Giovanni Vecchiato

• PhD, Neurophysiology
• PostDoc Position at Italian National Research Council

Nowadays, there is a growing interest in measuring emotions through the estimation of cerebral variables. Several techniques and methods are used and debated in neuroscience. In such a context, the present paper provides examples of time-varying variables related to the estimation of emotional valence, arousal and Approach-Withdrawal behavior in ma...

The present research investigates the neurophysiological activity elicited by fast observations of faces of real candidates during simulated political elections. We used simultaneous recording of electroencephalographic (EEG) signals as well as galvanic skin response (GSR) and heart rate (HR) as measurements of central and autonomic nervous systems...

Proportional reasoning is very important logical skill required in mathematics and science problem solving as well as in everyday life decisions. However, there is a lack of studies on neurophysiological correlates of proportional reasoning. To explore the brain activity of healthy adults while performing a balance scale task, we used high-resoluti...

Today, there is a greater interest in the marketing world in using neuroimaging tools to evaluate the efficacy of TV commercials. This field of research is known as neuromarketing. In this article, we illustrate some applications of electrical neuroimaging, a discipline that uses electroencephalography (EEG) and intensive signal processing techniqu...

The built environment represents the stage surrounding our everyday life activities. To investigate how architectural design impacts individuals' affective states, we measured subjective judgments of perceived valence (pleasant and unpleasant) and arousal after the dynamic experience of a progressive change of macro visuospatial dimensions of virtu...

Dynamic virtual representations of the human being can communicate a broad range of affective states through body movements, thus effectively studying emotion perception. However, the possibility of modeling static body postures preserving affective information is still fundamental in a broad spectrum of experimental settings exploring time-locked...

Understanding mental processes in complex human behavior is a key issue in driving, representing a milestone for developing user-centered assistive driving devices. Here, we propose a hybrid method based on electroencephalographic (EEG) and electromyographic (EMG) signatures to distinguish left and right steering in driving scenarios. Twenty-four p...

Nowadays, the growing interest in gathering physiological data and human behavior in everyday life scenarios is paralleled by an increase in wireless devices recording brain and body signals. However, the technical issues that characterize these solutions often limit the full brain-related assessments in real-life scenarios. Here we introduce the B...

Driving a car requires high cognitive demands, from sustained attention to perception and action planning. Recent research investigated the neural processes reflecting the planning of driving actions, aiming to better understand the factors leading to driving errors and to devise methodologies to anticipate and prevent such errors by monitoring the...

The complexity of concurrent cerebral processes underlying driving makes such human behavior one of the most studied real-world activities in neuroergonomics. Several attempts have been made to decode, both offline and online, cerebral activity during car driving with the ultimate goal to develop brain-based systems for assistive devices. Electroen...

Understanding mental processes in complex human behaviour is a key issue in the context of driving, representing a milestone for developing user-centred assistive driving devices. Here we propose a hybrid method based on electroencephalographic (EEG) and electromyographic (EMG) signatures to distinguish left from right steering in driving scenarios...

The built environment represents the stage surrounding our everyday life activities. To investigate the impact that architectural features have on individuals’ affective states, we measured their judgments of perceived valence (pleasant and unpleasant) and arousal after the dynamic experience of a progressive change of the environment within virtua...

Objective To explore neurophysiological features of musicogenic epilepsy (ME), discussing experimental findings in the framework of a systematic review on ME. Methods Two patients with ME underwent high-density-electroencephalography (hd-EEG) while listening to ictogenic songs. In one case, musicogenic seizures were elicited. Independent component...

Nowadays, the possibility to run advanced AI on embedded systems allows natural interaction between humans and machines, especially in the automotive field. We present a custom portable EEG-based Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) that exploits Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) induced with an oddball experimental paradigm to control the infotainment men...

Car accidents are considered to be one of the major cause of death all around the world. In order to design electronic devices to improve car safety in the future, we aimed to identify electroencephalographic (EEG) activities to disentangle left from right steering actions in car driving simulation. For this purpose, we performed 128-channels EEG r...

When humans compete, they invest energy and effort to injure others and to protect against injury and exploitation. The psychology behind exploiting others and protecting against exploitation is still poorly understood and is addressed here in an incentivized economic contest game in which individuals invested in predatory attack and prey defense....

The objective of the present work was to identify electroencephalographic (EEG) components in order to distinguish between braking and accelerating intention in simulated car driving. To do so, we collected high-density EEG data from thirty participants while they were driving in a car simulator. The EEG was separated into independent components th...

How is music perceived by cochlear implant (CI) users? This question arises as “the next step” given the impressive performance obtained by these patients in language perception. Furthermore, how can music perception be evaluated beyond self-report rating, in order to obtain measurable data? To address this question, estimation of the frontal elect...

The purpose of this chapter is to share scientific methods for the quantitative measurement of emotion through the recording of physiologic and cerebral variables of consumers in relation to advertising stimuli and during the purchase in the store. For this reason, the authors describe the way to estimate the emotion along the visit of a shop by us...

In this study, the cortical activity correlated with the perception and appreciation of different set of pictures was estimated by using neuroelectric brain activity and graph theory methodologies in a group of artistic educated persons. The pictures shown to the subjects consisted of original pictures of Titian's and a contemporary artist's painti...

Over the last few years, the efforts to reveal through neuroscientific lens the relations between the mind, body, and built environment have set a promising direction of using neuroscience for architecture. However, little has been achieved thus far in developing a systematic account that could be employed for interpreting current results and provi...

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are widely used for clinical applications and exploited to design robotic and interactive systems for healthy people. We provide evidence to control a sensorimotor electroencephalographic (EEG) BCI system while piloting a flight simulator and attending a double attentional task simultaneously. Ten healthy subjects w...

Nowadays there is the hope that neuroscientific findings will contribute to the improvement of building design in order to create environments which satisfy man's demands. This can be achieved through the understanding of neurophysiological correlates of architectural perception. To this aim, the electroencephalographic (EEG) signals of 12 healthy...

Nowadays there is an emerging interest to apply the cognitive neuroscience recent scientific findings into the industrial context, to increase the efficacy of the interaction between humans and devices. The aim of the present chapter is to illustrate the possibilities of the use of electroencephalographic (EEG) signals recorded in humans to improve...

The neuroelectrical and the eye-movements activities were collected in a group of 27 healthy subjects during their visit of a fine arts gallery displaying twenty paintings of Titian. Evaluation of the appreciation of the paintings was performed by using the neuroelectrical approach-withdrawal index (AW). AW index was estimated for two groups of ten...

Despite of technological innovations, noisy environments still constitute a challenging and stressful situation for words recognition by hearing impaired subjects. The evaluation of the mental workload imposed by the noisy environments for the recognition of the words in prelingually deaf children is then of paramount importance since it could affe...

In this paper we measured the neuroelectrical and the eye-movements activities in a group of 27 healthy subjects during their visit of a fine arts gallery in which a series of masterpieces of the Italian painter Tiziano Vecellio (also known as Titian, 1488-1576) were shown. The pictures chosen for the visit were 10 portraits and 10 of religious sub...

The present work aims to investigate the electroencephalographic (EEG) activity elicited by the observation of emotional pictures selected from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) database. We analyzed the evoked activity within time intervals of increasing duration taking into account the related ratings of Valence and Arousal. The s...

The recent efforts aimed at providing neuroscientific explanations of how people perceive and experience architectural environments have largely justified the initial belief in the value of neuroscience for architecture. However, a systematic development of a coherent theoretical and experimental framework is missing. To investigate the neurophysio...

The aim of the present study is to investigate the variations of the electroencephalographic (EEG) alpha rhythm in order to measure the appreciation of bilateral and unilateral young cochlear implant users during the observation of a musical cartoon. The cartoon has been modified for the generation of three experimental conditions: one with the ori...

In this study we investigated the cerebral activity of a group of Eastern people during the observation of a Western and an Eastern version of the same TV commercial advertising a very popular smartphone. By comparing the electroencephalographic (EEG) signals in theta, alpha and heart rate (HR) activity of the population investigated, we estimated...

The aim of the present study is to measure the perceived pleasantness during the observation of a musical video clip in a group of cochlear implanted adult patients when compared to a group of normal hearing subjects. This comparison was performed by using the imbalance of the EEG power spectra in alpha band over frontal areas as a metric for the p...

Recent studies have been showed as the perception of real or displayed masterpieces by ancient or modern painters generate stable neuroelectrical correlates in humans. In this study, we collected the neuroelectrical brain activity correlated with the observation of the real sculpture of Michelangelo's Moses within the church where it is actually in...

Sleep deprivation and/or a high workload situation can adversely affect driving performance, decreasing a driver’s capacity to respond effectively in dangerous situations. In this context, to provide useful feedback and alert signals in real time to the drivers physiological and brain activities have been increasingly investigated in literature. In...

Nowadays, there is a growing interest in measuring the impact of advertisements through the estimation of cerebral reactions. Several techniques and methods are used and discussed in the consumer neuroscience. In such a context, the present paper provides a novel method to estimate the level of memorization occurred in subjects during the observati...

Neuromarketing is a multidisciplinary field of research whose aim is to investigate the consumers' reaction to advertisements from a neuroscientific perspective. In particular, the neuroscience field is thought to be able to reveal information about consumer preferences which are unobtainable through conventional methods, including submitting quest...

Objective: To investigate by means of non-invasive neuroelectrical imaging the differences in the perceived pleasantness of music between children with cochlear implants (CI) and normal-hearing (NH) children. Methods: 5 NH children and 5 children who received a sequential bilateral CI were assessed by means of High-Resolution EEG with Source Rec...

How to evaluate the effect of commercials is significantly important in neuromarketing. In this paper, we proposed an electronic way to evaluate the influence of video commercials on consumers by impression index. The impression index combines both the memorization and attention index during consumers observing video commercials by tracking the EEG...

Graph theory is a powerful mathematical tool recently introduced in neuroscience field for quantitatively describing the main properties of investigated connectivity networks. Despite the technical advancements provided in the last few years, further investigations are needed for overcoming actual limitations in the field. In fact, the absence of a...

Partial Directed Coherence (PDC) is a spectral multivariate estimator for effective connectivity, relying on the concept of Granger causality. Even if its original definition derived directly from information theory, two modifies were introduced in order to provide better physiological interpretations of the estimated networks: i) normalization of...

The perception of the music in cochlear implanted (CI) patients is an important aspect of their quality of life. In fact, the pleasantness of the music perception by such CI patients can be analyzed through a particular analysis of EEG rhythms. Studies on healthy subjects show that exists a particular frontal asymmetry of the EEG alpha rhythm which...

The aim of the study is to analyze the variation of the EEG power spectra in theta band when a novice starts to learn a new task. In particular, the goal is to find out the differences from the beginning of the training to the session in which the performance level is good enough for considering him/her able to complete the task without any problem...

Neuroaesthetic is a scientific discipline founded more than a decade ago and it refers to the study of the neural bases of beauty perception in art. The aim of this paper is to investigate the neuroelectrical correlates of brain activity of the observation of real paintings showed in a national fine arts gallery (Scuderie del Quirinale) in Rome, It...

The issue of how we make, and should make, decisions and judgments made think philosophers for hundreds of years and kept alive some disciplines such as philosophy and some branches of psychology. A recent approach, known as neuroeconomy, suggested to merge some ideas and scientific discoveries coming from psychology, neuroscience and economy field...

The present Chapter illustrates the scenario of a series of neuromarketing experiments we performed in the last years to investigate the EEG cerebral activations correlated with memorization, attention and emotional processing of individuals while watching TV commercials. A large space to the basics knowledge of the high resolution EEG technology i...

In the present Chapter we are going to illustrate the details of an experiment which helped us in understanding the cortical correlates of cognitive and emotional processes during the observation of TV commercials. Particularly, we investigated the cerebral activity of fifteen healthy subjects by gathering and analysing the EEG, GSR and HR activity...

This paper aims to be a survey of recent experiments performed in the Neuromarketing field. Our purpose is to illustrate results obtained by employing the popular tools of investigation well known in the international neuroelectrical community such as the MEG, High Resolution EEG techniques and steady-state visually evoked potentials. By means of t...

In this chapter, an example of the practical application of the previously discussed neuroelectrical imaging indexes is provided for the evaluation of a commercial advertisement before its TV launch on air. The aim is to describe which kind of additional information the analysis of cerebral signal could bring to the industry in this area of researc...

The most popular brain imaging method adopted in the neuromarketing field is the functional Magnetic Resonance Image (fMRI), a techniques that returns a sequence of images of the cerebral activity by means of the measure of the cerebral blood flow. Although such as images are “static”, i.e. they are related to around ten seconds activity, they have...

The purpose of this Chapter is to illustrate the potential of the high resolution EEG techniques when applied to the analysis of brain activity related to the observation of TV commercials and Public Service Announcements (PSAs) to localize cerebral areas mostly involved. In particular, we want to describe how, by using appropriate statistical anal...

Advertisings related to the fruition of carbonated beverages are intensively presented on the usual TV programs worldwide. Such as advertisements are also present on journals, street posters, fast foods and supermarkets in a pervasive way and could have a deep impact on human behavior. Recent functional neuroimaging studies have begun to investigat...

Nowadays, researchers are attempting to investigate the signs of the brain activity correlated with an increase of emotional involvement during the observation of commercial advertisements (Langleben et al., 2009; Vecchiato et al., 2010b). In fact, indirect variables of emotional processing could be gathered by tracking variations of the activity o...

The aim of this Chapter is to show how it is possible to extract cerebral indexes which are able to describe memorization, attention and pleasantness processes running during the observation of ads. In particular, we show the existing linear correlation between the memorization index and the explicit report of subjects enrolled in the experiment. I...

In the previous chapters it has been described the methodological approaches useful for the analysis of neurophysiological data provided by the EEG recordings related to marketing stimuli. Such approaches involved essentially the estimation of the power spectrum of the EEG data in particular cortical locations, such as the prefrontal and orbitofron...

In this book the authors describe their original research on the potential of both standard and high-resolution electroencephalography (EEG) for analyzing brain activity in response to TV advertising. When engineering techniques, neuroscience concepts and marketing stimuli converge in one research field, known as neuromarketing, various theoretical...

BORGHINI et al. Measuring neurophysiological signals in aircraft pilots and car drivers for the assessment of mental workload, fatigue and drowsiness NEUROSCI BIOBEHAV REV 21(1) XXX-XXX, 2012. This paper reviews published papers related to neurophysiological measurements (electroencephalography: EEG, electrooculography EOG; heart rate: HR) in pilot...

There is a large interest in the marketing world to use the neuroimaging tools as a possible aid to evaluate the efficacy of a commercial advertisement. Such an area of study is called “neuromarketing”. Here we illustrate some applications of electrical neuroimaging, a discipline using EEG and intensive signal processing techniques for the evaluati...

The application of Graph Theory to the brain connectivity patterns obtained from the analysis of neuroelectrical signals has provided an important step to the interpretation and statistical analysis of such functional networks. The properties of a network are derived from the adjacency matrix describing a connectivity pattern obtained by one of the...

The "Default Mode Network" concept was defined, in fMRI field, as a consistent pattern, involving some regions of the brain, which is active during resting state activity and deactivates during attention demanding or goal-directed tasks. Several fMRI studies described its features also correlating the deactivations with the attentive load required...

Interestingly, the international debate about the quality of music fruition for cochlear implanted users does not take into account the hypothesis that bilateral users could perceive music in a more pleasant way with respect to monolateral users. In this scenario, the aim of the present study was to investigate if cerebral signs of pleasantness dur...

Controlling an aircraft during a flight is a compelling condition, which requires a strict and well coded interaction between the crew. The interaction level between the Captain and the First Officer changes during the flight, ranging from a maximum (during takeoff and landing, as well as in case of a failure of the instrumentation or other emergen...

One of the main limitations of the brain functional connectivity estimation methods based on Autoregressive Modeling, like the Granger Causality family of estimators, is the hypothesis that only stationary signals can be included in the estimation process. This hypothesis precludes the analysis of transients which often contain important informatio...

Driving tasks are vulnerable to the effects of sleep deprivation and mental fatigue, diminishing driver's ability to respond effectively to unusual or emergent situations. Physiological and brain activity analysis could help to understand how to provide useful feedback and alert signals to the drivers for avoiding car accidents. In this study we an...

In this paper, we investigated the memorization variation during the observation of TV commercials by tracking the cortical activity. According to the priori knowledge, in the human scalp EEG, the theta band responds selectively to the encoding of new information into episodic memory. There will be a significantly larger increase in theta power dur...

The aim of this work is to demonstrate if the transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) should be useful to improve the performance level of subjects while they are engaged in a flight simulation and other secondary tasks. The evaluation of the flight performance is done by analyzing the pitch and bank angles respect to those of the ideal flig...

The study presented in the following starts from the research of reliable indexes for monitoring the cognitive workload that the pilots face during flight missions besides the operational performances. In fact, the availability of such indexes should be an useful tool for the assessment of the spare cognitive capacity of the pilots during the fligh...

Driving tasks are vulnerable to the effects of sleep deprivation and mental fatigue, diminishing driver’s ability to respond effectively to unusual or emergent situations. Physiological and brain activity analysis could help to understand how to provide useful feedback and alert signals to the drivers for avoiding car accidents. In this study we an...

Normally, performing a BCI task requires a focused attention to the goal and this does not consent to execute other operational functions. In this paper, it has been established the possibility to perform the BCI simultaneously with other tasks. In fact, the subject were able to complete a flight simulation (FS) and a third attention - vigilance ta...

In order to deal with the classification for multi-class motor imagery(MI) tasks, a novel approach was presented in this paper. It is different from classical methods which classified the MI task with time-frequency analysis on EEG signals. It employs the brain function network(BFN) as a new characteristic to describe MI tasks. The BFN enlarges the...

Advertisings related to the fruition of carbonated beverages are intensively presented on the usual TV programs worldwide. Recent functional neuroimaging studies have begun to investigate how commercial brand information is processed in the brain. While the role of prefrontal cortices is then highlighted in the generation of appreciation for a bran...

Advances in neuroelectric recordings and computational tools allow investigation of interactive brain activity and connectivity in a group of subjects engaged in social interactions.

In the present work, we used the brain electroencephalografic activity as an alternative means to identify individuals. 50 healthy subjects participated to the study and 56 EEG signals were recorded through a high-density cap during one minute of resting state either with eyes open and eyes closed. By computing the power spectrum density (PSD) on s...

Brain Hyperscanning, i.e. the simultaneous recording of the cerebral activity of different human subjects involved in interaction tasks, is a very recent field of Neuroscience aiming at understanding the cerebral processes generating and generated by social interactions. This approach allows the observation and modeling of the neural signature spec...

Partial Directed Coherence (PDC) is a powerful tool to estimate a frequency domain description of Granger causality between multivariate time series. One of the main limitation of this estimator, however, has been so far the criteria used to assess the statistical significance, which have been obtained through surrogate data approach or arbitrarily...

There is a debate in the specialized literature about the quality of fruition of music for patients that received a cochlear implant. Interestingly, very few studies have investigated the hypothesis that patients that use a bilateral cochlear implant could perceive the music in a more pleasant way as compared to unilaterally implanted patients. Pre...

The aim of this research is to analyze the changes in the EEG frontal activity during the observation of commercial videoclips. In particular, we aimed to investigate the existence of EEG frontal asymmetries in the distribution of the signals' power spectra related to experienced pleasantness of the video, as explicitly rated by the eleven experime...

Here we present an overview of some published papers of interest for the marketing research employing electroencephalogram (EEG) and magnetoencephalogram (MEG) methods. The interest for these methodologies relies in their high-temporal resolution as opposed to the investigation of such problem with the functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) m...

This paper aims to be a survey of recent experiments performed in the Neuromarketing field. Our purpose is to illustrate results obtained by employing the popular tools of investigation well known in the international neuroelectrical community such as the MEG, High Resolution EEG techniques and steady-state visually evoked potentials. By means of t...

Here we present an overview of some published papers of interest for the marketing research employing electroencephalogram (EEG) and magnetoencephalogram (MEG) methods. The interest for these methodologies relies in their high-temporal resolution as opposed to the investigation of such problem with the functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) m...