Showing papers by "Alessandro D'Ausilio published in 2015"
TL;DR: Music provides an ideal domain for investigating social cognition through realistic interpersonal interaction because it offers a promising solution for balancing the trade-off between ecological validity and experimental control when testing cognitive and brain functions.
116 citations
TL;DR: This work proposes that the building blocks of the mirror mechanism are the relatively few motor synergies explaining the variety of hand functions, and can be potentially very robust to visual noise and thus demonstrate a clear advantage of using motor knowledge for classifying others' action.
57 citations
TL;DR: It is concluded that motor recruitment in speech perception can be a natural product of discriminating speech in a normally variable and unpredictable environment, not merely related to task difficulty.
Abstract: Listening speech sounds activates motor and premotor areas in addition to temporal and parietal brain regions. These activations are somatotopically localized according to the effectors recruited in the production of particular phonemes. Previous work demonstrated that transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of speech motor centers somatotopically altered speech perception, suggesting a role for the motor system. However, these effects seemed to occur only under adverse listening conditions, suggesting that degraded speech may stimulate listeners to adopt unnatural neural strategies relying on motor centers. Here, we investigated whether naturally occurring interspeaker variability, which did not affect task difficulty, made a speech discrimination task sensitive to TMS interference. In this paradigm, TMS over tongue and lips motor representations somatotopically altered the discrimination time of speech. Furthermore, the TMS-induced effect correlated with listeners' similarity judgments between listeners' and speakers' speech productions. Thus, the degree of motor recruitment depends on the perceived distance between listener and speaker. This result supports the claim that discriminating others' speech pattern requires the contribution of the listener's own motor repertoire. We conclude that motor recruitment in speech perception can be a natural product of discriminating speech in a normally variable and unpredictable environment, not merely related to task difficulty.
42 citations
TL;DR: The results suggest a functional dissociation between the processing of action content and structure, reminiscent of a similar dissociation found in the language or music domains, which provides further support to the hypothesis that some basic mechanisms, such as the rule-based structuring of sequential events, are shared between different cognitive domains.
33 citations
TL;DR: It is argued that the deflationary approach to interpreting apparent evidence of domain-specific processes for social perception sheds important light on how functionally specific processes in social perception can be subserved at least in part by domain-general processes.
27 citations
TL;DR: It is proposed that motor activities during AO might exploit the same synergistic mechanisms shown for the neural control of movement and organized around a limited set of motor primitives.
Abstract: Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of the motor cortex shows that hand action observation (AO) modulates corticospinal excitability (CSE). CSE modulation alternatively maps low-level kinematic characteristics or higher-level features, like object-directed action goals. However, action execution is achieved through the control of muscle synergies, consisting of coordinated patterns of muscular activity during natural movements, rather than single muscles or object-directed goals. This synergistic organization of action execution also underlies the ability to produce the same functional output (i.e., grasping an object) using different effectors. We hypothesize that motor system activation during AO may rely on similar principles. To investigate this issue, we recorded both hand CSE and TMS-evoked finger movements which provide a much more complete description of coordinated patterns of muscular activity. Subjects passively watched hand, mouth and eyelid opening or closing, which are performing non-object-directed (intransitive) actions. Hand and mouth share the same potential to grasp objects, whereas eyelid does not allow object-directed (transitive) actions. Hand CSE modulation generalized to all effectors, while TMS evoked finger movements only to mouth AO. Such dissociation suggests that the two techniques may have different sensitivities to fine motor modulations induced by AO. Differently from evoked movements, which are sensitive to the possibility to achieve object-directed action, CSE is generically modulated by "opening" vs. "closing" movements, independently of which effector was observed. We propose that motor activities during AO might exploit the same synergistic mechanisms shown for the neural control of movement and organized around a limited set of motor primitives.
21 citations
TL;DR: Automatic imitation of low-level motor control parameters demonstrates that the task is achieved through continuous action coordination as opposed to independent action planning, and serves as a validation of the joint goal-directed non-verbal task for future applications.
Abstract: Cognitive neuroscience, traditionally focused on individual brains, is just beginning to investigate social cognition through realistic interpersonal interaction. However, quantitative investigation of the dynamical sensorimotor communication among interacting individuals in goal-directed ecological tasks is particularly challenging. Here, we recorded upper-body motion capture of 23 dyads, alternating their leader/follower role, in a tower-building task. Either a strategy of joining efforts or a strategy of independent action could in principle be used. We found that arm reach velocity profiles of participants tended to converge across trials. Automatic imitation of low-level motor control parameters demonstrates that the task is achieved through continuous action coordination as opposed to independent action planning. Moreover, the leader produced more consistent and predictable velocity profiles, suggesting an implicit strategy of signaling to the follower. This study serves as a validation of our joint goal-directed non-verbal task for future applications. In fact, the quantification of human-to-human continuous sensorimotor interaction, in a way that can be predicted and controlled, is probably one of the greatest challenges for the future of human–robot interaction.
9 citations
TL;DR: The aim of this proposal was to bridge the gap between fields of research that, progressing independently, are facing similar issues regarding the neural representation of motor knowledge, and to infuse some fresh blood into the research, was appreciated by almost all commentators, giving raise to intriguing new suggestions.
2 citations
31 Dec 2015
2 citations