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Publications (85)
Interest in adult picky eating (PE), i.e., the unwillingness to eat familiar foods or try novel foods, has grown rapidly in the last decade as a result of its negative health consequences. Fairly poor data are available on the prevalence of PE in Italy, mostly due to the lack of a psychometrically sound tool to measure this construct. Thus, this co...
Previous research about body size estimation in obesity reported heterogeneous results. This might be related to the fact that the tasks adopted explored different body representations. Classifying the previous studies according to the specific body representation probed (i.e. implicit, explicit or both) might clarify discordant findings. A systema...
Voluntary actions are accompanied by the experience of controlling one’s own movements (sense of agency) and the feeling that the moving body part belongs to one’s self (sense of body ownership). So far, agency and body ownership have been investigated separately, leaving the neural underpinnings of the relation between the two largely unexplored....
To locate our body in the space, we rely on an implicit representation of body size and shape: the body model. Evidence about the implicit representation of bodily dimensions in obesity is rare. Nevertheless, it seems to suggest that such representation is not altered in obesity compared to healthy weight individuals. To probe further this hypothes...
The self-serving bias is the tendency to consider oneself in unrealistically positive terms. This phenomenon has been documented for body attractiveness, but it remains unclear to what extent it can also emerge for own body size perception. In the present study, we examined this issue in healthy young adults (45 females and 40 males), using two bod...
Natural exploration of textures involves active sensing, i.e., voluntary movements of tactile sensors (e.g., human fingertips or rodent whiskers) across a target surface. Somatosensory input during moving tactile sensors varies according to both the movement and the surface texture. Combining motor and sensory information, the brain is capable of e...
Preliminary evidence showed a reduced temporal sensitivity (i.e., larger temporal binding window) to audiovisual asynchrony in obesity. Our aim was to extend this investigation to visuotactile stimuli, comparing individuals of healthy weight and with obesity in a simultaneity judgment task. We verified that individuals with obesity had a larger tem...
The Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) is used widely to investigate the multisensory integration mechanisms that support bodily self-consciousness and, more specifically, body ownership and self-location. It has been reported that individuals affected by obesity show anomalous multisensory integration processes. We propose that these obesity-induced chang...
Considering the wealth of recent studies on affective touch, to date, little research addressed the role of the other sensory modalities in the modulation of hedonic tactile perception. Here, we investigated the behavioral and electrodermal signature of the interaction between simultaneously presented visual and tactile stimuli. In three experiment...
How do age-related changes affect the sense of body ownership? This study tackles this issue by means of the rubber hand illusion (RHI), a widely used experimental tool for investigating the sense of body ownership. There is ample literature on the RHI in young populations, but research on age-related changes in the RHI is still scarce. Here we ext...
In our study, we aimed to reduce bodily self-consciousness using a multisensory illusion (MI), and tested whether this manipulation increases Self-objectification (the psychological attitude to perceive one's own body as an object). Participants observed their own body from a first-person perspective, through a head-mounted display, while receiving...
In two behavioral experiments, we explored effects of long-term musical training on the implicit processing of temporal structures (rhythm, non-rhythm and meter), manipulating deviance detection under different conditions. We used a task that did not require an explicit processing of the temporal aspect of stimuli, as this was irrelevant for the ta...
Vibell et al. (J Cogn Neurosci 19:109–120, 2007) reported that endogenously attending to a sensory modality (vision or touch) modulated perceptual processing, in part, by the relative speeding-up of neural activation (i.e., as a result of prior entry). However, it was unclear whether it was the fine temporal discrimination required by the temporal-...
Despite the large number of studies on the multisensory aspects of tactile perception, very little is known regarding the effects of visual and auditory sensory modalities on the tactile hedonic evaluation of textures, especially when the presentation of the stimuli is mediated by a haptic device. In this study, different haptic virtual surfaces we...
Audition and touch interact with one another and share a number of similarities; however, little is known about their interplay in the perception of temporal duration. The present study intended to investigate whether the temporal duration of an irrelevant auditory or tactile stimulus could modulate the perceived duration of a target stimulus prese...
Recent findings have shown that sounds improve visual detection in low vision individuals when the audiovisual stimuli pairs of stimuli are presented simultaneously and from the same spatial position. The present study purports to investigate the temporal aspects of the audiovisual enhancement effect previously reported. Low vision participants wer...
Functional movement disorders (FMD) are characterized by motor symptoms (e.g., tremor, gait disorder, and dystonia) that are not compatible with movement abnormalities related to a known organic cause. One key clinical feature of FMD is that motor symptoms are similar to voluntary movements but are subjectively experienced as involuntary by patient...
In the rubber hand illusion (RHI), watching a rubber hand being stroked in synchrony with one’s own hidden hand may induce a sense of ownership over the rubber hand. The illusion relies on bottom-up multisensory integration of visual, tactile, and proprioceptive information, and on top-down processes through which the rubber hand is incorporated in...
To efficiently perceive and respond to the external environment, our brain has to perceptually integrate or segregate stimuli of different modalities. The temporal relationship between the different sensory modalities is therefore essential for the formation of different multisensory percepts. In this magnetoencephalography study, we created a para...
Over the last decade, scientists working on the topic of multisensory integration, as well as designers and marketers involved in trying to understand consumer behavior, have become increasingly interested in the non-arbitrary associations (e.g., sound symbolism) between different sensorial attributes of the stimuli. Nevertheless, to date, little r...
AIM: investigate whether the participants’ ASD-like traits affect the body representation and interpersonal socioaffective perception effects induced by the enfacement illusion.
It has been reported that people tend to preferentially associate phonemes like /m/, /l/, /n/ to curvilinear shapes and phonemes like /t/, /z/, /r/, /k/ to rectilinear shapes. Here we evaluated the performance of children/adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and neurotypical controls in this audiovisual congruency phenomenon. Pairs of v...
Aim of this study was to investigate the neural correlates of audio and tactile integration by means of magnetoenceohalography (MEG). Participants were presented with a one-second sound of a mosquito approaching the head from the left side. Furthermore a spatially correlated tactile stimulus was presented at different stimulus onset asynchronies (S...
The question of whether perceptual illusions influence eye movements is critical for the long-standing debate regarding the separation between action and perception. To test the role of auditory context on a visual illusion and on eye movements, we took advantage of the fact that the presence of an auditory cue can successfully modulate illusory mo...
Previous evidence on neurotypical adults shows that the presentation of a stimulus allocates the attention to its modality, resulting in faster responses to a subsequent target presented in the same (vs. different) modality. People with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) often fail to detect a (visual or auditory) target in a stream of stimuli after...
We highlight the results of those studies that have investigated the plastic reorganization processes that occur within the human brain as a consequence of visual deprivation, as well as how these processes give rise to behaviorally observable changes in the perceptual processing of auditory and tactile information. We review the evidence showing t...
The label ‘crossmodal correspondences’ has been used to define the nonarbitrary associations that appear to exist between different basic physical stimulus attributes in different sensory modalities. For instance, it has been consistently shown in the neurotypical population that higher pitched sounds are more frequently matched with visual pattern...
A recent study (Tsakiris et al., 2011) suggested that lower interoceptive sensitivity, as assessed by heat-rate estimation, predicts malleability of body representations, as measured by proprioceptive drift and ownership in a rubber hand illusion (RHI) task. The authors suggested that one explanation of their finding is linked to the notion of limi...
Our recent findings have shown that sounds improve visual detection in low vision individuals when the audiovisual pairs are presented simultaneously. The present study purports to investigate possible temporal aspects of the audiovisual enhancement effect that we have previously reported. Low vision participants were asked to detect the presence o...
The present study aims to assess the mechanisms involved in the processing of potentially threatening stimuli presented within the peri-head space of humans. Magnetic fields evoked by air-puffs presented at the peri-oral area of fifteen participants were recorded by using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Crucially, each air puff was preceded by a soun...
Human chemosensation can be strongly influenced by how much attention people pay to chemosensory stimuli (e.g., Marks and
Wheeler in Chem Senses 23:19–29, 1998; Prescott et al. in Chem Senses 29:331–340, 2004). In a recent study, a scale has been devised (i.e., the Odor Awareness Scale; OAS; see Smeets et al. in Chem Senses 33:725–734,
2008) to inv...
In the ventriloquism effect, the presentation of spatially discrepant visual information biases the localization of simultaneously presented sounds. Recently, an analogous spatial influence of touch on audition has been observed. By manipulating hand posture, it has been demonstrated that this audiotactile ventriloquist effect predominantly operate...
Behavioral and neurophysiological studies have shown an enhancement of visual perception in crossmodal audiovisual stimulation conditions, both for sensitivity and reaction times, when the stimulation in the two sensory modalities occurs in condition of space and time congruency. The purpose of the present work is to verify whether congruent visual...
Our perception of the objects and events that fill the world in which we live depends on the integration of the sensory inputs that simultaneously reach our various sensory systems (e.g., vision, audition, touch, taste, and smell). Perhaps the best-known examples of genuinely multisensory experiences come from our perception and evaluation of food...
We address the role of the incidental emotion of disgust in the Ultimatum Game. Participants had to choose whether or not to accept a €2 offer from a €10 pot made by another participant; 120 were in a room where a disgusting smell was released and 120 were in a room with no particular smell. Acceptance rates were higher in the room with the disgust...
In the present review, we focus on how commonalities in the ontogenetic development of the auditory and tactile sensory systems may inform the interplay between these signals in the temporal domain. In particular, we describe the results of behavioral studies that have investigated temporal resolution (in temporal order, synchrony/asynchrony, and s...
The last few years have seen a growing interest in the assessment of audiotactile interactions in information processing in peripersonal space. In particular, these studies have focused on investigating peri-head space and, more recently, on the functional differences that have been demonstrated between the space close to front and back of the head...
The Colavita effect occurs when participants performing a speeded detection/discrimination task preferentially report the visual component of pairs of audiovisual or visuotactile stimuli. To date, however, researchers have failed to demonstrate an analogous effect for audiotactile stimuli (Hecht and Reiner in Exp Brain Res 193:307-314, 2009). Here,...
In this paper, we review the empirical literature concerning the important question of whether or not food color influences
taste and flavor perception in humans. Although a superficial reading of the literature on this topic would appear to give
a somewhat mixed answer, we argue that this is, at least in part, due to the fact that many researchers...
The consumption of food and drink are among the most multisensory of our perceptual experiences. In fact, the evaluation of
foodstuffs is not only influenced by the unified oral sensation (or Gestalt) of taste and smell in the mouth but also by what
the foods look, feel (i.e., oral texture, temperature, viscosity, etc.), and sound like (particularl...
Neurophysiological and behavioural evidence now show that audiotactile interactions are more pronounced for complex auditory stimuli than for pure tones. In the present study, we examined the effect of varying the complexity of auditory stimuli (i.e., noise vs. pure tone) on participants' performance in the audiotactile cross-modal dynamic capture...
Distinct regions within the ventral visual pathway show neural specialization for nonliving and living stimuli (e.g., tools, houses versus animals, faces). The causes of these category preferences are widely debated. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we find that the same regions of the ventral stream that show category preferences for n...
Participants made speeded discrimination responses to unimodal auditory (low-frequency vs. high-frequency sounds) or vibrotactile stimuli (presented to the index finger, upper location vs. to the thumb, lower location). In the compatible blocks of trials, the implicitly related stimuli (i.e. higher-frequency sounds and upper tactile stimuli; and th...
Previous research has provided inconsistent results regarding the spatial modulation of auditory–somatosensory interactions. The present study reports three experiments designed to investigate the nature of these interactions in the space close to the head. Human participants made speeded detection responses to unimodal auditory, somatosensory, or...
We investigated the effect of varying sound intensity on the audiotactile crossmodal dynamic capture effect. Participants had to discriminate the direction of a target stream (tactile, Experiment 1; auditory, Experiment 2) while trying to ignore the direction of a distractor stream presented in a different modality (auditory, Experiment 1; tactile,...
In the present study, we examined the potential modulatory effect of relative spatial position on audiotactile temporal order judgments (TOJs) in sighted, early, and late blind adults. Pairs of auditory and tactile stimuli were presented from the left and/or right of participants at varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) using the method of con...
We investigated temporal processing in profoundly deaf individuals by testing their ability to make temporal order judgments (TOJs) for pairs of visual stimuli presented at central or peripheral visual eccentricities. Ten profoundly deaf participants judged which of the two visual stimuli appearing on opposite sides of central fixation was delivere...
We report 2 experiments designed to investigate the effect of people's prior beliefs concerning specific color-flavor associations on their ability to discriminate the flavor of colored sugar-coated chocolate sweets. The participants in our study judged whether pairs of Smarties had the same flavor or not. In our first experiment, the participants...
We report a study designed to investigate the influence of fruit acids (in particular, citric and malic acid) on people’s perception of the identity and the intensity of a variety of different fruit-flavored solutions. Participants had to identify the flavor of fruit-flavored drinks that were colored yellow, grey, orange, red, or else were presente...
Two experiments are reported that were designed to investigate the influence of visual color cues on people’s flavor discrimination and flavor intensity ratings for a variety of fruit-flavored solutions. In Experiment 1, the participants had to associate specific flavors with solutions of various colors simply by looking at them (i.e., without tast...
The information conveyed by our senses can be combined to facilitate perception and behaviour. One focus of recent research has been on the factors governing such facilitatory multisensory interactions. The spatial register of neuronal receptive fields (RFs) appears to be a prerequisite for multisensory enhancement. In terms of auditory-somatosenso...
Participants made unspeeded temporal order judgments (TOJs) regarding which occurred first, anauditory or a visual target stimulus, when they were presented at a variety of different stimulus onset asynchronies. The target stimuli were presented either in isolation or positioned randomly among a stream of three synchronous audiovisual distractors....
We investigated whether the perception of simultaneity for pairs of nociceptive and visual stimuli was dependent upon the focus of participants' attention to a particular sensory modality (either pain or vision). Two stimuli (one painful and the other visual) were presented randomly at different stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) using the method o...
When a hand (either real or fake) is stimulated in synchrony with our own hand concealed from view, the felt position of our own hand can be biased toward the location of the seen hand. This intriguing phenomenon relies on the brain's ability to detect statistical correlations in the multisensory inputs (ie visual, tactile, and proprioceptive), but...
The speeding-up of neural processing associated with attended events (i.e., the prior-entry effect) has long been proposed as a viable mechanism by which attention can prioritize our perception and action. In the brain, this has been thought to be regulated through a sensory gating mechanism, increasing the amplitudes of early evoked potentials whi...
We investigated whether people's perception of the pleasantness and forcefulness of aerosol sprays can be influenced by the particular sounds that aerosols make when used. Participants had to rate the pleasantness and forcefulness of aerosol samples sprayed either in front of them (Experiment 1) or else onto their own bodies (Experiment 2). The aer...
The sounds that are elicited when we touch or use many everyday objects typically convey potentially useful information regarding the nature of the stimuli with which we are interacting. Here we review the rapidly-growing literature demonstrating the influence of auditory cues (such as overall sound level and the spectral distribution of the sounds...
We investigated whether the perceived roughness of the end of a tool is influenced by the texture of the handle used to hold it. Participants rated the roughness of the ends (caps) of a series of tools by rubbing them along their forearm, and indicated the perceived roughness of the tool's cap by means of an anchored visual scale. The caps of the t...
We examined whether monitoring asynchronous audiovisual speech induces a general temporal recalibration of auditory and visual sensory processing. Participants monitored a videotape featuring a speaker pronouncing a list of words (Experiments 1 and 3) or a hand playing a musical pattern on a piano (Experiment 2). The auditory and visual channels we...
In this study we investigated audiotactile spatial interactions in the region behind the head. In experiment 1, participants made unspeeded temporal order judgments (TOJs) regarding pairs of auditory and tactile stimuli presented at varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) using the method of constant stimuli. Electrocutaneous stimuli were presen...
We report a series of experiments in which participants had to judge the direction in which a pair of vibrotactile stimuli presented to two adjacent digits of either the same or different hands were stimulated (left-to-right or vice versa in experiments 1 and 2; near-to-far or vice versa in experiment 3, at stimulus onset asynchronies varying betwe...
Our perception of the level of carbonation in a beverage often relies on the integration of a variety of multisensory cues from vision, oral-somatosensation, nociception, audition, and possibly even manual touch. In the present study, we specifically investigated the role of auditory cues in the perception of carbonation in beverages. In Experiment...
It is almost one hundred years since Titchener [E.B. Titchener, Lectures on the Elementary Psychology of Feeling and Attention, Macmillan, New York, 1908] published his influential claim that attending to a particular sensory modality (or location) can speed up the relative time of arrival of stimuli presented in that modality (or location). Howeve...
The relative spatiotemporal correspondence between sensory events affects multisensory integration across a variety of species; integration is maximal when stimuli in different sensory modalities are presented from approximately the same position at about the same time. In the present study, we investigated the influence of spatial and temporal fac...
We report a series of three experiments in which participants made unspeeded 'Which modality came first?' temporal order judgments (TOJs) to pairs of auditory and tactile stimuli presented at varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) using the method of constant stimuli. The stimuli were presented from either the same or different locations in ord...
We investigated whether the perception of the crispness and staleness of potato chips can be affected by modifying the sounds produced during the biting action. Participants in our study bit into potato chips with their front teeth while rating either their crispness or freshness using a computer-based visual analog scale. The results demonstrate t...
Somatic misperceptions and misrepresentations, like supernumerary phantom limb and denial of ownership of a given body part, have typically been reported following damage to the right side of the brain. These symptoms typically occur with personal or extrapersonal neglect and extinction of left-sided stimuli, suggesting that all these different sym...
In the present study, we assess whether illusory sensations of movement can be elicited in patients with right brain damage (RBD).
Ten RBD patients (three with disorders of bodily representations) were asked to report whether movements of their right hand induced any illusory somatic or motor sensations. Inquiries on anomalous sensation of movement...
Recent research shows that what people hear can influence what they feel. We investigated whether the perception of an electric toothbrush might also be affected by the sound that it makes. Participants were required to make stereotypical brushing movements with a standard electric toothbrush while they rated either the pleasantness or the roughnes...
Participants made unspeeded 'Which modality came first?' temporal order judgments (TOJs) in response to pairs of auditory and visual stimuli presented at varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), using the method of constant stimuli. The presentation of auditory and visual stimuli from different spatial positions facilitated performance (i.e. jus...
In two experiments, we examined the extent to which audiovisual temporal order judgments (TOJs) were affected by spatial factors and by the dimension along which TOJs were made. Pairs of auditory and visual stimuli were presented from either the left and/or right of fixation at varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), and participants made unspe...
In Experiment 1, participants were presented with pairs of stimuli (one visual and the other tactile) from the left and/or right of fixation at varying stimulus onset asynchronies and were required to make unspeeded temporal order judgments (TOJs) regarding which modality was presented first. When the participants adopted an uncrossed-hands posture...
A right-brain damaged patient with pure tactile extinction was asked to report series of single or double light, brief touches delivered to both hands, the thumb or the pinkie of a single hand, the sides of a single index. The stimulated hand was positioned palm up or palm down, in front of or behind the patient, in anatomic or crossed position. In...
Introduction. Multimodal tactile, visual, and auditory neurons with maximal activity when lights and sounds are delivered in peripersonal space have been recently described in the monkey premotor cortex. The present study is aimed at investigating in brain-damaged patients with or without extinction whether or not processing of trimodal stimuli is...