiological measurements enabled us to greatly increase our knowledge on the most spread learning disability in childhood represented by the Developmental Dyslexia (DD). The present chapter reviews the most relevant studies,... more
Electrophysiological measurements enabled us to greatly increase our knowledge on the most spread learning disability in childhood represented by the Developmental Dyslexia (DD). The present chapter reviews the most relevant studies, which used either Event Related Potentials (ERPs) or Electroencephalographic (EEG) bands to investigate reading disabilities in developmental age. Several studies are here described, which succeeded in showing processing abnormalities not only in dyslexics, but also in children genetically at risk of dyslexia, through the analysis of both the "classical" electrophysiological components (i.e., MMN, P300, N400) and earlier evoked potentials. The electrophysiological markers of neuronal dysfunctions found in these children, helped scientists to uncover the psychophysiological mechanisms chiefly involved in this language disorder. These are: deficits in speech sound processing and impairment in manipulating the phonological features of grapheme st...
Research Interests: Psychology, Biological Psychology, Cognitive Science, Decision Making, Semantics, and 15 moreEvoked Potentials, Humans, Task Switching, Cues, Female, Male, Spatial Processing, Event Related Potentials, ERPs, Semantic Processing, Task set, Middle Aged, Adult, Task Performance and Analysis, and Neurosciences
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a b s t r a c t The present study aimed to explore specific personality traits that affect risky choices by using a rela-tively novel computerised card game, the Columbia Card Task, to dissociate the processes of emotional decision making... more
a b s t r a c t The present study aimed to explore specific personality traits that affect risky choices by using a rela-tively novel computerised card game, the Columbia Card Task, to dissociate the processes of emotional decision making (i.e., the Hot version of the task) and deliberative decision making (i.e., the Cold version). Participants were administered either the Hot or the Cold version of the task together with standard mea-sures of personality traits that were hypothesised to be involved in completing the task (i.e., Sensation Seeking, Impulsivity, Sensitivity to Reward and Punishment). The results of the deliberative Cold version of the task revealed that participants who scored highly on the Impulsivity trait engaged in riskier deci-sion-making. Participants who scored highly on the Reward Responsiveness trait were found to be sen-sitive to variations in gains and losses in the emotional Hot version of the task. These findings enhance the existing knowledge of risky de...
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Given the increase of mental health problems in youth, focusing on the promotion of psychological well-being is essential. Among the variables recognized as linked to children’s psychological well-being, trait emotional intelligence,... more
Given the increase of mental health problems in youth, focusing on the promotion of psychological well-being is essential. Among the variables recognized as linked to children’s psychological well-being, trait emotional intelligence, emotional self-efficacy and coping seem to be crucial, whereas the role played by intelligence is still controversial. In the present study, we explored the combined effects of these variables, aimed at disentangling their unique contribution to psychological well-being of 74 children (41 males, mean age: 9.03 years). We administered verbal and reasoning tests as intelligence measures and self-report questionnaires to assess trait emotional intelligence, regulatory emotional self-efficacy, coping styles, psychological well-being. Correlations revealed two independent clusters of variables: a first cluster including intelligence indexes and a second cluster including psychological well-being, trait emotional intelligence, regulatory emotional self-effica...
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In the domain of cognitive studies on the lexico-semantic representational system, one of the most important means of ensuring well-suited experimental designs is using ecological stimulus sets accompanied by normative data on the most... more
In the domain of cognitive studies on the lexico-semantic representational system, one of the most important means of ensuring well-suited experimental designs is using ecological stimulus sets accompanied by normative data on the most relevant variables affecting the processing of their items. In the context of image sets, color photographs are particularly suited for this aim as they reduce the difficulty of visual decoding processes that may emerge with traditional image sets of line drawings, especially in clinical populations. We provide Italian norms for a set of 357 high quality image-items belonging to 23 semantic subcategories. Data from several variables affecting image processing: age of acquisition, familiarity, lexical frequency, manipulability, name agreement, typicality and visual complexity; were collected from a sample of 255 Italian-speaking participants. Lexical frequency data were derived from the CoLFIS corpus. Furthermore, we collected data with on image naming...
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A late neurophysiological response, the N400, is well known to reflect word processing and semantic context integration. Nevertheless, behavioural and neurophysiological data have demonstrated that word features and semantic sentence... more
A late neurophysiological response, the N400, is well known to reflect word processing and semantic context integration. Nevertheless, behavioural and neurophysiological data have demonstrated that word features and semantic sentence context influence linguistic processes already within the first 200 ms following the onset of the critical word stimulus. The lack of early word-related ERP effects in some studies might be due to large stimulus variance on relevant linguistic parameters, for example the length of written words or their frequency of usage. Here we investigated the effect of the length of words, their standardized lexical frequency and probability to occur in a given semantic context, by orthogonally varying these factors in a sentence-reading task. We found word frequency and probability to be reflected neurophysiologically already at 120 and 180 ms after written word onset. However, at these early stages frequency and probability effects were modulated by word length, ...
Research Interests: Psychology, Biological Psychology, Cognitive Science, Semantics, Psycholinguistics, and 18 moreReading, Electroencephalography, Intergroup Conflict (Psychology), Sentence Processing, Probability, Brain Mapping, Information Access, Humans, Cerebral Cortex, Comprehension, Female, Male, Word Frequency, Lexical access, Word length, Adult, Word Processing, and Neurosciences
The present study investigated emotional memory following bilateral transcranial electrical stimulation (direct current of 1 mA, for 20 minutes) over fronto-temporal cortical areas of healthy participants during the encoding of images... more
The present study investigated emotional memory following bilateral transcranial electrical stimulation (direct current of 1 mA, for 20 minutes) over fronto-temporal cortical areas of healthy participants during the encoding of images that differed in affective arousal and valence. The main result was a significant interaction between the side of anodal stimulation and image emotional valence. Specifically, right anodal/left cathodal stimulation selectively facilitated the recall of pleasant images with respect to both unpleasant and neutral images whereas left anodal/right cathodal stimulation selectively facilitated the recall of unpleasant images with respect to both pleasant and neutral images. From a theoretical perspective, this double dissociation between the side of anodal stimulation and the advantage in the memory performance for a specific type of stimulus depending on its pleasantness supported the specific-valence hypothesis of emotional processes, which assumes a speci...
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Phonetics, Semantics, Working Memory, and 22 morePhonological processing, Dyslexia, Temporal dynamics, Brain Mapping, Right Hemisphere Functions, Humans, Child, Female, Male, Reaction Time, Verbal behavior, Verbal working memory, Hemispheric Asymmetry, Task analysis, Time Dependent, Analysis of Variance, Neuropsychologia, Indexation, Left Hemisphere, Neurosciences, Time Course, and Theta Rhythm
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Research Interests: Psychology, Cognitive Science, Cognition, Reading, Electroencephalography, and 17 moreLanguage, Brain Mapping, Evoked Potentials, Humans, Child, Cerebral Cortex, Female, Gender Relations, Male, Gender Difference, Reaction Time, Developmental neuropsychology, School Children, Sex Factors, First Year, Developmental Neuropsychology, and Neurosciences
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A late neurophysiological response, the N400, is well known to reflect word processing and semantic context integration. Nevertheless, behavioural and neurophysiological data have demonstrated that word features and semantic sentence... more
A late neurophysiological response, the N400, is well known to reflect word processing and semantic context integration. Nevertheless, behavioural and neurophysiological data have demonstrated that word features and semantic sentence context influence linguistic processes already within the first 200 ms following the onset of the critical word stimulus. The lack of early word-related ERP effects in some studies might be due to large stimulus variance on relevant linguistic parameters, for example the length of written words or their frequency of usage. Here we investigated the effect of the length of words, their standardized lexical frequency and probability to occur in a given semantic context, by orthogonally varying these factors in a sentence-reading task. We found word frequency and probability to be reflected neurophysiologically already at 120 and 180 ms after written word onset. However, at these early stages frequency and probability effects were modulated by word length, as documented by significant interactions, whereas at later stages, around 300-500 ms, additive effects of these variables were found. These results indicate that semantic context integration may take place at a surprisingly early stage and near-simultaneously with the processing of information about the form of a word and its lexical properties, therefore challenging serial models of psycholinguistic information access. A methodological implication of this study is that, in order to obtain early psycholinguistic ERP effects, stimulus variance must be kept to a minimum.