Alice Mado Proverbio

Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca | UNIMIB · Department of Psychology

Environmental hypoxia, resulting from reduced oxygen supply, poses a significant risk of dysfunctioning and damaging the neurocognitive system, particularly in relation to anxiety and stress. Inadequate oxygenation can lead to acute and chronic brain damage. Scholars used behavioral, hemodynamic, and electromagnetic neurofunctional techniques to in...

It is well established that the Self has a unique representation in the social brain, as evident from the Self-Referential Effect (SRE). However, the timing and neural mechanisms underlying the representation of individuals with varying degrees of closeness and emotional relevance to the Self remain unclear. Twenty-two participants read 260 persona...

The study examined the impact of music’s emotional content on the aesthetic experience of visual artworks during combined stimulation. The hypothesis posited that incongruity of emotional states induced by music would impede accurate comprehension of emotional aspect of artworks. A total of 18 university students were presented with 192 paintings a...

The literature has demonstrated the potential for detecting accurate electrical signals that correspond to the will or intention to move, as well as decoding the thoughts of individuals who imagine houses, faces or objects. This investigation examines the presence of precise neural markers of imagined motivational states through the combining of el...

Introduction The capacity to understand the others’ emotional states, particularly if negative (e.g. sadness or fear), underpins the empathic and social brain. Patients who cannot express their emotional states experience social isolation and loneliness, exacerbating distress. We investigated the feasibility of detecting non-invasive scalp-recorded...

Considerable evidence suggests that musical education induces structural and functional neuroplasticity in the brain. This study aimed to explore the potential impact of such changes on word-reading proficiency. We investigated whether musical training promotes the development of uncharted orthographic regions in the right hemisphere leading to bet...

Introduction In this study, we employed a combined electromagnetic recording technique, i.e., electroencephalogram (EEG)/event-related potentials (ERPs) plus standardized weighted low-resolution electromagnetic tomography (swLORETA), to investigate the neural mechanism subserving the orthographic processing of symbols in language and music. While m...

Our study investigated the effects of hypoxia on visuospatial attention processing during preparation for a single/double-choice motor response. ERPs were recorded in two sessions in which participants breathed either ambient-air or oxygen-impoverished air. During each session, participants performed four cue-target attention orienting and/or alert...

The literature has demonstrated the potential for detecting accurate electrical signals that correspond to the will or intention to move, as well as decoding the thoughts of individuals who imagine houses, faces or objects. This investigation examines the presence of precise neural markers of imagined motivational states through the combining of el...

Considerable evidence suggests that musical education induces structural and functional neuroplasticity in the brain. This study aimed to explore the potential impact of such changes on word-reading proficiency. We investigated whether musical training promotes the development of uncharted orthographic regions in the right hemisphere leading to bet...

Racial bias—nonconscious behavioral inclinations against people of other ethnic groups—heavily contributes to inequality and discrimination. Immersive virtual reality (IVR) can reduce implicit racial bias through the feeling of owning (embodying) a virtual body of a different “race”; however, it has been demonstrated only behaviorally for the impli...

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) have revolutionized the way humans interact with machines, particularly for patients with severe motor impairments. EEG-based BCIs have limited functionality due to the restricted pool of stimuli that they can distinguish, while those elaborating event-related potentials up to now employ paradigms that require the p...

To investigate whether alpha-band synchronization in visuospatial attention reflects facilitation or suppression of neural parieto-occipital processing, we computed spatiotemporal-trends of alpha-band Wavelet CSDA at parieto-occipital and frontal scalp-sites. A higher alpha power was found at right-sided parietal-occipital electrodes in pre- and po...

This Pictionary is suitable for communicating with individual unable to interact (locked-in syndrome, LIS) through the development of Brain Computer Interface (BCI) systems. It includes 60 validated, easy-to-understand illustrated plates depicting adults in various situations affecting their physiological or psychological state. The drawings are in...

The aim of this study was to investigate the neural underpinnings and the time course of emoji recognition through the recording of event-related potentials in 51 participants engaged in a categorization task involving an emotional word paradigm. Forty-eight happy, sad, surprised, disgusted, fearful, angry emojis, and as many facial expressions, we...

The C1 ERP component reflects the earliest visual processing in V1. However, it remains debated whether attentional load can influence it or not. We conducted two EEG experiments to investigate the effect of attentional load on the C1. Task difficulty was manipulated at fixation using an oddball detection task that was either easy (low load) or dif...

Emojis are colorful ideograms resembling stylized faces commonly used for expressing emotions in instant messaging, on social network sites, and in email communication. Notwithstanding their increasing and pervasive use in electronic communication, they are not much investigated in terms of their psychological properties and communicative efficacy....

Introduction While EEG signals reflecting motor and perceptual imagery are effectively used in brain computer interface (BCI) contexts, little is known about possible indices of motivational states. In the present study, electrophysiological markers of imagined motivational states, such as craves and desires were investigated. Methods Event-relate...

Previous research suggests that masks disrupt expression recognition, but the neurophysiological implications of this phenomenon are poorly understood. In this study, 26 participants underwent EEG/ERP recording during the recognition of six masked/unmasked facial expressions. An emotion/word congruence paradigm was used. Face-specific N170 was sign...

Emojis are colorful ideograms resembling stylized faces commonly used for expressing emotions in instant messaging, in social network sites and in email communication. Notwithstanding their increasing and pervasive use in electronic communication, they are not much investigated in terms of their psychological properties and communicative efficacy....

This study aimed to investigate the psychophysiological markers of imagery processes through EEG/ERP recordings. Visual and auditory stimuli representing 10 different semantic categories were shown to 30 healthy participants. After a given interval and prompted by a light signal, participants were asked to activate a mental image corresponding to t...

Music is a powerful medium for conveying emotions. Here it was investigated whether music was able to transmit precise conceptual meanings, similarly to figurative art. Fifty University students took part in this investigation. 273 photographic reproductions of artworks, mostly oil paintings on canvas (dated between 1600-1900), were initially prese...

Objective A majority of BCI systems, enabling communication with patients with locked-in syndrome, are based on electroencephalogram (EEG) frequency analysis (e.g., linked to motor imagery) or P300 detection. Only recently, the use of event-related brain potentials (ERPs) has received much attention, especially for face or music recognition, but ne...

Event-related potentials (ERPs) represent the ideal methodological approach for investigating the time course of language reading and comprehension processes. In this chapter, various ERP components reflecting orthographic, phonological, semantic, and syntactic processing of written and auditory language are examined. Furthermore, data are shown of...

According to V.S. Ramachandran (inaugural ‘Decade of the Brain’ lecture at Society for Neuroscience meeting), ‘mirror neurons are to neuroscience what DNA was to biology’. Their discovery (by Rizzolatti’s group) led to the understanding of how hominids rapidly evolved through imitation and cultural transmission in the last 100,000 years. In this ch...

Several studies have demonstrated sex differences in empathy and social abilities. This chapter reviews studies on sex differences in the brain, with particular reference to how women and men process faces and facial expressions, social interactions, pain of others, infant faces, faces in things ( pareidolia ), living vs. non-living information, pu...

Musical learning is related to the development of audio-visuomotor associations linking gestures with musical sounds. To study the role of auditory feedback in learning, 115 students (56 guitarists, 59 pianists) at the beginner, intermediate and advanced levels were recruited. Playing with sound (audio-motor feedback), mute practice (motor feedback...

Cognitive neuroscience has inspired a number of methodological advances to extract the highest signal-to-noise ratio from neuroimaging data. Popular techniques used to summarize behavioral data include sum-scores and item response theory (IRT). While these techniques can be useful when applied appropriately, item dimensionality and the quality of i...

The purpose of advanced Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs) is to connect the human brain with an external device without using the muscular system. To do this, they must effectively process mental activity and infer information on the users’ intentions and directives. This work proposes a novel and explainable BCI system capable of recognizing P300 d...

Background The need to wear surgical masks in everyday life has drawn the attention of psychologists to the negative effects of face covering on social processing. A recent but not homogeneous literature has highlighted large costs in the ability to recognize emotions. Methods Here it was investigated how mask covering impaired the recognition of...

The present study used EEG/ERPs to detect the activation of implicit stereotypical representations associated to other-race (OR) people and the modulation of such activation through the previous presentation of positive vs. neutral social information. Electrophysiological signals were recorded in 40 Italian Caucasian participants, unaware of the ov...

Do speech and music understanding share common neural mechanisms? Here, brain bioelectrical activity was recorded in healthy participants listening to music obtained by digitally transforming speech into viola music. Sentences originally had a positive or negative affective prosody. The aim was to investigate if the emotional content of music was p...

A joint ERPs and source reconstruction research project from the cognitive psychophysiology laboratories of University of Milan-Bicocca (headed by Alice mado Proverbio) and of Vita-Salute San Raffaele Univ (headed by Alberto Zani) recorded the "voice" of the visual thalamus in the human being, for the first time and in a non-invasive way, that is,...

N40 is a well‐known component of evoked potentials with respect to the auditory and somatosensory modality but not much recognized with regard to the visual modality. To be detected with Event‐related Potentials (ERPs) it requires an optimal signal‐to‐noise ratio. To investigate the nature of visual N40, we recorded EEG/ERP signals from twenty part...

This work presents a supervised machine-learning approach to build an expert system that provides support to the neuroscientist in automatically classifying ERP data and matching them with a multisensorial alphabet of stimuli. To do this, two different approaches are considered: a hierarchical tree-based algorithm, XGBoost, and feedfoward neural ne...

Background Recently, the need to continuously wear surgical masks in everyday life has drawn the attention of neuroscientists and psychologists to the negative effects of face covering on social processing. A very recent but not very homogeneous literature has highlighted large costs in the ability to recognize emotions. Methods Here it was invest...

It is shared notion that speech and music processing share some commonalities. Brain bioelectrical activity was recorded in healthy participants listening to music obtained by digitally transforming real speech into melodies played by viola. Sentences were originally pronounced with a positive or negative affective prosody. The research’s aim was t...

A well-established neuroimaging literature predicts a right-sided asymmetry in the activation of face-devoted areas such as the fusiform gyrus (FG) and its resulting M/N170 response during face processing. However, the face-related response sometimes appears to be bihemispheric. A few studies have argued that bilaterality depended on the sex compos...

Many studies have reported sex differences in empathy and social skills. In this review, several lines of empirical evidences about sex differences in functions and anatomy of social brain are discussed. The most relevant differences involve face processing, facial expression recognition, response to baby schema, the ability to see faces in things,...

The present investigation used ERPs to detect the activation of implicit stereotypical representations associated to different ethnic groups, by means of an implicit paradigm. 285 sentences were presented to 20 Italian Caucasian participants while EEG signals were recorded from 128 scalp sites. Sentences could either violate (Incongruent condition)...

A hemispheric asymmetry for the processing of global versus local visual information is known. In this study, we investigated the existence of a hemispheric asymmetry for the visual processing of low versus high spatial frequency gratings. The event-related potentials were recorded in a group of healthy right-handed volunteers from 30 scalp sites....

We investigated through electrophysiological recordings how music-induced emotions are recognized and combined with the emotional content of written sentences. Twenty-four sad, joyful, and frightening musical tracks were presented to 16 participants reading 270 short sentences conveying a sad, joyful, or frightening emotional meaning. Audiovisual s...

A hemispheric asymmetry is known for the processing of global vs. local visual information. In this study, we investigated the existence of a hemispheric asymmetry for visual processing of low vs. high spatial frequency gratings. Event-related potentials were recorded in a group of healthy right-handed volunteers from 30 scalp sites. Six types of s...

Keywords: Cognitive neuroscience Visuospatial orienting of attention Preparatory bias Spatial anisotropy Early attentional selection ERPs Intracranial source reconstruction High temporal and spatial localization resolution Striate occipital cortex Extrastriate occipital cortex Behavioral test Nervous system Cognition Systems neuroscience Neuroanato...

While it is well-established that the face perception is orientation-dependent, less evidence has been provided on the effects of the orientation on the body schema processing and related attentive mechanisms. Poorer performance in same/different judgment tasks and increased occipito-temporal N1 response to the inverted (vs. upright) body schema se...

The cognitive processes involved in humor comprehension were analyzed by directly comparing the time course of brain activity associated with the perception of slapstick humor and that associated with the comprehension of humor requiring theory of mind (ToM). Four different comic strips (strips containing humorous scenes that required ToM, non-ToM...

While electroencephalogram (EEG) alpha desynchronization has been related to anticipatory orienting of visuospatial attention, an increase in alpha power has been associated to its inhibition. A separate line of findings indicated that alpha is affected by a deficient oxygenation of the brain or hypoxia, although leaving unclear whether the latter...

The ability to mentally simulate an action by recalling the body sensations relative to the real execution is referred to as kinesthetic motor imagery (MI). Frontal and parietal motor-related brain regions are generally engaged during MI. The present study aimed to investigate the time course and neural correlates of complex action imagery and poss...

The aim of the study was to investigate the neural processing of congruent vs. incongruent affective audiovisual information (facial expressions and music) by means of ERPs (Event Related Potentials) recordings. Stimuli were 200 infant faces displaying Happiness, Relaxation, Sadness, Distress and 32 piano musical pieces conveying the same emotional...

The present electrophysiological (EEG) study investigated the neural correlates of perceiving effortful vs. effortless movements belonging to a specific repertoire (ballet). Previous evidence has shown an increased heart and respiratory rate during the observation and imagination of human actions that require a great muscular effort. In addition, T...

How is auditory emotional information processed? The study’s aim was to compare cerebral responses to emotionally positive or negative spoken phrases matched for structure and content. 20 participants listened to 198 vocal stimuli while detecting filler phrases containing first names. EEG was recorded from 128 sites. Three event-related potentials...

The neural mechanisms involved in the processing of vocalizations and music were compared, in order to observe possible similarities in the encoding of their emotional content. Positive and negative emotional vocalizations (e.g., laughing, crying) and violin musical stimuli digitally extracted from them were used as stimuli. They shared the melodic...

It has been shown that selective attention enhances the activity in visual regions associated with stimulus processing. The left hemisphere seems to have a prominent role when non-spatial attention is directed towards specific stimulus features (e.g., color, spatial frequency). The present electrophysiological study investigated the time course and...

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the comprehension of a specific type of humorous situation requires the involvement of brain regions associated to mentalization or Theory of Mind processing and if the electrical stimulation of these areas would facilitate the comprehension of humor. To this aim, we analyzed the effects of tDCS...

Aim of this study was to investigate the association between finger and number representation in a task in which students had to perform arithmetic calculations and decide whether the provided solution was correct or incorrect, while a pair of task-irrelevant hands gesturally expressed the same or a different number. In particular we aimed at inves...

Inter‐individual differences in the numerical ability of healthy adults have been previously demonstrated, mainly with tasks involving mental number line or size representation. However, electrophysiological correlates of superior vs. poor arithmetic ability (in the healthy population) have been scarcely investigated. We correlated electric potenti...

Previous evidence has shown neuroplastic changes in brain anatomy and connectivity associated with the acquisition of professional visuomotor skills. Reduced hemispherical asymmetry was found in the sensorimotor and visual areas in expert musicians and athletes compared with non-experts. Moreover, increased expertise with faces, body, and objects r...

In this study the timing of electromagnetic signals recorded during incongruent and congruent audiovisual (AV) stimulation in 14 Italian healthy volunteers was examined. In a previous study (Proverbio et al., 2016) we investigated the McGurk effect in the Italian language and found out which visual and auditory inputs provided the most compelling i...

The role of facial coding in body language comprehension was investigated by ERP recordings in 31 participants viewing 800 photographs of gestures (iconic, deictic and emblematic), which could be congruent or incongruent with their caption. Facial information was obscured by blurring in half of the stimuli. The task consisted of evaluating picture/...

In this EEG/ERP study, 16 volunteers were asked to compare the numerical equality of 360 pairs of multi‐digit numbers presented in Arabic or verbal format. Behavioural data showed faster and more accurate responses for digit targets, with a right hand/left hemisphere advantage only for verbal numerals. Occipito‐temporal N1, peaking at approximately...

Literature has shown that playing a musical instrument is associated with the formation of multimodal audio visuomotor representations that are strongly instrument-specific. Here, we investigated the effect of increased motor practice on perceptual sensitivity in 32 professional musicians of comparable expertise but with different amounts of instru...

Atto C.4673 EPUB Proposta di Legge presentata il 3 Ottobre 2017 per l'introduzione della pratica musicale e canore nella scuole primarie, in via di approvazione alla Camera. Bill C.4673 Proposal for the introduction of the musical and singing practices in the prymary school presented on Oct 3, 2018, at present waiting for approval.

Studies in the literature have provided conflicting evidence about the effects of background noise or music on concurrent cognitive tasks. Some studies have shown a detrimental effect, while others have shown a beneficial effect of background auditory stimuli. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of agitating, happy or touching mu...