
Gianna CocchiniGoldsmiths University of London · Department of Psychology
Gianna Cocchini
BSc, MSc, PhD
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61
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Introduction
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October 2003 - present
Publications
Publications (61)
Knowledge of the body size is intricately tied to multisensory integration processes that rely on the dynamic interplay of top‐down and bottom‐up mechanisms. Recent years have seen the development of passive sensory stimulation protocols aimed at investigating the modulation of various cognitive functions, primarily inducing perceptual learning and...
Previous studies have identified a ‘defensive graded field’ in the peripersonal front space where potential threatening stimuli induce stronger blink responses, mainly modulated by top–down mechanisms, which include various factors, such as proximity to the body, stimulus valence, and social cues. However, very little is known about the mechanisms...
A growing body of research investigating the relationship between body representation and tool-use has shown that body representation is highly malleable. The nature of the body representation does not consist only of sensory attributes but also of motor action-oriented qualities, which may modulate the subjective experience of our own body. Howeve...
Personal Neglect (PN) is a disorder in which patients fail to attend or explore the contralateral side of their body. An increasing number of studies have considered PN as a form of body representation disorder frequently observed following damage to parietal areas. The extent and the direction of the body misrepresentation is still unclear with re...
Objectives
Anosognosic patients show a lack of awareness for their hemiplegia coupled with a distorted sense of agency for the actions performed by the plegic limbs. Since anosognosia is often associated with right brain damage, this hemisphere seems to play a dominant role in monitoring awareness for motor actions. Therefore, we would expect that...
Body representation disorders are complex, varied, striking, and very disabling in most cases. Deficits of body representation have been described after lesions to multimodal and sensorimotor cortical areas. A few studies have reported the effects of tumors on the representation of the body, but little is known about the changes after tumor resecti...
Recent findings indicate that the mental representation of an object contains crucial information about the motor interactions relevant for its intended functional use, suggesting a possible action-specific link with body effectors. For example, in the visual system, the extrastriate body area (EBA) responds to full body and body part images accord...
Recent studies have hypothesized that the stereotypical representation of the body may reflect some functional aspects of routine actions that are performed in specific peripersonal domains. For example, the lower and upper limbs tend to ‘act’ in different peripersonal spaces and perform different functions. The present study aims to directly inves...
The representation of the metrics of the hands is distorted, but is susceptible to malleability due to expert dexterity (magicians) and long-term tool use (baseball players). However, it remains unclear whether modulation leads to a stable representation of the hand that is adopted in every circumstance, or whether the modulation is closely linked...
Anosognosia for hemiplegia is a multifaceted syndrome that has a detrimental impact on the patient. Various theories based on behavioural and neuroanatomical data have been proposed to explain the mechanisms underlying the symptoms. These approaches have resulted in the development of a number of different proce- dures aimed at reducing symptoms or...
Introduction: Personal neglect (PN) refers to a form of hemi-inattention toward the contralesional body space and it usually occurs following a right brain lesion. Recent studies suggest that PN indicates a disorder of body representation. Specifically, patients with PN show difficulties in identifying differences between left and right hands and h...
The Fluff test is a simple test to assess evidence of personal neglect (PN) in brain-damaged patients. While blindfolded, patients are asked to remove targets previously attached on their body and the number of targets detached provides information about possible spatial bias. This test has been widely used for clinical and research purposes. Howev...
Objective: Anosognosia, or unawareness, for memory loss has been proposed to underlie cognitive functions such as memory and executive function. However, there is an inconsistent association between these constructs. Recent studies have shown that compromise ongoing self-monitoring of one’s memory associates with anosognosia for
memory loss. Yet to...
There is a growing interest in the distortions of body representation in healthy population and most studies have focused their attention on specific parts of the body, such as the hands. Only three studies have considered the representation of the body as a whole. Findings, acquired by different means of assessment methods, are partially contrasti...
Objective: Patients who suffer from memory loss after an Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) may also suffer from anosognosia, or unawareness of their memory loss. How we define and measure anosognosia can have critical implications for its study and clinical assessment. Commonly used measures often lack standardization and reliability checks for responses...
Morphology and functional aspects of the tool have been proposed to be critical factors modulating tool use-induced plasticity. However, how these aspects contribute to changing body representation has been underinvestigated. In the arm bisection task, participants have to estimate the length of their own arm by indicating its midpoint, a paradigm...
Internal spatial body configurations are crucial to successfully interact with the environment and to experience our body as a three dimensional volumetric entity. These representations are highly malleable and are modulated by a multitude of afferent and motor information. Despite some studies reporting the impact of sensory and motor modulation o...
Face recognition has been the focus of multiple studies, but little is still known on how we represent the structure of one’s own face. Most of the studies have focused on the topic of visual and haptic face recognition, but the metric representation of different features of one’s own face is relatively unknown. We investigated the metric represent...
Anosognosia for memory loss is a common feature of Alzheimer's disease (AD). Recent theories have proposed that anosognosia, a disruption in awareness at a global level, may reflect specific deficits in self-monitoring, or local awareness. Though anosognosia for memory loss has been shown to relate to memory self-monitoring, it is not clear if it r...
Objectives:
Anosognosia for motor impairment is a complex syndrome that can manifest itself under different forms, guiding patients' behavior and task decisions. However, current diagnostic tools tend to evaluate only more explicit aspects of anosognosia (asking the patients about their motor abilities) and fail to address more subtle features of...
Sense of agency (SoAg) is the feeling of control over one's actions and their effects. It can be augmented or attenuated by internal signals and by external cues. Research has shown a reduction in the SoAg in older adulthood, but the reasons behind this change remain unclear. We investigated agency processing differences that may underpin age-relat...
Brain-damaged patients showing extinction are able to process stimuli presented on either hemispace, but fail to report contralesional stimuli when simultaneously presented with an ipsilesional stimulus. Extinction may occur between stimuli of the same modality or between stimuli of different modalities (such as visual and tactile). This phenomenon...
Background: There has been comparatively little research into anosognosia for aphasia (a lack of awareness of acquired language deficits). Direct assessments of metacognitive awareness tend to rely on high levels of verbal competence and are difficult for people with aphasia to complete. Therefore, indirect measures of awareness have been considere...
Studies investigating effect of practice on dual task performance have yielded conflicting findings, thus supporting different theoretical accounts about the organization of attentional resources when tasks are performed simultaneously. Because practice has been proven to reduce the demand of attention for the trained task, the impact of long-lasti...
Background: There has been comparatively little research into anosognosia for aphasia (a lack of awareness of acquired language deficits). Direct assessments of metacognitive awareness tend to rely on high levels of verbal competence and are difficult for people with aphasia to complete. Therefore indirect measures of awareness have been considered...
The presence of double dissociations in patients with neurological damage has long been used as evidence that the dissociated functions cannot be explained in terms of a common system or module. Shallice (1988) has suggested that a second procedure, the double critical variable method, can provide evidence for a similar conclusion. In this paper we...
Patients showing unilateral neglect fail to respond, report or orient to stimuli located in the contralesional (usually the left) side of the environment, of own body or of mental representations. Several studies have investigated different forms of neglect for stimuli located in the extra personal or reaching space confirming that this syndrome is...
Unilateral visuo-spatial neglect is a neuropsychological syndrome commonly resulting from right hemisphere stroke at the temporo-parietal junction of the infero-posterior parietal cortex. Neglect is characterized by reduced awareness of stimuli presented on patients’ contralesional side of space. Inspired by evidence of increased spatial exploratio...
Diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) requires evidence of progressive decline in cognitive function. However, many tests used to assess cognitive function suffer from considerable practice effects, reducing their reliability. Several studies have reported that the ability to do two things at once, or dual tasking, is impaired in AD, but unaffected...
We report the case of a 52-year old man who, following rupture of an anterior communicating artery aneurysm, presented with a phenomenon not previously described, which we have labelled "Phantabulation." Phantabulation is characterized by frequent and purposeful interactions with contextually appropriate imagined objects. We suggest that this pheno...
Depression and reduced awareness of illness (anosognosia) can be frequent complications following a brain lesion but the relationship between these two syndromes is still unclear. While some researchers suggested a protective function of anosognosia from depression, others deny a functional relationship. We investigated anosognosia and depression i...
Objective:
Patients with visual extinction have difficulty detecting a single contralesional stimulus when a second stimulus is simultaneously presented on the ipsilesional side. The rarely reported phenomenon of visual anti-extinction describes the opposite behavior, in which patients show greater difficulty in reporting a stimulus presented in i...
Anosognosia is a multi-factorial syndrome whose clinical manifestations can vary considerably from patient to patient. Considering the complexity of this syndrome, its assessment represents an evident challenge for the diagnostic process and it presents various methodological complications. Lack of agreement about diagnosis criteria, high exclusion...
Anosognosia is a multi-factorial syndrome whose clinical manifestations can vary considerably from patient to patient. Considering the complexity of this syndrome, its assessment represents a major challenge for the diagnostic process, and presents various methodological complications. Lack of agreement about diagnostic criteria, high exclusion rat...
Different techniques, such as optokinetic stimulation, adaptation to prismatic shift of the visual field to the right, or transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS), have been shown to alleviate neglect, at least temporarily. We assessed the effect of these techniques on anosognosia and whether their therapeutic effect, if any, matches that...
Congenital amusia manifests as a lifelong difficulty in making sense of musical sound. The extent to which this disorder is accompanied by deficits in visuo-spatial processing is an important question, bearing on the issue of whether pitch processing draws on supramodal spatial representations. The present study assessed different aspects of visuo-...
Lack of awareness (anosognosia) for one's own language impairments has rarely been investigated, despite hampering language rehabilitation. Assessment of anosognosia by means of self-report is particularly complex, as a patient's language difficulties may seriously prevent or bias the assessment. Other methods, such as measures of self-correction a...
If asked directly, anosognosic patients deny or seriously underestimate their motor difficulties. However explicit denial of hemiplegia does not necessarily imply a lack of insight of the deficit. In this study we explored explicit and implicit awareness for upper limb motor impairment in a group of 30 right-brain damaged patients. Explicit awarene...
Previous dual task studies have demonstrated minimal costs when healthy individuals simultaneously perform two tasks at their own individual ability levels. Conversely, Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients show dual task decrements, but it is unclear whether the problem arises at the encoding, maintenance, and/or retrieval phases of memory. Two experi...
Previous dual task studies have demonstrated minimal costs when healthy individuals simultaneously perform two tasks at their own individual ability levels. Conversely, Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients show dual task decrements, but it is unclear whether the problem arises at the encoding, maintenance, and/or retrieval phases of memory. Two experi...
There has been a growing interest in anosognosia in both clinical and research domains, yet relatively little attention has been paid to methods for evaluating it. Usually, the presence and severity of anosognosia is assessed by means of structured interviews or questionnaires. Both interviews and questionnaires can provide valuable information, bu...
Anosognosia for motor impairment has been linked to lesions of the right hemisphere. However, left hemisphere damaged patients have often been excluded from investigation because of their associated language deficits. In this study we assessed anosognosia for motor disorders in a group of left hemisphere damaged patients using 2 tools that assess t...
Successful interaction with the environment depends upon our ability to retain and update visuo-spatial information of both front and back egocentric space. Several studies have observed that healthy people tend to show a displacement of the egocentric frame of reference towards the left. However representation of space behind us (back space) has n...
In this article, we describe a patient, CN, with unilateral left posterior brain damage, who shows a rare occurrence of left ipsilesional neglect limited to mental representations. CN's clinical pattern is consistent with the hypothesis that different mechanisms underlie perceptual and representational neglect. We also discuss an interpretation of...
Three experiments compared groups of Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients and healthy older and younger participants on visuospatial tracking and digit sequence recall, as single tasks and performed concurrently. In Experiment 1, tasks were performed concurrently with very low demand relative to span. Only the AD patients showed a dual task deficit. I...
Résumé
Des études antérieures sur les patients atteints de la maladie d’Alzheimer ont suggéré qu’une tâche cognitive, comme le fait de tenir une conversation, peut altérer la vitesse et la précision de la marche. Lors de deux expériences, nous avons comparé l’impact de la demande cognitive de la marche chez des patients atteints de la maladie d’Alz...
Previous studies of dual-task coordination in working memory have shown a lack of dual-task interference when a verbal memory task is combined with concurrent perceptuomotor tracking. Two experiments are reported in which participants were required to perform pairwise combinations of (1) a verbal memory task, a visual memory task, and perceptuomoto...
Unawareness of motor disorders (anosognosia) has often been reported after brain lesions, and it has been considered a temporary condition common in the acute and post-acute phases. The presence of anosognosia in a chronic phase (i.e. lasting more than few weeks) is a rare occurrence, thought to be the result of reasoning deficits which prevent pat...
In clinical settings, relatively little attention has been paid to the personal domain in neglect syndrome. This is in contrast to the important role that this aspect can play in rehabilitation training for patients who show neglect syndrome. We propose a simple task, the Fluff Test, which consists of an own body exploration with one's eyes closed....
Both single unit recording and neuroradiological studies suggest that frontal and executive processes are necessary for visual maintenance rehearsal. This observation is linked to the classic vigilance literature by the proposal that vigilance decrement is found when the subject is required to maintain a representation over a brief delay. Vigilance...
A patient, AB, is reported who showed clear signs of neglect but no extinction (N+ E-). Several hypotheses proposed to account for this dissociation were put to the test. The postulated association between motor neglect and extinction did not hold good, nor did the possibility that the N+ E- dissociation may be traced back to the difference in test...
Bisiach and Luzzatti (1978) provided evidence that unilateral spatial neglect is not only a disorder of visual perception, but also can affect mental representations such that patients fail to report the left side of scenes or objects in mental imagery. However in case reports of representational neglect generally it is accompanied by perceptual ne...
A case of pure retrograde amnesia following mild head injury is reported. Neuropsychological, psychodynamic and statistical approaches are employed in an attempt to disentangle the clinical picture presented by the patient. Focal retrograde amnesia, psychogenic retrograde amnesia and simulated amnesia are all taken into account. From a public event...
Tonic alertness was investigated in Alzheimer patients and normal elderly subjects. Sensitivity and criterion shifts were investigated across 45 min of continuous testing using a high event rate test with very low target probability. Alzheimer patients showed a significant sensitivity decrement over time that was unrelated to dementia severity. The...