Daniele Caligiore

• Research Director at Italian National Research Council

This chapter primarily describes a system-level approach to modeling the brain, focusing on the interactions between different brain areas and the overall neural activity trends of entire regions rather than individual areas or single neurons. The emphasis is on the dynamics of neural activity across networks of areas. In particular, the chapter co...

This chapter introduces the fundamental mathematical tools used throughout the book. The focus is on simplicity, prioritizing real-life applications over formal definitions to clarify critical mathematical concepts. The topics covered are essential for solving systems of ordinary differential equations and understanding their real-world connections...

This chapter presents the fundamental technical concepts essential for any computational project. It addresses key aspects of software development, effective group collaboration, and the Python programming language, providing a comprehensive introduction to the realm of software development.

This section presents and discusses several examples of using ODEs to model and study various physical phenomena. The examples are organized to show increasing complexity, beginning with single equations involving one variable and progressing to systems of equations with multiple variables. The examples below simplify the discussion by omitting uni...

Research has extensively explored the role of the dopaminergic system in the reward circuit, while the contribution of the noradrenergic system remains less understood. This study aims to fill this gap by employing computational modeling to examine how the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) influences cocaine-induced norepinephrine (NE) release in the...

Introduction Historically, Parkinson's Disease (PD) research has focused on the dysfunction of dopamine-producing cells in the substantia nigra pars compacta, which is linked to motor regulation in the basal ganglia. Therapies have mainly aimed at restoring dopamine (DA) levels, showing effectiveness but variable outcomes and side effects. Recent e...

Brainstem dysfunctions are very common in Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and are a critical predictive factor for future disability. Brainstem functionality can be explored with blink reflexes, subcortical responses consisting in a blink following a peripheral stimulation. Some reflexes are already employed in clinical practice, such as Trigeminal Blink R...

Several influential works propose that the acquisition of motor behavior involves different learning mechanisms in the brain, in particular supervised and reinforcement learning, that are respectively associated with cerebellar-thalamocortical and basal ganglia-thalamocortical networks. Despite increasing evidence suggesting anatomical and function...

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) diagnosis often requires invasive examinations (e.g., liquor analyses), expensive tools (e.g., brain imaging) and highly specialized personnel. The diagnosis commonly is established when the disorder has already caused severe brain damage, and the clinical signs begin to be apparent. Instead, accessible and low-cost approac...

Increasing evidence suggests that Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD) share monoamine and alpha-synuclein (αSyn) dysfunctions, often beginning years before clinical manifestations onset. The triggers for these impairments and the causes leading these early neurodegenerative processes to become AD or PD remain unclear. We address t...

Traditionally, research on affordances and emotions follows two separate routes. For the first time, this article explicitly links the two phenomena by investigating whether, in a discrimination task (artifact vs. natural object), the motivational states induced by emotional images can modulate affordances-related motor response elicited by dangero...

Ovarian cancer is one of the most common gynecological malignancies, ranking third after cervical and uterine cancer. High-grade serous ovarian cancer (HGSOC) is one of the most aggressive subtype, and the late onset of its symptoms leads in most cases to an unfavourable prognosis. Current predictive algorithms used to estimate the risk of having O...

Empirical evidence suggests that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show abnormal behavior during delay eyeblink conditioning. They show a higher conditioned response learning rate and earlier peak latency of the conditioned response signal. The neuronal mechanisms underlying this autistic behavioral phenotype are still unclear. Here, we...

While current dopamine-based drugs seem to be effective for most Parkinson's disease (PD) motor dysfunctions, they produce variable responsiveness for resting tremor. This lack of consistency could be explained by considering recent evidence suggesting that PD resting tremor can be divided into different partially overlapping phenotypes based on th...

Previous work suggests that perception of an object automatically facilitates actions related to object grasping and manipulation. Recently, the notion of automaticity has been challenged by behavioral studies suggesting that dangerous objects elicit aversive affordances that interfere with encoding of an object's motor properties; however, related...

Background Alzheimer’s disease (AD) etiopathogenesis remains partially unexplained. The main conceptual framework used to study AD is the Amyloid Cascade Hypothesis, although the failure of recent clinical experimentation seems to reduce its potential in AD research. Objective A possible explanation for the failure of clinical trials is that they...

Several data have demonstrated that during the widely used experimental paradigm for studying associative learning, trace eye blinking conditioning (TEBC), there is a strong interaction between cerebellum and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Despite this evidence, the neural mechanisms underlying this interaction are still not clear. Here, we propo...

Developmental psychology experiments on tool use show that infants’ capacity to use a rake-like tool to retrieve a toy arises quite suddenly around 18 months. We use a developmental-robotics model to propose and test two alternative hypotheses to explain this conundrum. Both hypotheses rely on the assumptions that tool use involves goal-directed be...

Despite increasing literature supports a strong involvement of dopamine, noradrenaline and serotonin dysfunctions in the pathogenesis of most depressive disorders, the (causal) relationship between those monoamines impairments and the resulting disorder features is still not clear. We propose a hypothesis based on a computational model for which so...

Although the occurrence of Parkinsonian akinesia and tremor is traditionally associated to dopaminergic degeneration, the multifaceted neural processes that cause these impairments are not fully understood. As a consequence, current dopamine medications cannot be tailored to the specific dysfunctions of patients with the result that generic drug th...

Action observation therapy (AOT) has been recently proposed as a new rehabilitation approach for treatment of motor deficits in Parkinson’s disease. To date, this approach has never been used to deal with cognitive deficits (e.g., deficits in working memory, attention), which are impairments that are increasingly recognized in Parkinsonian patients...

Despite wide evidence suggesting anatomical and functional interactions between cortex, cerebellum and basal ganglia, the learning processes operating within them —often viewed as respectively unsupervised, supervised and reinforcement learning— are studied in isolation, neglecting their strong interdependence. We discuss how those brain areas form...

Motor tics are a cardinal feature of Tourette syndrome and are traditionally associated with an excess of striatal dopamine in the basal ganglia. Recent evidence increasingly supports a more articulated view where cerebellum and cortex, working closely in concert with basal ganglia, are also involved in tic production. Building on such evidence, th...

Values of the parameters of the model. The star indicates the values obtained with the genetic algorithm. Abbreviations of neural areas are summarized in S1 Table as well as in the caption of Fig 2. The other symbols used in the table are as follows: r: unit resting potential (Eq 3); τ: unit decay coefficient (Eq 1); wpre → post: connection weight...

Abbreviations used in the article. (EPS)

Average value of the peak amplitude of the activity (mean) and standard deviation (SD) for several areas of the model and for each movement state (NO-TIC vs TIC). (EPS)

Despite increasing evidence suggesting the cerebellum works in concert with the cortex and basal ganglia, the nature of the reciprocal interactions between these three brain regions remains unclear. This consensus paper gathers diverse recent views on a variety of important roles played by the cerebellum within the cerebello-basal ganglia-thalamo-c...

In this commentary, we highlight a crucial challenge posed by the proposal of Lake et al. to introduce key elements of human cognition into deep neural networks and future artificial-intelligence systems: the need to design effective sophisticated architectures. We propose that looking at the brain is an important means of facing this great challen...

Traditionally, the basal ganglia have been considered the main brain region implicated in Parkinson’s disease. This single area perspective gives a restricted clinical picture and limits therapeutic approaches because it ignores the influence of altered interactions between the basal ganglia and other cerebral components on Parkinsonian symptoms. I...

This article discusses recent evidence supporting the use of action observation therapy and motor imagery practice for rehabilitation of Parkinson's disease. A main question that emerges from the review regards the different effectiveness of these approaches and the possibility of integrating them into a single method to enhance motor behaviour in...

We present a novel concept of interactive devices, called “transitional wearable companions” (TWCs), usable to support therapy and foster social skill development in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). TWCs have two distinctive features. First, they are soft interactive devices, which look like tender animals, able to arise attachment emo...

When humans learn several skills to solve multiple tasks, they exhibit an extraordinary capacity to transfer knowledge between them. We present here the last enhanced version of a bio-inspired reinforcement-learning modular architecture able to perform skill-to-skill knowledge transfer and called ‘TERL Transfer Expert Reinforcement Learning model’....

Mental rotation, a classic experimental paradigm of cognitive psychology, tests the capacity of humans to mentally rotate a seen object to decide if it matches a target object. In recent years, mental rotation has been investigated with brain imaging techniques to identify the brain areas involved. Mental rotation has also been investigated through...

Intrinsic motivations drive the acquisition of knowledge and skills on the basis of novel or surprising stimuli or the pleasure to learn new skills. In so doing, they are different from extrinsic motivations that are mainly linked to drives that promote survival and reproduction. Intrinsic motivations have been implicitly exploited in several psych...

The flexibility of human motor behaviour strongly relies on rhythmic and discrete movements. Developmental psychology has shown how these movements closely interplay during development but the dynamics of that are largely unknown and we currently lack computational models suitable to investigate such interaction. This work initially presents an ana...

By assimilation children embody sensorimotor experiences into already built mental structures. Conversely, by accommodation these structures are changed according to the child’s new experience. Despite the intuitive power of these concepts to trace the course of sensorimotor development, they have gradually lost ground in psychology. This likely du...

Despite the huge literature on reaching behavior, a clear idea about the motor control processes underlying its development in infants is still lacking. This article contributes to overcoming this gap by proposing a computational model based on three key hypotheses: (a) trial-and-error learning processes drive the progressive development of reachin...

To suitably adapt to the challenges posed by reproduction and survival, animals need to learn to select when to perform different behaviours, to have internal criteria for guiding these learning processes, and to perform behaviours efficiently once selected. To implement these processes, their brains must be organised in a suitable hierarchical fas...

Research on action understanding in cognitive neuroscience has led to the identification of a wide "action understanding network" mainly encompassing parietal and premotor cortical areas. Within this cortical network mirror neurons are critically involved implementing a neural mechanism according to which, during action understanding, observed acti...

Mental rotation concerns the cognitive processes that allow an agent mentally to rotate the image of an object in order to solve a given task, for example to say if two objects with different orientations are the same or different. Here we present a system-level bio-constrained model, developed within a neurorobotics framework, that provides an emb...

The extended mind view and the embodied-grounded view of cognition and language are typically considered as rather independent perspectives. In this paper we propose a possible integration of the two views and support it proposing the idea of “Words As social Tools” (WAT). In this respect, we will propose that words, also due to their social and pu...

The extended mind view and the embodied-grounded view of cognition and language are typically considered as rather independent perspectives. In this paper we propose a possible integration of the two views and support it proposing the idea of "Words As social Tools" (WAT). In this respect, we will propose that words, also due to their social and pu...

Mental rotation processes allow an agent to mentally rotate an image of an object in order to solve a given task, for example to make a decision on whether two objects presented with different rotational orientation are same or different. This article proposes a bio-constrained neural network model that accounts for the mental rotation processes ba...

Neuroscientific and psychological data suggest a close link between affordance and mirror systems in the brain. However, we still lack a full understanding of both the individual systems and their interactions. Here, we propose that the architecture and functioning of the two systems is best understood in terms of two challenges faced by complex or...

Dexterous movements performed by the human hand are by far more sophisticated than those achieved by current humanoid robotic hands and systems used to control them. This work aims at providing a contribution in order to overcome this gap by proposing a bio-inspired control architecture that captures two key elements underlying human dexterity. The...

The empirical investigation of cognitive processes in infants is hampered by the limited development of their body and motor control skills. Novel gaze-contingent paradigms where infants control their environment with their eyes offer a solution to this problem since the control of gaze develops very early. Recently such a paradigm has been used to...

Children are capable of acquiring a large repertoire of motor skills and of efficiently adapting them to novel conditions. In a previous work we proposed a hierarchical modular reinforcement learning model (RANK) that can learn multiple motor skills in continuous action and state spaces. The model is based on a development of the mixture-of-expert...

In designing artificial systems for studying motor control in humans and other organisms a key point to consider is the complexity reached by brain and body in their developmental stages. An artificial system whose brain and body complexity is shaped according to developmental stages might allow understanding weather, for example, newborn infants,...

The ability to grasp and manipulate objects can be regarded as a distinctive feature of humans in the animal world. The human hand is studied for different purposes, such as the control of anthropomorphic robotic hands. One of the fundamental features of the human hand is the thumb opposition, not always considered as active degree of freedom in th...

Seeing an object activates both visual and action codes in the brain. Crucial evidence supporting this view is the observation of object to response compatibility effects: perception of an object can facilitate or interfere with the execution of an action (e.g., grasping) even when the viewer has no intention of interacting with the object. TRoPICA...

The development of manipulation skills is a fundamental process for young primates as it leads them to acquire the capacity to modify the world to their advantage. As other motor skills, manipulation develops on the basis of motor babbling processes which are initially heavily based on the production of rhythmic movements. We propose a computationa...

In classical reinforcement learning framework, an external, handcrafted reward typically drives the learning process. Intrinsically motivated systems, on the other hand, can guide their learning process autonomously by computing the interest they have in each task they can engage in. We explore how intrinsic motivation could be implemented in the i...

Seeing an object activates in the brain both visual and action codes. Crucial evidence supporting this view is offered by compatibility effect experiments (Ellis et al. (2007). J Exp Psychol: Hum Percept Perform): perception of an object can facilitate or interfere with the execution of an action (e.g. grasping) even when the viewer has no intentio...

Perceiving objects activates the representation of their affordances. For example, experiments on compatibility effects showed that categorizing objects by producing certain handgrips (power or precision) is faster if the requested responses are compatible with the affordance elicited by the size of objects (e.g., small or large). The article prese...

Models proposed within the literature of motor control have polarised around two classes of controllers which differ in terms of controlled variables: the Force-Control Models (FCMs), based on dynamic control, and the Equilibrium-Point Models (EPMs), based on kinematic control. This paper proposes a bioinspired model which aims to exploit the stren...

In the present chapter we report experiments on the relationships between visual objects and action and between words and actions. Results show that seeing an object activates motor information and that language is also grounded in perceptual and motor systems. They are discussed within the framework of embodied cognitive science. We argue that mod...

Organisms, and especially primates, are able to learn several skills while avoiding catastrophic interference and enhancing gen-eralisation. This paper proposes a novel re-inforcement learning (RL) architecture which has a number of features that make it suit-able to investigate these phenomena. The model instantiates a mixture of expert archi-tect...

Behavioural and brain imaging evidence has shown that seeing objects automatically evokes "affordances", for example it tends to activate internal representations related to the execution of precision or power grips. In line with this evidence, Tucker and Ellis [1] found a compatibility effect between object size (small and large) and the kind of g...

EU

An influential hypothesis of developmental psy-chology states that, in the first months of their life, infants perform exploratory/random movements ("motor babbling") in order to create associations between such movements and the resulting perceived effects. These associations are later used as building blocks to tackle more complex sensorimotor be...

The Internet is one of the most interesting realizations of a “complex” network. As a non-supervised growing object, it allows the study of the selective pressure which drives the network to assume its current structure. The DIMES and the ROUTEVIEWS projects are ongoing projects aimed at evaluating the topological structure of the Internet (at the...

One of the most influential principles of motor development theory, the circular-reaction hypothesis, states that infants perform exploratory movements to acquire efferent-reafferent associations later used to perform goal directed behavior. All models proposed so far to specify this principle lack biological plausibility under some respects. This...

We describe some simple simulations showing two possible adaptive advantages of the ability to predict the consequences of one’s actions: predicted inputs can replace missing inputs and predicted success vs. failure can help deciding whether to actually executing a planned action or not. The neural networks controlling the organisms’ behaviour incl...

According to one of the most influential principles of mo-tor development theory, the circular-reaction hypothesis, infants perform exploratory random movements (motor babbling) to acquire efferent-reafferent associations later used to perform goal directed behavior. The models proposed so far to specify this principle learn to accomplish reach-ing...

This report presents the architecture and some tests of a software that can be used for simulating the iCub robot's arm and for building and simulating other robots. The software is based on OPAL to inteface either ODE or NEWTON physical engines, on YARP to allow parallel computation on multiple machines, and on REFLEX for monitoring simulation var...