Alfredo Brancucci

• PhD in Basic Neuroscience, University of Pisa
• Professor (Associate) at Università degli Studi "G. d'Annunzio" Chieti-Pescara

Coffee and caffeinated products have a remarkable potential to beneficially influence different psychomotor variables. The main neuropharmacological mechanisms underlying caffeine’s psychostimulant action involve an antagonist role on the adenosine receptor, which enables an increase of brain catecholamine levels. These mechanisms also encompass de...

Background Binge eating (BE) is associated with a range of cognitive control deficits related to impulsivity, including lower response inhibition, preference for immediate gratification, and maladaptive decision-making. The aim was to investigate whether impulsivity and BE may interact with the decision process and underlying brain activity in outp...

This study investigates bistable perception as a function of the presentation side of the ambiguous figures and of participants' sex, to evaluate left-right hemispheric (LH-RH) asymmetries related to consciousness. In two experiments using the divided visual field paradigm, two Rubin's vase-faces figures were projected simultaneously and continuous...

The present review considers all papers published on the topic up to the end of the year 2022. Transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) is a non-invasive neuromodulation technique introduced about 15 years ago whose use is becoming increasingly widespread in neuroscience. It consists of the application over the scalp of a weak, white noise-like...

Displaying foods congruently with the healthy-left/unhealthy-right (HL/UR) horizontal mental representation could, through self-control facilitation, lead to healthier food choices. Here, by using two versions of the same on-line menu, we tested whether the healthy-left nudge was influenced by the hunger of our participants. A total of 192 particip...

This study was aimed at investigating mechanisms of consciousness and time estimation using bistable perception. In 4 experimental conditions, 1, 2, 4 or 8 Rubin's face-vase ambiguous figures were presented for 3 min. In Experiment 1, 40 subjects looked at the center of the screen and pressed a specific key correspondent to the figure where they pe...

Over the last decade, many researchers investigated the neurophysiological underpinnings of eating behavior through neuroimage and neurostimulation techniques. In this field, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) and ventral midbrain have a key role since their involvement in cognitive control, rewarding and...

Over the past fifteen years, research has demonstrated the central role of interpersonal emotions in communicating intentions, goals and desires. These emotions can be conveyed through facial expressions during specific social interactions, such as in the context of coordination between economic agents, where information inferred from them can infl...

Many studies suggest that specific movements or postures with shared social meaning can influence mainly verbal stimuli evaluation. On the other hand, several visuospatial biases can interact with this influence. Thus, we tested whether both head and stimuli movements can influence individual attitude towards food pictures. In two experiments, we u...

Previous studies have shown that money possesses affective properties even when it is not at stake within a given task. Smaller economic values are generally perceived as less arousing and neutral in valence, whereas larger ones are perceived as more arousing and positive in valence. Moreover, numerical cognitive processes seem to be less prominent...

Research using short musical sequences and musical tracks created by means of computer algorithms has demonstrated that individuals with or without musical skills can match these soundtracks to specific tastes with above-chance accuracy. More recently, a study that investigated implicit effects associated with crossmodal congruency/incongruency bet...

If a food product is not perceived positively in its appearance, it is unlikely eaten. However, there are several subtle spatial cues able to bias attitudes towards food, such as the position where it is displayed. To date, no-one has investigated how the placement of high-calorie food (HcFd) or low-calorie food (LcFd) on a screen, influences them...

Both the selection and consumption of food are biologically necessary for survival. Consequently, individuals may consider food as a primary and biologically relevant stimulus. In addition, recent findings support specific patterns of food preference during the lifespan development. Indeed, the preference for sweet taste largely observed in newborn...

Money can be a tool to achieve a wide range of goals in everyday life. Different studies have reported that both the mere exposure to money and its use as a reward can determine cognitive and social effects. Nevertheless, little is known about the basic affective perception of Euro banknotes. Thus, in the present study we aim to assess differences...

Tutti gli stimoli visivi possiedono delle dimensioni quantitative che possono potenzialmente determinare degli effetti di lateralità sull’asse orizzontale (grandezza, peso, prezzo, luminanza, ecc.…), i cosiddetti effetti SNARC (per quantità numeriche) e SNARC-like (per quantità non numeriche). Le teorie che spiegano questi effetti postulano che num...

Studies on the effects of music on spatial reasoning report conflicting results. Some studies show slight effects, and others show no effects but few seem to replicate the strong findings of the first study published in Rauscher et al. Nature, 365(6447), 611–612, (1993). Nonetheless, the debate about the performance enhancing “Mozart effect” remain...

Objective. Recent studies suggest that the use of noninvasive closed-loop neuromodulation combining electroencephalography (EEG) and transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) may be a promising avenue for the treatment of neurological disorders. However, the attenuation of tACS artifacts in EEG data is particularly challenging, and comput...

In two successive experiments using the divided visual field paradigm with vertical or horizontal division, two ambiguous figures, the Rubin’s vase-face or the Necker cube, were projected to the right and left or to the upper and lower visual hemifields of 108 healthy volunteers. Stimulation time was 120 s. The main hypotheses were (a) that differe...

The visual perception of a product and the ability to categorize it play a central role in food choice. People's opinion of the healthiness and caloric content of a food is influenced substantially by its appearance. Despite that, few studies have analyzed i) which one of the two dimensions of caloric content and healthiness is preferred to categor...

Uno dei problemi fondamentali della scienza è la comprensione della coscienza. In questo testo coscienza e spazio-tempo vengono congiunti in un'unica visione generando una teoria che unisce la Teoria dell'Informazione Integrata (IIT) di Giulio Tononi alle nozioni fondamentali di spazio e tempo derivanti dalla Teoria della Relatività Ristretta. Vist...

Recentemente, alcuni ricercatori hanno proposto e dimostrato attraverso una serie di studi, che i prodotti salubri sono mentalmente rappresentati nello spazio sinistro degli individui, e quindi sono preferibilmente consumati se collocati a sinistra rispetto a quando collocati a destra. Hanno interpretato le loro scoperte alla luce della body specif...

Mediante 3 esperimenti abbiamo esplorato l’effetto dei movimenti dell’annuire e del negare (socialmente connotati da un significato di accordo e disaccordo, accettazione e rifiuto) sulla valutazione da parte dei consumatori di determinati prodotti alimentari. In particolare, per ogni cibo i partecipanti ne valutavano la piacevolezza, il desiderio d...

The ''consonance effect" is the pleasant and unpleasant evaluation attributed to consonant and dissonant music, respectively. Different studies in this domain revealed a left-hemispheric superiority for disso-nance and a right-hemispheric superiority for consonance. We investigated the causal relationship between the consonance effect and the activ...

Whereas the role of observers' sex has already been addressed in research on embodied cognition, so far it has been neglected as regards laterality effects in embodied cognition. Here, we report further analyses of the data used in our paper "Hemispheric asymmetries in the processing of body sides: A study with ambiguous human silhouettes" [1], whe...

One of the fundamental problems of science is the difficulty in understanding the relationships that interconnect consciousness with space and time. The objective of this article is to describe the relationship between consciousness and space-time by relating the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of Giulio Tononi with the fundamental notions of s...

One of the fundamental problems of science is the difficulty in understanding the relationships that interconnect consciousness with space and time. The objective of this article is to describe the relationship between consciousness and space-time by relating the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of Giulio Tononi with the fundamental notions of s...

One of the fundamental problems of science is the difficulty in understanding the relationships that interconnect consciousness with space and time. The objective of this article is to describe the relationship between consciousness and space-time by relating the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of Giulio Tononi with the fundamental notions of s...

Sound symbolism refers to a non-arbitrary relationship between the sound of a word and its meaning. With the aim to better investigate this relationship by using natural languages, in the present cross-linguistic study 215 Italian and Polish participants were asked to listen to words pronounced in 4 unknown non-indo-European languages (Finnish, Jap...

Money is a special stimulus for humans, because of its relevance in everyday life. However, the basic mechanisms underlying money representation have not yet been fully investigated. Left-right asymmetries in the visual perception and evaluation of monetary value offer such a possibility. The pattern of these asymmetries can contribute to disentang...

The Right Ear Advantage effect (REA) was explored in a white noise speech illusion paradigm: binaural white noise (WN) could be presented i) in isolation (WN condition), ii) overlapped to a voice pronouncing the vowel /a/ presented in the left ear (LE condition), iii) overlapped to a voice pronouncing the vowel /a/ presented in the right ear (RE co...

Per molti anni l’idea che la coscienza non potesse essere oggetto di ricerche scientifiche è stata predominante. Solo negli ultimi decenni, l’evoluzione delle neuroscienze, ha consentito l’adozione di un approccio più scientifico a tale problema. Il problema di fondo sembra risiedere nella struttura del metodo scientifico che tende a separare l’oss...

Deutsch's octave illusion is produced by a sequence of two specular dichotic stimuli presented in alternation to the left and right ear causing an illusory segregation of pitch (frequency) and side (ear of origin). Previous studies have indicated that illusory perception of pitch takes place in temporo-frontal areas, whereas illusory perception of...

The "gaze bias theory" (Schotter et al., 2010) suggests that people tend to look longer at items that are eventually chosen. This was not entirely confirmed for food choice, a complex phenomenon influenced by many factors (Renner et al., 2012). Actually it is important to considering top-down goals as personal wills and task request when investigat...

Previous evidence showed the presence of a straight relationship between feeding behavior and emotions. Despite that, no studies have focused on the influence of emotional faces on food processing. In our study, participants were presented with 72 couples of visual stimuli composed of a neutral, happy, or disgusted faces (5000 ms duration in Experim...

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A growing body of empirical research documents the existence of several interesting crossmodal correspondences between auditory and gustatory/flavor stimuli, demonstrating that people can match specific acoustic and musical parameters with different tastes and flavors. In this context, a number of researchers and musicians arranged their own soundt...

Background The food‐rich environment in which we live makes the regulation of food choices a very complex phenomenon determined by many factors, as well as their interactions. Much evidence suggests that the sensory perception of food can be considered as a central factor affecting individual food choices. Despite this, the approaches used to study...

Transcranial electrical stimulation (tES) has been increasingly adopted to modulate perceptual and cognitive functions, but the effects on auditory perception are still relatively uncharted. Starting from the evidence that a stronger right ear advantage effect (REA) in dichotic listening positively correlates with speech sound processing, the prese...

The focus of the present study is on the relationships between illusory and non-illusory auditory perception analyzed at a biological level. To this aim, we investigate neural mechanisms underlying the Deutsch’s illusion, a condition in which both sound identity (“what”) and origin (“where”) are deceptively perceived. We recorded magnetoencephalogr...

Musical setticlavio (literally, seven clefs) reading refers to the ability to read (i.e., to say aloud, without to sing) the musical note labels in the 7 musical clefs. The present research report aims to investigate hemispheric asymmetries in such a basic musical ability, very poorly investigated in the domain of cognitive neurosciences. Sixty-thr...

The easy availability of food has caused a shift from eating for survival to hedonic eating. Women, compared to men, have shown to respond differently to food cues in the environment on a behavioral and a neural level, in particular to energy rich (compared to low energy) foods. It has been demonstrated that the right posterior superior temporal su...

The Spatial Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC) effect has been associated with a wide range of magnitude processing. This effect is due to an implicit relationship between numbers and horizontal space, according to which weaker magnitudes and smaller numbers are represented on the left, whereas stronger magnitudes and larger numbers ar...

Lo Spatial Association of Response Code (SNARC) indica un’associazione tra numeri e spazio orizzontale: numeri piccoli e spazio sinistro, numeri grandi e spazio destro che si verifica anche per grandezze non numeriche quali grandezza fisica, luminanza e grandezza concettuale. Studi sulla stima di prezzi hanno mostrato che prodotti posizionati a des...

La facile disponibilità di cibo nel mondo occidentale ha favorito uno spostamento da un’alimentazione centrata sulla sopravvivenza ad una forma di alimentazione più orientata all’edonismo. Donne e uomini si relazionano in modo diverso ai cibi, mostrando differenti pattern di risposta sia a livello comportamentale che neurale. Recentemente è stato d...

When required to indicate the perceived orientation of pictures of human silhouettes with ambiguous front/back orientation and handedness, both right- and left-handed participants perceive the figures more frequently as right-handed than as left-handed, which seems to indicate an attentional bias towards the right arm of human bodies. Given that pa...

The aim of the present study was to test whether transcranial electrical stimulation can modulate illusory perception in the auditory domain. In two separate experiments we applied transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (anodal/cathodal tDCS, 2 mA; N = 60) and high-frequency transcranial Random Noise Stimulation (hf-tRNS, 1.5 mA, offset 0; N = 45)...

The main predispositions that constrain food preferences comprise the tendency to prefer sweet foods and to reject bitter foods, as well as to favor more familiar foods and rejecting novel foods. Much evidence indicates that preference for sweet taste is inborn and universally present in neonates and that it decreases during adult life. However, th...

The role of memory retention and attentional control on hemispheric asymmetry was investigated using a verbal dichotic listening paradigm, with the consonant–vowel syllables (/ba/,/da/,/ga/,/ka/,/pa/and/ta/), while manipulating the focus of attention and the time interval between stimulus and response. Attention was manipulated using three conditio...

Lot of research has investigated hemispheric specialization for the processing of sensory stimuli. These include studies on patients with brain injury, neuroimaging methods, or behavioral paradigms based on the stimulation of only one of the two visual fields. For example, it seems that faces with emotional expression are processed predominantly by...

Characterizing how the brain appraises the psychological dimensions of reward is one of the central topics of neuroscience. It has become clear that dopamine neurons are implicated in the transmission of both rewarding information and aversive and alerting events through two different neuronal populations involved in encoding the motivational value...

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) plays a key role in emotion processing and regulation. vmPFC dysfunction may lead to disinhibition of amygdala causing high anxiety levels. γ-Aminobutyric acid (GABA) inter-neurons within vmPFC shape the information flow to amygdala. Thus, we hypothesize that GABA content within vmPFC could be relevant to...

Previous evidence showed that social interactions and emotional stimuli can influence desire, intake and food preferences. The aim of our study was to understand, through a cross-category adaptation paradigm, how the representation of faces and foods interact at a cognitive level. Thirty-nine participants were presented with 144 couples of visual s...

Although the inhibitory action that tactile stimuli can have on pain is well documented, the precise timing of the interaction between the painful and non-painful stimuli in the central nervous system is unclear. The aim of this study was to investigate this issue by measuring the timing of the amplitude modulation of laser evoked potentials (LEPs)...

Hemodynamic correlates of consciousness were investigated in humans during the presentation of a dichotic sequence inducing illusory auditory percepts with features analogous to visual multistability. The sequence consisted of a variation of the original stimulation eliciting the Deutsch's octave illusion, created to maintain a stable illusory perc...

The common-coding hypothesis suggests that the more similar an observed action is to the way the observer would perform it, the stronger is the ensuing activation of motor representations. Therefore, producing actions could prime perception so that observers would be particularly responsive to (i.e. biased to perceive) actions that are related to,...

The association between musical consonance and pleasantness, and between musical dissonance and unpleasantness (‘consonance effect’) is well established. Furthermore, a number of studies suggest the main involvement of the left hemisphere in the perception of dissonance and that of the right hemisphere in the perception of consonance. In the presen...

It is known that the left hemisphere of the human brain is critical in understanding and producing spoken language, but it remains a topic of great interest determining the cerebral lateralization of multiple languages. The aim of this study is to examine the effects of similarity between languages on hemispheric asymmetry of bilingual brains. The...

The neural bases of human intelligence have been investigated by means of raw anatomical methods, structural and functional neuroimaging techniques and patient studies. These have led to two important fndings that are briefy discussed: the parieto-frontal integration theory of intelligence, which assumes that a distributed network of cortical areas...

The challenge to neuroscientists working on intelligence is to discover what neural structures and mechanisms are at the basis of such a complex and variegated capability. Several psychologists agree on the view that behavioral flexibility is a good measure of intelligence, resulting in the appearance of novel solutions that are not part of the ani...

The present study investigates hemispheric asymmetries in the neural adaptation processes occurring during alternating auditory stimulation. Stimuli were two monaural pure tones having a frequency of 400 or 800 Hz and a duration of 500 ms. Electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded from 14 volunteers during the presentation of the following stimulus s...

The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC), i.e., patterns of brain activity that specifically accompany a particular conscious experience, have been investigated mainly in the visual system using particularly suited paradigms, such as binocular rivalry and multistable percepts in combination with neural recordings or neuroimaging. Through the sa...

Deutsch's octave illusion occurs when two tones that are spaced an octave apart are repeatedly presented in alternation; the sequence is presented to both ears simultaneously but offset by one tone, so that two dichotic chords are repeatedly presented in alternation. The most common illusory percept consists of an intermittent high tone in one ear...

Multisensory processing involving visual and auditory inputs is modulated by their relative temporal offsets. In order to assess whether multisensory integration alters the activation timing of primary visual and auditory cortices as a function of the temporal offsets between auditory and visual stimuli, a task was designed in which subjects had to...

Objectives: Structural and functional abnormalities of the left brain hemisphere, more often involving the temporal lobe, were frequently observed in patients with schizophrenia. However, negative and discrepant findings were also reported. Our study aimed to investigate the presence of lateralized brain dysfunction in patients with schizophrenia b...

This chapter describes how electroencephalography (EEG) was the first “objective” measure to be used to infer asymmetry of neuronal firing in the two hemispheres, and also considers its similarity with magnetoencephalography (MEG). The high temporal resolution of EEG and MEG allows the recording of brain rhythms, the use of which for the assessment...

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 a...

The aim of the present study is to investigate functional laterality for pitch identification in subjects with absolute pitch (AP) and without absolute pitch (NAP). Forty-four musicians were divided into two groups (AP and NAP) on the basis of their performance in a preliminary standard AP-test. They were subsequently presented with an AP-test desi...

The simplest and likeliest assumption concerning the cognitive bases of absolute pitch (AP) is that at its origin there is a particularly skilled function which matches the height of the perceived pitch to the verbal label of the musical tone. Since there is no difference in sound frequency resolution between AP and non-AP (NAP) musicians, the hypo...

Structural and functional asymmetries are present in many regions of the human brain responsible for motor control, sensory and cognitive functions and communication. Here, we focus on hemispheric asymmetries underlying the domain of social perception, broadly conceived as the analysis of information about other individuals based on acoustic, visua...

Unlabelled: We tested whether cortical activation anticipating painful stimuli is reduced more by integrative processes on somatosensory painful and motor information relative to the same hand than when that information refers to different hands. In 3 conditions, visual warning stimuli were followed by visual target stimuli associated with an elec...

The "Deutsch's illusion" occurs in most people when a dichotic pair of tones spaced an octave apart is presented repeatedly in alternation, so that when the right ear receives the high tone, the left ear receives the low tone, and vice versa. The illusory percept consists typically in a single low tone heard at one ear alternating with a single hig...

It is well known that scalp potentials evoked by nonpainful visual and auditory stimuli are enhanced in amplitude when preceded by pre-stimulus low-amplitude alpha rhythms. This study tested the hypothesis that the same holds for the amplitude of vertex N2-P2 potentials evoked by brief noxious laser stimuli, an issue of interest for clinical perspe...

The present magnetoencephalography (MEG) study tested the hypothesis of a phase synchronization (functional coupling) of cortical alpha rhythms (about 6-12 Hz) within a "speech" cortical neural network comprising bilateral primary auditory cortex and Wernicke's areas, during dichotic listening (DL) of consonant-vowel (CV) syllables. Dichotic stimul...

Hemispheric asymmetries for processing duration of non-verbal and verbal sounds were investigated in 60 right-handed subjects. Two dichotic tests with attention directed to one ear were used, one with complex tones and one with consonant-vowel syllables. Stimuli had three possible durations: 350, 500, and 650 ms. Subjects judged whether the duratio...

Dichotic listening (DL) is a neuropsychological technique for the study of functional laterality. Based on behavioral patient studies, the "structural theory" states that lateralization of the auditory input during DL is allowed by an inhibition of the ipsilateral pathways. We aimed here at extending this theory to provide a neurophysiological basi...

In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that the neural synchronization estimated in visual cortex during visuo-spatial demands shows different features in elite karate athletes when compared to amateur karate athletes and non-athletes. EEG recordings (56 channels; EB-Neuro) were performed from 17 elite karate athletes, 14 amateur karate ath...

Electroencephalographic (EEG; Be-plus Eb-Neuro) and stabilogram (RGM) data were simultaneously recorded in 19 elite karate and 18 fencing athletes and in 10 non-athletes during quiet upright standing at open- and closed-eyes condition in order to investigate the correlation between cortical activity and body sway when the visual inputs are availabl...

In our study, preparation of voluntary movement was used to physiologically activate the motor cortex areas and the effect of this activation on CO(2) laser-evoked potentials (LEPs) was explored. LEPs were recorded from 31 scalp electrodes in 10 healthy subjects after painful stimulation of the right C6-C7 skin dermatomes. LEP stimuli were delivere...

Pain sensation is characterized by multiple features that allow to differentiate pricking, burning, aching, stinging, and electrical shock. These features are sub-served by neural pathways that might give flexibility and selectivity to the cerebral anticipatory processes. In this line, the present high-resolution electroencephalography (EEG) study...