Paola Venuti

University of Trento | UNITN · Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science

This study examines the impact of collaborative storytelling methods on group interactions and story quality in primary school students. Participants (97 students, grades 1–3) engaged in tangible digital collaborative storytelling (TDST), collaborative digital storytelling (DST), and traditional storytelling (TST). The research explored three hypot...

This study investigated the role of domain-specific and domain-general factors in predicting early literacy skills in Italian children. A sample of 239 first-grade students was evaluated using a broad neuropsychological battery to assess their cognitive skills. The results showed that phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, speed of proce...

An attentional bias toward infant versus adult faces has been detected in parents and positively associated with sensitive caregiving behaviors. In previous research, the attentional bias has been measured as the difference in attention, in terms of reaction times, captured by infant versus adult faces; the larger the difference, the greater the co...

Diagnostic evaluations of neurodevelopmental disorders dramatically reduced and slowed down following the disruptions caused by Sars-CoV-2 pandemic. For this, it was necessary to identify solutions allowing diagnostic assessment, screening, and early patient care by implementing remote diagnostic protocols respecting the restrictions imposed by the...

The document "Scaffolding in Flexible Learning Environments: Public Guidelines and Actions" (Version 1.1, dated January 15th, 2024) provides a comprehensive framework for implementing scaffolding strategies in flexible learning environments (FLEs). It outlines the development and validation of a scaffolding system designed to support educators in c...

Introduction Verbal language is one of the most immediate and significant means parents have to express affect and information to their children. Parental speech directed to children has been thoroughly examined in typical development. However, the characteristics of parental speech directed to children with neurodevelopmental disorders are far les...

Mothers and fathers of autistic children (ASD) tend to report elevated levels of parenting stress. Thus, it is critically important to understand which factors contribute to an imbalance between the perceived demands of parenting and the available psychological resources. To date, little is known about the association between child attachment repre...

Background Collaborative storytelling can be a helpful tool to promote cognitive and social skills in adolescents with neurodevelopmental disorders. Aims The current study aimed to explore the benefits of collaborative storytelling using traditional (TST), digital (DST), and tangible digital (TDST) methodologies. Materials and Methods Fourteen Sp...

La didattica a distanza (DaD) attivata durante l'emergenza Covid-19 ha fatto emergere criticità per quanto riguarda la partecipazione di alunni/e con bisogni educativi speciali (BES). In risposta a questi nuovi bisogni, col progetto BESt-DaD è stata realizzata una piattaforma di facile fruizione, funzionale a diversi profili neurocognitivi, per pro...

BACKGROUND Virtual Reality (VR) adventure games can offer ideal technological solutions for training social skills in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), leveraging on their support to multisensory and multiplayer interactions over distance which may lower barriers to training access and increase user motivation. However, the design of...

Background Virtual reality (VR) adventure games can offer ideal technological solutions for training social skills in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), leveraging their support for multisensory and multiplayer interactions over distance, which may lower barriers to training access and increase user motivation. However, the design of...

Background: Identifying mechanisms of change in Autism treatment may help explain response variability and maximize efficacy. For this, the child-therapist interaction could have a key role as stressed by developmental models of intervention, but still remains under-investigated. Aims: The longitudinal study of treatment response trajectories co...

(1) Background: Children can develop cognitive and social skills during play. Most research has focused on mothers, but the paternal features in interaction with children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are mainly unexplored. This study aimed to compare fathers’ and mothers’ interactive behaviors with their children with ASD to identify similar...

This study focused on evaluating the application of digital tools with features of gamification, aims to evaluate the efficacy, in terms of motivation, engagement and improvement of crucial life skills, reading and writing abilities. The training involved children who attended the Primary School both with typical development and Special Educational...

Research during the COVID-19 pandemic has shown a strong relationship between child symptoms, parental stress, and mental health challenges. The pandemic has changed family routines, worsening child symptomatology and parental burden. The aim of this study was to investigate how the magnitude of the perceived changes in child externalizing behavior...

Given the influence of parents’ qualities and dyadic characteristics on child developmental outcomes, recent findings strengthened the importance of involving caregivers during the intervention to increase dyadic syntonization levels and to extend the acquisition of competencies in naturalistic contexts. The Intersubjectivity Parental-Based Interve...

This study applies methods used in sign language and gesture research to better understand reduced imitation accuracy (IA) of actions and gestures in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and we addressed contrasting theories on IA in ASD and the role of objects and meanings in imitation. Eight male children with ASD with a mean chronologic...

Background Females with ASD tend to be under-recognized as they might present a different symptom manifestation, better social abilities, and masking behaviors. Since the main limitation of current literature on gender differences is represented by focusing on broad constructs, research needs to prioritize narrower constructs related to the subdoma...

The few studies available on quality of attachment in school-age children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exclusively used questionnaires assessing explicit attachment representations. Thus, in the current study we assessed both explicit and implicit attachment representations in 23 children with ASD (without intellectual disability), 22 with l...

Parental rejection has been consistently empirically implicated in a wide array of developmental, behavioural and psychological problems worldwide. However, the interaction effect between parental rejection in childhood and the oxytocin receptor genotype on psychological adjustment has yet to be investigated. The present study aimed to investigate...

The school textbook is a cultural artefact capable of conveying a particular cultural and social imagery that clearly affects the attitudes of teachers and learners towards disability. This paper presents an exploratory-descriptive study that aims to investigate the attitudes of primary school teachers towards the representation of disability withi...

The present study aims to investigate cross-cultural differences and similarities in maternal and children’s adjustment to COVID-19 restrictions in Spain and Italy, with reference to determinants of maternal stress. A total of 950 mothers (45.4% from Spain, n = 432, Mage = 39.6, years old, SD = 5.2 and 54.5% from Italy, n = 518, Mage = 40.5, years,...

In modern societies, training reading skills is fundamental since poor-reading children are at high risk of struggling both at school and in life. Reading relies not only on oral language abilities but also on several executive functions. Considering their importance for literacy, training executive functions—particularly, attentional control has b...

As fathering research has flourished, a growing body of studies has focused on behavioral and neurobiological mechanisms, respectively associated with caregiving sensitivity and responsiveness to infant stimuli. However, the association between these aspects and the key concept of paternal involvement in childcare (i.e., contribution in infant care...

This article describes the experiential workshop INCLUSI carried out by a group of Italian teachers and educators which focused on promoting an inclusive perspective within the school environment. Using a methodology based on storytelling, learning by doing and cooperative learning. Participants shared their knowledge on story-telling and represent...

Chronic pain in youth has an unsung etiology and limited treatment options. Affected adolescents show difficulties in different functioning domains, and their parents can develop associated distress, which negatively influences the adolescent’s capacity to adjust to pain. The aims of this study are the following: (1) to develop an internet-delivere...

During the last decade, the evidences on the relationship between neurodevelopmental disorders and the microbial communities of the intestinal tract has considerably grown. Particularly, the role of gut microbiota (GM) ecology and predicted functions in Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) has been especially investigated by 16S rRNA targeted and shotgu...

Background: Autism Spectrum Disorder is often associated with deficits in executive functions (EFs), which is contributing significantly to individuals with ASD's difficulties in conducting an independent life, particularly considering social skills. Technologies offer promising opportunities to structure EF intervention programs for children on t...

Despite a growing interest in player-centred methods for serious games, little is known on how to achieve this goal in practice when prospective users are children. Foundational questions remain unanswered, such as to which design dimensions children should contribute, and how and when they should be engaged. This paper presents the methods and res...

Studies on parental interaction in the context of ASD has mainly focused on mothers, even if fathers and their children seem to form close and supportive relationships that may have unique effects on child development. Given the impact of ASD symptoms on a child’s ability to interact with significant others, recent findings strengthen the importanc...

Evidence of psychological distress in families during COVID-19 outbreak are arising. However, the perceived changes in psychological adjustment during home confinement with respect to the period before the pandemic have not been addressed yet. Moreover, little is known about the role of coparenting and specific COVID-19 contextual variables on pare...

Background Few studies have investigated the characteristics of father language directed to typically developing children (TD), and father speech directed to children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) is largely under investigated. Considering the importance of involving fathers of children with ASD in research and clinical practice, the main pu...

Time is a key factor to consider in Autism Spectrum Disorder. Detecting the condition as early as possible is crucial in terms of treatment success. Despite advances in the literature, it is still difficult to identify early markers able to effectively forecast the manifestation of symptoms. Artificial intelligence (AI) provides effective alternati...

In this study, we investigated whether the difficulties in body motion (BM) perception may led to deficit in emotion recognition in Autism spectrum disorder (ASD). To this aim, individuals with high-functioning ASD were asked to recognise fearful, happy, and neutral BM depicted as static images or dynamic point-light and full-light displays. Result...

Background: Observational research plays an important part in developmental research due to its noninvasiveness. However, it has been hardly applied to investigate efficacy of the child–therapist interaction in the context of naturalistic developmental behavioral interventions (NDBI). In particular, the characteristics of child–therapist interplay...

Empathy, reciprocity and turn-taking are critical therapeutic targets in conditions of social impairment such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). These aspects are related to each other, converging into the construct of synchrony, which includes emotional, behavioural and, possibly, physiological components. Therefore, being able to quantify the syn...

Research on the psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted negative effects on the general population and particularly on parents. However, little is known about families of children with Neurodevelopmental Disorder (NDD). The present study investigated parental stress, coparenting, and child adjustment in Italian families with child...

(1) Background: Parental involvement during intervention with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has been demonstrated to be fundamental for children’s developmental outcomes. However, most research focused on child gains especially considering cognitive functioning and symptoms severity, whereas parental and dyadic changes during interve...

Background Emotional availability (EA) is a dyadic relationship construct that can be considered an index of emotional quality of parent-child interaction. Using this construct, some research showed that both parent and child components of EA reflect key aspects of the parent-child relationship, but there are few studies that investigated these asp...

In this research, we examined the responsiveness to treatment in 49 Italian children with Dyslexia. In part A, we compare the efficacy of a phonological‐based treatment (Ph‐T) with a cognitive training of executive functions (CT). In part B, we investigate whether a sequential treatment (CT+Ph‐T) has a larger remedial effect compared to the pure ph...

Parents often use partial self-repetitions with variation in successive utterances (e.g., Want to get your ball? Get your ball? Do you want to get your ball?). Such 'variation sets' contain latent distributional information about the building blocks of language and are predictive of children's lexical and grammatical structures. Because these prope...

(1) Background: Research highlights the positive effects of early intensive intervention with parent and school involvement for preschool children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) on general developmental outcomes and social skills in randomized controlled trials. However, given the inter-individual variability in the response to treatment, it i...

The recognition of emotional body movement (BM) is impaired in individuals with Autistic Spectrum Disorder ASD, yet it is not clear whether the difficulty is related to the encoding of body motion, emotions, or both. Besides, BM recognition has been traditionally studied using point-light displays stimuli (PLDs) and is still underexplored in indivi...

Alexithymia is defined as a limited ability in the cognitive processing of emotions. Literature suggested its negative influence on interpersonal relationship, documenting elevated alexithymia in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) compared to control groups. However, the study of alexithymia in school-age children with ASD remains larg...

This study aimed to analyse and compare the storytelling of 25 children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) with a comparison group of 25 children with typical development. Children’s narratives were transcribed verbatim, and their forms and contents were analysed. The two groups were matched according to the narrative cohesion of the story using t...

Pain management is a growing concern in pediatric cancer patients as pain can originate from multiple sources and negatively influence long-term children well-being. To gain a better understanding of the pain adjustment processes occurring in these young patients, here we have analyzed a cohort of 30 children and early adolescents with acute leukem...

Parents often use partial self-repetitions with variation in successive utterances (e.g.,Want to get your ball? Get your ball? Do you want to get your ball?). Such ’variation sets’ contain latent distributional information about the building blocks of language andare predictive of children’s lexical and grammatical structures. Because these propert...

Parents often use partial self-repetitions with variation in successive utterances (e.g., Want to get your ball? Get your ball? Do you want to get your ball?). Such 'variation sets' contain latent distributional information about the building blocks of language and is predictive of children's lexical and grammatical structures. Here we compared for...

The impact of different parenting‐related variables on child psychological development is widely acknowledged. However, studies about the specific influence of maternal and family dimensions on child early developmental outcomes in at‐risk dyads are still scarce. The aim of this longitudinal study was to investigate the short‐ and middle‐term effec...

Pain experience is a negative complex phenomenon influenced by several mechanisms. Attachment processes may affect the way in which individuals experience and signal pain. Hence, in the last two decades, the role of attachment quality has drawn attention in pain research and practice. However, previous reviews on this topic focused on adulthood and...

Webpage reading is ubiquitous in daily life. As Web technologies allow for a large variety of layouts and visual styles, the many formatting options may lead to poor design choices, including low readability. This research capitalizes on the existing readability guidelines for webpage design to outline several visuo-typographic variables and explor...

One of the main ways in which children learn is by playing. Playing can enrich learning and help children in developing essential skills for their everyday life [1]. Furthermore, games, if significant, can possibly make students active and participating, as well as creative, motivated and sociable [2]. The word ‘gamification’ refers to the use of t...

Deficits in communicative and interactive social aspects represent the symptomatic basis of Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC). Over the past few years, the density of studies attempting to define markers of the early presence of the disorder has increased exponentially (Zwaigenbaum et al.,2013). In such research context, this work aims to highlight t...

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are early onset pervasive neurodevelopmental disorders characterized by: • persistent deficits in social communication and interaction and restricted/repetitive interests and behaviour • incidence around 1-2% worldwide and diagnosis possible not earlier than 2-3 years of age, based only on a cognitive-behavioural ass...

SYNOPSIS To develop a secure attachment, the quality of the mother’s relationship is fundamental, but now there is evidence that fathers equally play early and integrated roles in the development of the child, particularly in social and communicative skills. Hiraoka and colleagues emphasize father support in regulating maternal distress while liste...

A key feature of parenting is that it is observable starting from behaviors that are performed daily by adult caregivers during repeated interactions with the child. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research on parental brain should integrate settings that resemble ecologies of situations in which parents typically care for children. Ho...

SYNOPSIS Objective: In everyday life, parents must respond to and interact with children while in different situational contexts. How situational contexts influence parents’ responses has not been systematically studied. Here we investigated mothers’ versus nonmothers’ neural responses to infant vocalizations in different situations with different...

How special is her own child to a mother? Research that has focused on mothers’ brain responses to their own child has revealed the involvement of multiple subcortical and cortical brain regions, but less is known about which brain regions are systematically activated across these studies. This meta-analysis aims to identify specific neural regions...

Adults' sensitive appraisal of and response to infant cry play a foundational role in child development. Employing a gene × environment (G × E) approach, this study investigated the interaction of genetic polymorphisms of the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR) and oxytocin receptor genes (OXTR; rs53576, rs2254298) with early parental care experi...

We studied the development of narrative ability yearly in a cross-sectional design from 4 to 10 years. All children were given the same props and underwent the same procedures. Children’s narratives were transcribed verbatim, and then coded for number of words, propositions, episodes and indexes of narrative cohesion and structure. Verbal IQ was co...

A defective attention to faces and eyes characterizes autism spectrum disorder (ASD), however, the role of contingent information – such as the task instructions – remains still unclear. Our study aimed to investigate the face-orienting response and the subsequent attentive selection in the presence of varying task instructions in individuals with...

Management of cancer pain associated with anxiety derived is complex, especial in adolescent age when the ability to have body control gains a really central role. This case report aims to provide health professionals with insight into how patients’ awareness of physiological processes - improved by means of an individualized Biofeedback-Assisted R...

Abstract: Given the protracted development of gaze-following (GF), research has focused on the visual cues promoting GF: studies on Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) showed that children with ASD respond differently to these cues. This study aims to investigate the effect of specific cues in typical and atypical development with a novel analytical ap...

This study (a) investigates effects of the transition to motherhood on implicit and explicit responses to infant cues; (b) assesses influences of prior parenting and delivery experiences on implicit and explicit responses to infant cues; and (c) investigates relations between implicit and explicit responses to infant cues and parenting beliefs. A t...

Parents and children form a family: their characteristics balance personal and family well-being with healthy levels of stress. Research on parents of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) demonstrated that higher levels of parental stress are associated with communication impairment, a core symptom of ASD. The aim of this article is to disc...

Background: Humans present a strong face-orienting response and a visual preference for faces from birth. Consistent evidence indicates that defective attention to faces and other humans characterizes Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Objectives: In our eye-tracking study, we aimed to investigate the face-orienting response and the subsequent attenti...

Music constitutes an integral part of everyday life. There is great variation in preference patterns for music. However, the cause of such individual differences has not been fully elucidated to date. Many behavioral traits, including personality, are known to be influenced by steroid-hormone testosterone. On this basis, we conjectured that testost...

Little is known about the physiological response of parents of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) to crying of children who have already received the diagnosis of ASD. This study aimed to compare cardiac dynamics via Inter-Beat Interval (IBI) and self-reported emotional states of parents of children with ASD and of parents with typically...