Showing papers by "Alessandro D'Ausilio published in 2014"
TL;DR: The amount of information flow and sensorimotor group dynamics are measured suggesting that the fabric of leadership is not built upon exclusive information knowledge but rather on sharing it.
68 citations
TL;DR: Results show that passive listening to speech sounds evokes a pattern of motor synergies mirroring those occurring during speech production, which were more evident in subjects showing good performances in discriminating speech in noise demonstrating a role of the speech-related mirror system in feed-forward processing the speaker's ongoing motor plan.
Abstract: The activation of listener's motor system during speech processing was first demonstrated by the enhancement of electromyographic tongue potentials as evoked by single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) over tongue motor cortex. This technique is, however, technically challenging and enables only a rather coarse measurement of this motor mirroring. Here, we applied TMS to listeners’ tongue motor area in association with ultrasound tissue Doppler imaging to describe fine-grained tongue kinematic synergies evoked by passive listening to speech. Subjects listened to syllables requiring different patterns of dorso-ventral and antero-posterior movements (/ki/, /ko/, /ti/, /to/). Results show that passive listening to speech sounds evokes a pattern of motor synergies mirroring those occurring during speech production. Moreover, mirror motor synergies were more evident in those subjects showing good performances in discriminating speech in noise demonstrating a role of the speech-related mirror system in feed-forward processing the speaker's ongoing motor plan.
36 citations
TL;DR: It is suggested that audiovisual integration in speech may benefit from speech production learning and direct visual experience of an articulator movement is not necessary for the generation of audioviisual mismatch effects.
20 citations
TL;DR: Results offer a direct proof of the emergence of an early visuomotor transformation when tools are observed, that maintains the same amount of synergistic motor details as the actions the authors can perform on them.
20 citations
TL;DR: Recent neurophysiological and machine learning-based studies showing the specific contribution of the motor system to speech perception and that automatic phone recognition is significantly improved when motor data are used during training of classifiers are reviewed.
Abstract: Action perception and recognition are core abilities fundamental for human social interaction. A parieto-frontal network (the mirror neuron system) matches visually presented biological motion information onto observers' motor representations. This process of matching the actions of others onto our own sensorimotor repertoire is thought to be important for action recognition, providing a non-mediated "motor perception" based on a bidirectional flow of information along the mirror parieto-frontal circuits. State-of-the-art machine learning strategies for hand action identification have shown better performances when sensorimotor data, as opposed to visual information only, are available during learning. As speech is a particular type of action (with acoustic targets), it is expected to activate a mirror neuron mechanism. Indeed, in speech perception, motor centers have been shown to be causally involved in the discrimination of speech sounds. In this paper, we review recent neurophysiological and machine learning-based studies showing (a) the specific contribution of the motor system to speech perception and (b) that automatic phone recognition is significantly improved when motor data are used during training of classifiers (as opposed to learning from purely auditory data).
12 citations