Giovanni Mirabella

Università degli Studi di Brescia | UNIBS · Department of Clinical and Experimental Sciences

Background/Objective: Early-onset obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and Tourette syndrome (TS) are frequently associated conditions. Evidence is accumulating in support of a common genetic liability of the two disorders [1-2], which has raised new interest for their comorbidity (TS+OCD), both in terms of clinical course and response to treatment....

A classical theoretical frame to interpret motor reactions to emotional stimuli is that such stimuli, particularly those threat-related, are processed preferentially, i.e., they are capable of capturing and grabbing attention automatically. Research has recently challenged this view, showing that the task relevance of emotional stimuli is crucial t...

Tourette syndrome (TS) and early-onset obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) are frequently associated and conceptualized as distinct phenotypes of a common disease spectrum. However, the nature of their relationship is still largely unknown on a pathophysiological level. In this study, early structural white matter (WM) changes investigated through...

Whole-body movements represent an ecologically valid model for assessing the effect of emotional stimuli valence on approach/avoidance reactions as they entail a change of the physical distance between such stimuli and the self. However, research in this field has provided inconsistent results as the task relevance of the emotional content of the s...

The ability to generate appropriate responses, especially in social contexts, requires integrating emotional information with ongoing cognitive processes. In particular, inhibitory control plays a crucial role in social interactions, preventing the execution of impulsive and inappropriate actions. In this study, we focused on the impact of facial e...

Tourette syndrome (TS) and obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) are two neurodevelopmental disorders characterized by repetitive behaviors. Our recent study in drug-naive children with TS and OCD provided evidence of cerebellar involvement in both disorders. In addition, cerebellar functional connectivity (FC) was similar in TS patients without como...

The relationship between handedness, laterality, and inhibitory control is a valuable benchmark for testing the hypothesis of the right-hemispheric specialization of inhibition. According to this theory, and given that to stop a limb movement, it is sufficient to alter the activity of the contralateral hemisphere, then suppressing a left arm moveme...

We, humans, live under the impression that agents’ conscious intentions to act are at the origin of our actions. However, experimental evidence challenged this common intuition of free will, suggesting that such subjective experience is something of a perceptual illusion. The awareness of the intention to act would be generated as a side effect of...

The ability to generate appropriate responses, especially in social contexts, requires integrating emotional information with ongoing cognitive processes. In particular, inhibitory control plays a crucial role in social interactions, preventing the execution of impulsive and inappropriate actions. In this study, we focused on the impact of facial e...

Introduction Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is a clinical condition defined as intentional, self-inflicted act causing pain or superficial damage without suicidal intents (12-35% of the adolescent community). Several findings show a high correlation between NSSI and impairments in the impulsivity control. Objectives The goal of our study is to ev...

The impairment of inhibitory control is often assumed to be the core deficit of several neurodevelopmental disorders characterized by poor impulse control. However, could the same deficit explain different clinical phenotypes? Evidence from behavioural studies is very mixed. This is partly because inhibition is a highly complex executive function....

Facial emotional expressions are a salient source of information for nonverbal social interactions. However, their impact on action planning and execution is highly controversial. In this vein, the effect of the two threatening facial expressions, i.e., angry and fearful faces, is still unclear. Frequently, fear and anger are used interchangeably a...

Previous studies in cohorts of Tourette syndrome (TS) or obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) patients have not clarified whether these two disorders represent two clinical conditions or they are distinct clinical phenotypes of a common disease spectrum. The study aimed to compare functional connectivity (FC) patterns in a pediatric drug-naive cohor...

Reactive inhibition correlates with the severity of symptoms in paediatric patients with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) though not in those with Tourette syndrome (TS). Here we assessed whether structural alterations in both grey (GM) and white matter (WM) volumes correlate with a measure of reactive inhibition, i.e. the stop-signal reaction t...

Typically, the inability to control urges tends to be ascribed to a lack of inhibitory control. Primary complex motor stereotypes (p-CMS), occurring in children with an otherwise typical development, represent a remarkable example of involuntary, complex, repetitive and apparently purposeless movements. However, it has never been tested whether the...

Background: It is well known that a deficit in inhibitory control is a hallmark of Parkinson's disease (PD). However, inhibition is not a unitary construct, and it is unclear whether patients in the early stage of the disease (Hoehn and Yahr stage 1) exhibit a deficit in outright stopping (reactive inhibition), a deficit in the ability to shape th...

Despite the relevance of inhibitory control in shaping our behavior its neural substrates are still hotly debated. In this regard, it has been suggested that inhibitory control relies upon a right-lateralized network which involves the right subthalamic nucleus (STN). To assess the role of STN, we took advantage of a relatively rare model, i.e., ad...

Modern theories of behavioral control converge with the idea that goal-directed/voluntary behaviors are intimately tied to the evaluation of resources. Of key relevance in the decision-making processes that underlie action selection are those stimuli that bear emotional content. However, even though it is acknowledged that emotional information aff...

Background: Impaired inhibitory control is thought to be a core deficit in psychiatric disorders where patients exhibit problems with controlling urges. These problems include the urge to perform movements typical of Tourette syndrome and the urge to execute compulsive actions typical of obsessive‐compulsive disorder. However, the picture emerging...

Conventional medical treatments of Parkinson’s disease (PD) are effective on motor disturbances but may have little impact on nonmotor symptoms, especially psychiatric ones. Thus, even when motor symptomatology improves, patients might experience deterioration in their quality of life. We have shown that 3 years of active theatre is a valid complem...

Objectives The ability to stop a pending action is fundamental for survival because it allows to adapt to unpredictable changes in the external environment. Despite the importance of this executive function both neural substrates and their roles are still debated. It has been suggested that inhibitory control relies upon a right-lateralized network...

Parkinson's disease (PD) is often characterized by asymmetrical symptoms, which are more prominent on the side of the body contralateral to the most extensively affected brain hemisphere. Therefore, lateralized PD presents an opportunity to examine the effects of asymmetric subcortical dopamine deficiencies on cognitive functioning. As it has been...

We have previously shown that in seven drug-resistant epilepsy patients, both reaching-grasping of objects and the mere observation of those actions did desynchronize subdural electrocorticographic (ECoG) alpha (8–13 Hz) and beta (14–30) rhythms as a sign of cortical activation in primary somatosensory-motor, lateral premotor and ventral prefrontal...

Processing action-language affects the planning and execution of motor acts, which suggests that the motor system might be involved in action-language understanding. However, this claim is hotly debated. For the first time, we compared the processing of action-verbs in children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD), a disease that specific...

Parkinson's disease (PD) is often characterized by asymmetrical symptoms, which are more prominent on the side of the body contralateral to the most extensively affected brain hemisphere. Thus, lateralized PD presents an opportunity to examine the effects of asymmetric subcortical dopamine deficiencies on cognitive functioning. As it has been hypot...

Objectives: The ability to stop a pending action is fundamental for survival because it allows to adapt to unpredictable changes in the external environment. Despite the importance of this executive function the roles of its neural substrates are still debated. It has been suggested that inhibitory control relies upon a right-lateralized network co...

Objectives: The ability to stop a pending action is fundamental for survival because it allows to adapt to unpredictable changes in the external environment. Despite the importance of this executive function the roles of its neural substrates are still debated. It has been suggested that inhibitory control relies upon a right-lateralized network co...

Adaptive adjustments of strategies are needed to optimize behavior in a dynamic and uncertain world. A key function in implementing flexible behavior and exerting self-control is represented by the ability to stop the execution of an action when it is no longer appropriate for the environmental requests. Importantly, stimuli in our environment are...

Abstract Objective. In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that both movement execution and observation induce parallel modulations of alpha, beta, and gamma electrocorticographic (ECoG) rhythms in primary somatosensory (Brodmann area 1-2, BA1-2), primary motor (BA4), ventral premotor (BA6), and prefrontal (BA44 and BA45, part of putative h...

Whether art therapy can be an effective rehabilitative treatment for people with brain or mental diseases (e.g., dementia, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, autism, schizophrenia) is a long-standing and highly debated issue. On the one hand, several observational studies and anecdotal evidence enthusiastically support the effectiveness of a...

All actions, even the simplest like moving an arm to grasp a pen, are associated with energy costs. Thus all mobile organisms possess the ability to evaluate resources and select those behaviors that are most likely to lead to the greatest accrual of valuable items (reward) in the near or, especially in the case of humans, distant future. The evalu...

The theory of embodied language states that language comprehension relies on an internal reenactment of the sensorimotor experience associated with the processed word or sentence. Most evidence in support of this hypothesis had been collected using linguistic material without any emotional connotation. For instance, it had been shown that processin...

It is solidly established that unequal stimulus frequencies lead to faster responses to the more likely stimulus; however, the effect of this probability bias on response inhibition is still debated. To tackle this issue, we administered two versions of the stop-signal task to 18 right-handed healthy subjects. In one version, we manipulated the fre...

Aim: It is solidly established that physical exercise has a positive influence on high-level cognitive abilities [1,2]. In addition, it has been demonstrated that the motor system has an important role in action-related words comprehension [3]. Given the recruitment of the motor system in this particular cognitive function, the aim of this study wa...

Cognitive functions like motor planning rely on the concerted activity of multiple neuronal assemblies underlying still elusive computational strategies. During reaching tasks, we observed stereotyped sudden transitions (STs) between low and high multiunit activity of monkey dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) predicting forthcoming actions on a single-tr...

A fundamental function of the motor system is to gather key information from the environment in order to implement behavioral strategies appropriate to the context. Although several lines of evidence indicate that Parkinson’s disease affects the ability to modify behavior according to task requirements, it is currently unknown whether deep brain st...

Supporting table and figure. (DOC)

Background and methods Several studies have demonstrated that action verbs processing is selectively impaired in Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients. These results suggest that the integrity of the motor system is needed to properly elaborate action related verbs. To further explore this topic we exploited a go/no-go paradigm where 15 non-demented id...

In humans, the ability to withhold manual motor responses seems to rely on a right-lateralized frontal-basal ganglia-thalamic network, including the pre-supplementary motor area and the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). These areas should drive subthalamic nuclei to implement movement inhibition via the hyperdirect pathway. The output of this network i...

Even though a growing body of research has shown that the processing of action language affects the planning and execution of motor acts, several aspects of this interaction are still hotly debated. The directionality (i.e. does understanding action-related language induce a facilitation or an interference with the corresponding action?), the time...

Analyses of movement times across all experiments. (DOC)

The precise localizations of the neural substrates of voluntary inhibition are still debated. It has been hypothesized that, in humans, this executive function relies upon a right-lateralized pathway comprising the inferior frontal gyrus and the presupplementary motor area, which would control the neural processes for movement inhibition acting thr...

Canceling a pending movement is a hallmark of voluntary behavioral control because it allows us to quickly adapt to unattended changes either in the external environment or in our thoughts. The countermanding paradigm allows the study of inhibitory processes of motor acts by requiring the subject to withhold planned movements in response to an infr...

Most medical treatments of Parkinson's disease (PD) are aimed at the reduction of motor symptoms. However, even when motor improvements are evident, patients often report a deterioration of their daily lives. Thus, to achieve a global improvement in personal well-being, not only drugs, but also complementary therapies, such as physical exercise, oc...

Posterior parietal cortex (PPC) has long been implicated in the control of spatial attention. Recent studies have also suggested a role of PPC in other forms of attention, like attention to object features and task switching. We investigated this by recording single neurons from area 7a of one monkey engaged in spatial and non-spatial attention tas...

It is well known that visual attention can enhance processing of restricted regions of space or of individual objects. Recent work has shown that visual attention can also lead to selective processing of individual object features, but clear demonstrations of these feature-specific modulatory effects are still lacking at the level of single neurons...

Previous evidence in epileptic subjects has shown that theta (about 4-7Hz) and gamma rhythms (about 40-45Hz) of hippocampus, amygdala, and neocortex were temporally synchronized during the listening of repeated words successfully remembered (Babiloni et al., 2009). Here we re-analyzed those electroencephalographic (EEG) data to test whether a paral...

It is well known that theta rhythms (3-8 Hz) are the fingerprint of hippocampus, and that neural activity accompanying encoding of words differs according to whether the items are later remembered or forgotten ["subsequent memory effect" (SME)]. Here, we tested the hypothesis that temporal synchronization of theta rhythms among hippocampus, amygdal...

Behavioral flexibility provides a very large repertoire of actions and strategies, however, it carries a cost: a potential interference between different options. The voluntary control of behavior starts exactly with the ability of deciding between alternatives. Certainly inhibition plays a key role in this process. Here we examined the inhibitory...

The ability of rapidly adapting our motor behaviour in order to face the unpredictable changes in the surrounding environment is fundamental for survival. To achieve such a high level of efficiency our motor system has to assess continuously the context in which it acts, gathering all available information that can be relevant for planning goal-ori...

A milestone on which relies the voluntary control of behavior is the ability to shape our motor output to meet the needs of the context which we are continuously facing. Even though it is solidly established that contextual information influence movement generation few studies have so far explored their effects on inhibitory processes. We compared...

Neural processing at most stages of the primate visual system is modulated by selective attention, such that behaviorally relevant information is emphasized at the expenses of irrelevant, potentially distracting information. The form of attention best understood at the cellular level is when stimuli at a given location in the visual field must be s...