Maria Elide Vanutelli

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

Background: Although insect-based foods (IBFs) have been recently proposed as a way to face climate crisis and starvation, they encounter aversion from Western countries, which express fear, disgust, and high risk. The contribution of psychology research to food choices highlights how decisions are made, not only through reasoned attitudes and goal...

Background: Although insect-based foods (IBF) have been recently proposed as a way to face climate crisis and starvation, they encounter the aversion from Western countries which perceive fear, disgust, and high risk. The contribution of psychology research to food choices highlighted how decisions are taken not only through reasoned attitudes and...

The impact of controlled breathing on cognitive and affective processing has been recognized since ancient times, giving rise to multiple practices aimed at achieving different psychophysical states, mostly related to mental clarity and focus, stress reduction, and relaxation. Previous scientific research explored the effects of forced unilateral n...

The impact of controlled breathing on cognitive and affective processing has been recognized since ancient times, giving rise to multiple practices aimed at achieving different psychophysical states, mostly related to mental clarity and focus, stress reduction and relaxation. Previous scientific research explored the effects of unilateral nostril b...

Citation: Vanutelli, M.E.; Salvadore, M.; Lucchiari, C. BCI Applications to Creativity: Review and Future Directions, from little-c to C 2. Brain Sci. 2023, 13, 665. https://doi. Abstract: BCI devices are increasingly being used to create interactive interfaces between users and their own psychophysiological signals. Over the years, these systems h...

The COVID-19 emergency has had important implications not only for physical but also for psychological well-being. This is particularly true for fragile populations such as people with intellectual disability (ID), who are particularly at risk of suffering during uncertain times. The goal of this action research was to design, implement, and test t...

The current study investigates the differential effects of neurostimulation, mindfulness, and e-meditation over cognitive and creative performance. 47 healthy participants were randomly assigned to 4 experimental conditions: A) real stimulation, real meditation; B) sham stimulation, real meditation; C) real stimulation, fake meditation; D) real med...

People with intellectual disabilities (ID) show cognitive deficits that are subject to an earlier deterioration and they experience difficulties in the social-emotional sphere. Various stimulation techniques exist to strengthen these skills that, however, are not usually proposed to individuals with ID because 1) the users are not necessarily in se...

Divergent and convergent thinking are considered the two sides of creativity: the first being more related to idea generation; the second more focused on reaching one well-defined solution. Being one of the most complex of human behaviors, previous research underlined that creativity is supported by different neural circuits which involve both cont...

In the last 25 years, the field of neuroscience has seen exponential growth due to technological advances, which have not only allowed for collecting more accurate data, but also for addressing a variety of innovative studies for human development understanding. Neurofeedback (NF), and particularly Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) applications, are...

In the last 25 years, the field of neuroscience has seen exponential growth due to technological advances, which have not only allowed for collecting more accurate data, but also for addressing a variety of innovative studies for human development understanding. Neurofeedback (NF), and particularly Brain–Computer Interfaces (BCI) applications, are...

Mathematics, being a very ancient discipline, is usually seen as a formal subject that must be learned for school purposes, which is very far from creativity and fun. Also, mathematical skills are often considered a talent, so students are easily divided into gifted and not gifted, with a focus on speed and accuracy rather than encouraging the proc...

Mathematics, being a very ancient discipline, is usually seen as a formal subject that must be learned for school purposes, which is very far from creativity and fun. Also, mathematical skills are often considered a talent, so students are easily divided into gifted and not gifted, with a focus on speed and accuracy rather than encouraging the proc...

Neurofunctional models of developmental dyslexia (DD) point out disruption of the left-lateralized reading network. In individuals with DD, the left temporo-parietal (TP) regions are underactivated during reading tasks and a dysfunctional activation of the contralateral regions is reported. After a successful reading intervention, left TP lateraliz...

Background: Our daily cognitive and sensory experiences change exponentially fast, thus requiring individuals to exert a great effort in terms of neural adaptation. Our cognitive system simultaneously needs to be flexible, allowing for prompt switching from routine functioning to Creative-On mode. Creativity has been defined as humankind’s ultimate...

In a historical moment like the present one, characterized by a continuous flow of information and emotions, it becomes even more important to use flexible cognitive strategies that allow us to deal with change in a functional and adaptive way. An area of particular attention related to the pandemic concerns the emotional domain, which is often cha...

Decisional conflicts have been investigated with social decision-making tasks, which represent good models to elicit social and emotional dynamics, including fairness perception. To explore these issues, we created two modified versions of the UG framed within an economic vs. a moral context that included two kinds of unfair offers: advantageous (u...

Intellectual disability (ID) is a generalized neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by significant limitations in intellectual and adaptive functioning. From a cognitive point of view, individual with ID systematically show rigidity in thinking, with difficulties in planning, problem-solving abilities, in adapting to new situations and in think...

Il libro nasce dalla volontà di offrire riferimenti teorici e supporto pratico a tutti coloro che sono interessati alla creatività nell’ambito scolastico. Un lavoro pensato e progettato nel corso degli ultimi due anni, grazie anche al contributo e alla passione di numerosi studenti, ma che ha trovato la propria realizzazione durante la quarantena d...

Background: Recently several studies in the psychological and social field have investigated the social function of gift exchange as a useful way for the consolidation of interpersonal and social relationships and the implementation of prosocial behaviors. Specifically, the present research wanted to explore if gift exchange, increased emotional s...

Recently, different psychological studies have been interested in identifying the factors that regulate the development and maintenance of long-lasting interpersonal and social relationships. Specifically, the present research explored the link between gifts exchange, gratitude, and cognitive effects. The behavioral performance and neural activity...

Empirical management research has focused more on the investigation of important interpersonal factors that could be beneficial for a company’s well-being, including emotional and empathic engagement between managers and employees. Recent research has increasingly embodied a neuroscientific methods and paradigms. Specifically, the capacity to under...

Ricerche di Psicologia

Recent research in social neuroscience has shown how prosocial behavior can increase perceived self-efficacy, perception of cognitive abilitites and social interactions. The present research explored the effect of prosocial behavior, that is giving a gift during an interpersonal exchange, measuring the hyperscanning among two brains. The experiment...

Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a relatively new neuroimagingtechnique adequate and useful for exploring neural activity in social contexts involving humaninteractions. Compared to functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), fNIRS is easy-to-usesafe, noninvasive, silent, relatively low cost and portable, and applicable to subject...

Recent neuroscience research tried to identify biological markers underlying schizophrenia’s (SZ) symptoms. Results showed a functional hypofrontality in SZ patients during both cognitive and emotional tasks. Here, we submitted an experimental (E) group of patients to a neurofeedback (NF) training during emotion induction (T1) and assessed its effi...

Decision-making is configured as a very complex construct that it is influenced by different variables (Rilling & Sanfey, 2011; Fehr & Camerer 2007; Wang, Liu, & Ruhe, 2004), such as emotions and cognitive evaluation (Frith & Singer 2008; Groot et al., 2017; Stallen, Smidts, & Sanfey, 2013), that allow individuals to consider personal interests, po...

The functional role of the prefrontal cortex has often been related to decision-making. Moreover, depending on the task that has to be carried out, it can be even more functionally specialized (Ernst & Paulus, 2005). The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), for example, seems to be activated by complex tasks solving, working memory processing an...

How do people make decisions? Previous psychological research consistently shed light on the fact that decisions are not the result of a pure rational reasoning, and that emotions can assume a crucial role. This is particularly true in the case of moral decision-making, which requires a complex integration of affective and cognitive processes. One...

This paper describes a pilot educational project made in a Primary School in Italy (Scuola Primaria Alessandro Manzoni at Mulazzano, Milan) implemented in 2016 and 2017. The project was born from a specific request: the school aimed at improving the results achieved by students aged 7 during the National Tests for Mathematics since they registered...

Organizational research started including neurosciences exploring pivotal phenomena and promoting organizational well-being. Leadership was investigated by assessing psychophysiological responses during performance review characterized by narrative or quantitative assessments and their effects on employees' well-being. As is known, rating could be...

La relazione tra uomo e animale è diventata negli ultimi anni un tema di grande interesse, e gli effetti positivi di questo incontro sono stati valutati attraverso percorsi terapeutici specifici che coinvolgono la presenza di un animale nello sviluppo o nel recupero di alcune competenze motorie o cognitive. Tuttavia, al di là della percezione comun...

Research suggests that doctors are failing to make use of technologies designed to optimize their decision making skills in daily clinical activities, despite a proliferation of electronic tools with the potential for decreasing risks of medical and diagnostic errors. This paper addresses this issue by exploring the cognitive basis of medical decis...

Leadership in organizations consists of a complex process, which includes the interpersonal relationship with collaborators. By using a neuroscientific approach, we evaluated the effect of the presence of unidirectional versus reciprocal feedback (provided only by the leader or by both figures), as well as the assignment of a quantitative or just a...

La creatività rappresenta un costrutto multidimensionalee per questo risulta difficile definirla in modo unico e universalmente riconosciuto. Al contrario, è necessario fare riferimento a diversi modelli definitori, ognuno in grado di porre in evidenza alcuni suoi particolari aspetti, o dimensioni. Al massimo livello di generalità, i vari modelli c...

The goal of this experimental research was to demonstrate that creative thinking could be trained in primary school children. After asserting the difficulty to determine a unique definition of creativity – the concept fits to several fields and areas of interests – the capacity to produce numerous ideas and to think divergently was chosen as the fr...

Brain-to-brain coupling during cooperation is a core question of study on social interactions. The aim of the present study was to investigate the neural basis of interbrain cooperation and the cognitive performance underlying the execution of jointactions by using EEG coherence measures. Synchronicity of the cognitive variables (response times, RT...

Background Social behavior and interactions pervasively shape and influence our lives and relationships. Competition, in particular, has become a core topic in social neuroscience since it stresses the relevance and salience of social comparison processes between the inter-agents that are involved in a common task. The majority of studies, however,...

Previous research on Schizophrenia (S) revealed anomalies in brain responsiveness during emotion processing, as shown by neuroimaging and electroencephalography (EEG) measures. Nonetheless preserved capacities to explicitly evaluate the emotional significance of affective stimuli in term of valence have been found. The present study applied functio...

Previous work showed that, when we interact with other people, an alignment of psychophysiological measures occur as a clue about the intensity of the social interaction. Available evidence highlighted increase autonomic synchrony, known as physiological linkage, during intense dyadic situations, like conflictual conversations within romantic coupl...

Creativity, meant as the ability to produce novel, original and suitable ideas, has received increased attention by research in the last years, especially from neuroaesthetics and social neuroscience. Besides the research conducted on the neural correlates of such capacities, previous work tried to answer the question of whether it is possible to e...

The consumption of energy drink is commonly associated with greater physical and cognitive performance. However, there are contradictory results on this issue because the influence of each single component, nor the interactions between them, is still not clear. In addition, the mechanisms underlying neuromarketing techniques and their influence on...

The presented performance, using an EEG-BCI (Brain Computer Interface), is dedicated to artists, scholars and experts interested in the whole world of creativity and the related psychological and neuro-cognitive mechanisms. The aims of this work are: to identify possible biomarkers (EEG) related to the creative process in specific tasks, exploring...

Real and virtual are often considered terms in reciprocal opposition, but the boundaries between the two are blurred. The main goal of our study consists in answering the question whether the presence of a third dimension (3D) is a fundamental step of the virtual toward the real world, and if it causes some difference in the neural activity of the...

The neurophysiological basis of social ranking perception underlying the execution of cooperative joint-actions was explored in the present study. Self-perception of social ranking, personality trait (Behavioral Activation System (BAS) and locus of control (LoC)) and alpha brain oscillations were considered. Subjects were required to match their co...

The diagnosis of Learning Disabilities (LD) is frequently subject to cognitive biases. In Italy, minimal diagnostic standards have been identified during a national Consensus Conference (2010). However, specialists use different protocols to assess reading and cognitive abilities. Thus, we propose to support LDs diagnosis with Artificial Neural Net...

Emotional empathy plays a crucial role in social intra-species and inter-species interactions. However the role of interspecies interactions and of some personality components was underestimated. The present research explored electrophysiological correlates of affective processing in relation to emotionally valenced human-human (HH) and human-anima...

Cooperation behavior is a core question of study on social neuroscience. In the present study, inter-brain functional connectivity and cognitive performance were considered during joint which was failing. The cognitive performance and the EEG (brain oscillations from delta to beta) underlying the execution of joint-actions were recorded when dyads...

Functional connectivity during cooperative actions is an important topic in social neuroscience that has yet to be answered. Here, we examined the effects of administration of (fictitious) negative social feedback in relation to cooperative capabilities. Cognitive performance and neural activation underlying the execution of joint actions was recor...

Introduction The neural activity in response to ineffective joint actions was explored in the present study. Subjects involved in a cooperative but frustrating task (poor performance as manipulated by an external feedback) were required to cooperate (T1) during an attentional task in a way to synchronize their responses and obtain better outcomes....

The Publication is following the yearly Editions of EVA FLORENCE. The State of Art is presented regarding the Application of Technologies (in particular of digital type) to Cultural Heritage. The more recent results of the Researches in the considered Area are presented. Information Technologies of interest for Culture Heritage are presented: multi...

Previous research highlighted that during social interactions people shape each other’s emotional states by resonance mechanisms and synchronized autonomic patterns. Starting from the idea that joint actions create shared emotional experiences, in the present study a social bond was experimentally induced by making subjects cooperate with each othe...

Inter-brain synchronization during joint actions is a core question in social neuroscience, and the differential contribution of intra- and inter-brain functional connectivity has yet to be clarified along with the role of psychological variables such as perceived self-efficacy. The cognitive performance and the neural activation underlying the exe...

Previous research investigated the presence of differential autonomic responses towards the emotions expressed by individuals from ingroup or outgroup contexts. Results found increased affective reactions and typical identification bias that can be explained, according to "the similarity factor", as the tendency to tune stronger with those perceive...

It is known that the longer an information has been memorized, the stronger is its memory trace. At the same time it is known that the emotionally-valenced information has a stronger memory trace than neutral one. Interactive effects between these factors are largely unknown. In this study electrical neuroimaging signals were recorded in healthy co...

Cooperation represents a main component of our social life. In previous studies it was found that cooperative tasks are often able to improve the subjective performance and that they simultaneously contribute to modify the self-perception of social ranking position. From a neurophysiological perspective, it was found the relevant contribution of pr...

Background Cooperation and competition were compared in the present study. Brain correlates (electroencephalography, EEG frequency band, delta, theta, alpha, and beta) and hemodynamic measure of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS, O2Hb) were acquired during a joined cooperative (Experiment 1) or competitive (Experiment 2) task. Subjects w...

Purpose: Human life is connoted by sophisticated interactions that involve not only single individuals, but larger social groups composed by members interacting each other. Cooperation secures a benefit to all the people engaged as well as important behaviors like helping, sharing, and acting prosocially. But what happens when the joint actions ar...

This abstract describe the effect of negative feedback on performance and brain activation using an hyperscanning paradigm during a cooperative joint task.

Cooperation and competition, as two common and opposite examples of interpersonal dynamics, are thought to be reflected by different cognitive, neural, and behavioral patterns. According to the conventional approach, they have been explored by measuring subjects' reactions during individual performance or turn-based interactions in artificial setti...

Hyperscanning brain paradigm was applied to competitive task for couples of subjects. Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) and cognitive performance were considered to test inter-brain and cognitive strategy similarities between subjects (14 couples) during a joint-action. We supposed increased brain-to-brain coupling and improved cognitiv...

Human creativity is not just the result of a cognitive encapsulated process, but is an online process that link together thoughts, emotions and sensory events in a complex fashion. Thanks to this property, that is to the development of mental reflection, we can always (or almost always) create a context in which to give sense to the world. Art and...

The aims of the present work were to identify possible biomarkers (EEG) related to the creative process in specific tasks; to explore the creative process in a real-time ecological setting; to investigate the relation between explicit and implicit mechanisms during creative processes; to explore the relation between creativity and personality trait...

Cooperation is a construct within social cognition that requires both self-perception and the comprehension of others' actions. In the case of synchronized activities the adoption of common strategies is crucial, but this process can be strongly influenced by those variables. In fact, self-perceived efficacy within the social exchange can affect th...

Neuromanagement deals with neuroscience methodological approaches to the management. A management construct is leadership, but objective psychophysiological data in support of it are still missing. The present pilot study aimed to apply the hyperscanning paradigm during a role-played employees' evaluation. Our purpose was to identify lexical and ne...

Emotional empathy is crucial to understand how we respond to interpersonal positive or negative situations. In the present research, we aim at identifying the neural networks and the autonomic responsiveness underlying the human ability to perceive and empathize with others’ emotions when positive (cooperative) or negative (uncooperative) interacti...

Introduction The present study explored the role of resting state and personality component (BIS/BAS measure) on prefrontal cortical responsiveness to emotional cues. Indeed, we supposed that lateralized resting activity (right vs. left) and approach (BAS) versus avoidance (BIS) attitude may explain the successive emotional processing within the pr...

The aim of the present study was to investigate the neural bases of cooperative behaviors and social self-perception underlying the execution of joint actions by using a hyperscanning brain paradigm with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). We firstly found that an artificial positive feedback on the cognitive performance was able to affe...

In the present study, the social ranking perception in competition was explored. Brain response (alpha band oscillations, EEG; hemodynamic activity, O2Hb), as well as self-perception of social ranking, cognitive performance, and personality trait (Behavioral Activation System, BAS) were considered during a competitive joint-action. Subjects were re...