Pietro Avanzini

• PhD.
• Researcher at Italian National Research Council

Background: The association of different sensory inputs enhances brain plasticity in patients after stroke, but no studies have associated Action Observation Training (AOT) delivered in immersive virtual reality (VR) with Focal Vibration (FV) to elicit a kinesthetic illusion coherent with the observed task to improve motor function. Objective: T...

Introduction Via mirror mechanism, motor training approaches based on the alternation of action observation and execution (i.e., Action Observation Training-AOT) promote the acquisition of motor abilities. Previous studies showed that both visual and auditory stimuli may elicit a common motor representation of music-related gestures; however, the p...

Action observation and motor imagery (AOMI) are commonly delivered through a laptop screen. Immersive virtual reality (VR) may enhance the observer’s embodiment, a factor that may boost AOMI effects. The study aimed to investigate the effects on manual dexterity of AOMI delivered through immersive VR compared to AOMI administered through a laptop....

Simulation theories predict that the observation of other’s expressions modulates neural activity in the same centres controlling their production. This hypothesis has been developed by two models, postulating that the visual input is directly projected either to the motor system for action recognition (motor resonance) or to emotional/interoceptiv...

How is conscious experience related to material brain processes? A variety of theories aiming to answer this age-old question have emerged from the recent surge in consciousness research, and some are now hotly debated. While most researchers have so far focused on the development and validation of their preferred theory in relative isolation, this...

The identification of personalized preventive strategies plays a major role in contrasting the occurrence of work-related musculoskeletal disorders. This requires the identification of distinct movement patterns within large samples and the attribution of a proper risk level to each identified movement phenotype. We assessed the feasibility of this...

The evaluation of pupillary light reflex (PLR) by chromatic pupillometry may provide a unique insight into specific photoreceptor functions. Chromatic pupillometry refers to evaluating PLR to different wavelengths and intensities of light in order to differentiate outer/inner retinal photoreceptor contributions to the PLR. Different protocols have...

Language lateralization in patients with focal epilepsy frequently diverges from the left-lateralized pattern that prevails in healthy right-handed people, but the mechanistic explanations are still a matter of debate. Here, we debate the complex interaction between focal epilepsy, language lateralization, and functional neuroimaging techniques by...

The interplay between space and cognition is a crucial issue in Neuroscience leading to the development of multiple research fields. However, the relationship between architectural space and the movement of the inhabitants and their interactions has been too often neglected, failing to provide a unifying view of architecture's capacity to modulate...

This work aimed to investigate the contribution of each single joint during the execution of whole-body reaching tasks to the overall discomfort of the worker evaluated through standard observational methods.Forty-five healthy volunteers were asked to reach and rotate 2 spheres placed on a custom-made rack in standardized positions, i.e., above the...

Action Observation Training (AOT) promotes the acquisition of motor abilities. However, while the cortical modulations associated with the AOT efficacy are well known, few studies investigated the AOT peripheral neural correlates and whether their dynamics move towards the observed model during the training. We administered seventy-two participants...

Electrophysiological source imaging (ESI) aims at reconstructing the precise origin of brain activity from measurements of the electric field on the scalp. Across laboratories/research centers/hospitals, ESI is performed with different methods, partly due to the ill-posedness of the underlying mathematical problem. However, it is difficult to find...

Objective: In Alzheimer's disease (AD), the presence of circadian dysfunction is well-known and may occur early in the disease course. The melanopsin retinal ganglion cell (mRGC) system may play a relevant role in contributing to circadian dysfunction. In this study, we aimed at evaluating, through a multimodal approach, the mRGC system in AD at a...

In sports, understanding others’ actions represents a fundamental skill that allows players to predict the outcome of teammates’ and opponents’ actions and counteract them properly. While it is well known that motor expertise sets better premises for predicting the result of an observed sports action, it remains untested whether this principle appl...

The interplay between space and cognition is a crucial issue in Neuroscience leading to the development of multiple research fields. However, the relationship between architectural space, the movement of the inhabitants and their interactions has been too often neglected, failing to provide a unifying view of architecture's capacity to modulate soc...

The observation of other's actions represents an essential element for the acquisition of motor skills. While action observation is known to induce changes in the excitability of the motor cortices, whether such modulations may explain the amount of motor improvement driven by action observation training (AOT) remains to be addressed. Using transcr...

According to an evolutionist approach, laughter is a multifaceted behaviour affecting social, emotional, motor and speech functions. Albeit previous studies have suggested that high-frequency electrical stimulation (HF-ES) of the pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC) may induce bursts of laughter—suggesting a crucial contribution of this regio...

In this review, we retrace the results of 70 years of human cingulate cortex (CC) intracerebral electrical stimulation and discuss its contribution to our understanding of the anatomofunctional and clinical aspects of this wide cortical region. The review is divided into three main sections. In the first section, we report the results obtained by t...

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...

Objective To investigate the effects of Action Observation and Motor Imagery administered the day before surgery on functional recovery in patients after total hip arthroplasty. Design Randomised controlled trial. Setting Humanitas Clinical and Research Center, Milan, Italy Participants Eighty inpatients with end-stage hip osteoarthritis undergo...

Since the second-half of the twentieth century, intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG), including both electrocorticography (ECoG) and stereo-electroencephalography (sEEG), has provided an intimate view into the human brain. At the interface between fundamental research and the clinic, iEEG provides both high temporal resolution and high spatia...

The interaction between different sensory modalities represents a crucial issue in the neuroscience of consciousness: when the processing of one modality is deficient, the concomitant presentation of stimuli of other spared modalities may sustain the restoring of the damaged sensory functions. In this regard, visual enhancement of touch may represe...

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...

The temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) is a cortical area contributing to a multiplicity of visual, language-related, and cognitive functions. In line with this functional richness, also the organization of the underlying white matter is highly complex and includes several bundles. The few studies tackling the outcome and neurological burdens of surgi...

Background Cortico-cortical evoked potentials (CCEPs) recorded by stereo-electroencephalography (SEEG) are a valuable tool to investigate brain reactivity and effective connectivity. However, invasive recordings are spatially sparse since they depend on clinical needs. This sparsity hampers systematic comparisons across-subjects, the detection of t...

The interaction between different sensory modalities represents a crucial issue in the neuroscience of consciousness: when the processing of one modality is deficient, the concomitant presentation of stimuli of other spared modalities may sustain the restoring of the damaged sensory functions. In this regard, visual enhancement of touch may represe...

Motor learning can be defined as a process that leads to relatively permanent changes in motor behavior through repeated interactions with the environment. Different strategies can be adopted to achieve motor learning: movements can be overtly practiced leading to an amelioration of motor performance; alternatively, covert strategies (e.g., action...

Background and Objectives Cingulate epilepsy (CE) is a rare and challenging type of focal epilepsy, due to the polymorphic semiology of the seizures, mimicking other types of epilepsy, and the limited utility of scalp-EEG. Methods We selected consecutive drug-resistant subjects with CE who were seizure-free after surgery, with seizure onset zone (...

There is a growing interest in action observation treatment (AOT), i.e., a rehabilitative procedure combining action observation, motor imagery, and action execution to promote the recovery, maintenance, and acquisition of motor abilities. AOT studies employed basic upper limb gestures as stimuli, but—in principle—the AOT approach can be effectivel...

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...

This paper presents a novel approach to support rehabilitation employing Action Observation Therapy (AOT), mixed reality (MR) and wearable technologies to foster common rehabilitative methods in restoring motor function. Here, the platform was specifically designed to support the standard physical treatments in post-stroke patients during upper lim...

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...

COVER ILLUSTRATION The image presents a high-definition reconstruction obtained from an MRI that was de-identified using our novel method. The artwork aims to show that with current techniques it is possible to recreate with outstanding accuracy not only the brain but also the face of a subject, putting privacy at risk. In our study we present a ne...

Significance In several clinical conditions, especially those related to orthopedic trauma or specific injuries of the peripheral nervous system, patients may experience a period of limb nonuse that has detrimental cascade effects on corticomotor organization and ultimately, on motor performance. During limb nonuse, treatments based on action obser...

Background: Cortico-cortical evoked potentials (CCEPs) recorded by stereo-electroencephalography (SEEG) are a valuable clinical tool to investigate brain reactivity and effective connectivity. However, these invasive recordings are spatially sparse since they depend on clinical needs. This sparsity hampers systematic comparisons across-subjects, th...

Although clinical neuroscience and the neuroscience of consciousness have long sought mechanistic explanations of tactile-awareness disorders, mechanistic insights are rare, mainly because of the difficulty of depicting the fine-grained neural dynamics underlying somatosensory processes. Here, we combined the stereo-EEG responses to somatosensory s...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Action observation can sustain motor skill improvement. At the neurophysiological level, action observation affects the excitability of the motor cortices, as measured by transcranial magnetic stimulation. However, whether the cortical modulations induced by action observation may explain the amount of motor improvement dri...

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...

Deidentifying MRIs constitutes an imperative challenge, as it aims at precluding the possibility of re-identification of a research subject or patient, but at the same time it should preserve as much geometrical information as possible, in order to maximize data reusability and to facilitate interoperability. Although several deidentification metho...

Electrical source imaging (ESI) aims at reconstructing the electrical brain activity from measurements of the electric field on the scalp. Even though the localization of single focal sources should be relatively straightforward, different methods provide diverse solutions due to the different underlying assumptions. Furthermore, their input parame...

Deidentifying MRIs constitutes an imperative challenge, as it aims at precluding the possibility of re-identification of a research subject or patient, but at the same time it should preserve as much geometrical information as possible, in order to maximize data reusability and to facilitate interoperability. Although several deidentification metho...

The perspective from which body-related stimuli are observed plays a fundamental role in modulating cerebral activity during the processing of others' bodies and actions. Previous research has shown perspective-dependent cerebral responses during the observation of both ongoing actions and static images of an acting body with implied motion informa...

The temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) is a cortical area contributing to a multiplicity of visual, language-related and cognitive functions. In line with this functional richness, also the organization of the underlying white matter is highly complex and includes several bundles. The few studies tackling to date the outcome and neurological burdens o...

While it is well documented that the motor system is more than a mere implementer of motor actions, the possible applications of its cognitive side are still under-exploited, often remaining as poorly organized evidence. Here, we will collect evidence showing the value of action observation treatment (AOT) in the recovery of impaired motor abilitie...

Ensuring proper dosage of treatment and repetition over time is a major challenge in neurorehabilitation. However, a requirement of physical distancing to date compromises their achievement. While mostly associated to COVID-19, physical distancing is not only required in a pandemic scenario, but also advised for several clinical conditions (e.g. im...

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...

The processing steps that lead up to a decision, i.e., the transformation of sensory evidence into motor output, are not fully understood. Here, we combine stereoEEG recordings from the human cortex, with single-lead and time-resolved decoding, using a wide range of temporal frequencies, to characterize decision processing during a rule-switching t...

Here we describe a rare case of Capgras delusion – a misidentification syndrome characterized by the belief that a person has been replaced by an imposter – in a patient without evident neurological or psychiatric symptoms. Intriguingly, delusional belief was selective for both person and modality, as the patient believed that his son – not his dau...

Precisely localizing the sources of brain activity as recorded by EEG is a fundamental procedure and a major challenge for both research and clinical practice. Even though many methods and algorithms have been proposed, their relative advantages and limitations are still not well established. Moreover, these methods involve tuning multiple paramete...

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...

The properties of the secondary somatosensory area (SII) have been described by many studies in monkeys and humans. Recent studies on monkeys, however, showed that beyond somatosensory stimuli, SII responds to a wider number of stimuli, a finding requiring a revision that human SII is purely sensorimotor. By recording cortical activity with stereot...

Precisely localizing the sources of brain activity as recorded by EEG is a fundamental procedure and a major challenge for both research and clinical practice. Even though many methods and algorithms have been proposed, their relative advantages and limitations are still not well established. Moreover, these methods involve tuning multiple paramete...

It is well known that the kinematics of an action is modulated by the underlying motor intention. In turn, kinematics serves as a cue also during action observation, providing hints about the intention of the observed action. However, an open question is whether decoding others’ intentions on the basis of their kinematics depends solely on how much...

difficult action discrimination involves the LOTC and PPC levels of the action observation network as well as the multiple demand control system; the link between control and effector system may me localised in phAIP

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...

Childhood epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes (CECTS) is the most common type of “self-limited focal epilepsies.” In its typical presentation, CECTS is a condition reflecting non-lesional cortical hyperexcitability of rolandic regions. The benign evolution of this disorder is challenged by the frequent observation of associated neuropsychological d...

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Since its first description, quantifying the burden of epileptiform abnormalities in sleep EEG has played a fundamental role in the diagnosis of Encephalopathy related to Status Epilepticus during slow Sleep (ESES). In fact, in the 1971 seminal paper by Tassinari's group and in the following studies on this syndrome, the amount of epileptiform disc...

Aim To evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of an action observation treatment (AOT) home‐based platform promoting child‐to‐child interaction to improve hand motor function in unilateral cerebral palsy (CP). Method Twenty children (14 males, six females; mean age 6y 7mo, standard deviation 1y 7mo; range 5y 1mo–10y 6mo) with unilateral CP und...

Background Motor deficits in autism have a double aspect: on one side, they are neglected by standard diagnostic procedures, on the other they are very frequent (70%) and promising as early indicator of the syndrome. Their characterization is extremely relevant, as they could impact on social abilities based on the understanding of others’ actions....

Drawings produced by children provide insights about their physical and psychological status. In children suffering from unilateral cerebral palsy (UCP), self-portraits constitute a unique opportunity to study whether and how their disease affects self-body representation. The aim of the present study is to evaluate self-body representation in UCP...

The anterior temporal lobe (ATL), located at the tip of the human temporal lobes, has been heavily implicated in semantic processing by neuropsychological and functional imaging studies. These techniques have revealed a hemispheric specialization of ATL, but little about the time scale on which it operates. Here we show that ATL is specifically act...

In the present study, we mapped the spatio-temporal dynamics of cortical responses to ipsilateral median nerve stimulation using intracerebral recordings (stereo-EEG) in 38 drug-resistant epileptic patients. Furthermore, we compared the pattern of responsiveness obtained in the same leads across ipsilateral and contralateral stimulations. Ipsilater...

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...

During action observation, several visual features of observed actions can modulate the level of sensorimotor reactivity in the onlooker. Among possibly relevant parameters, one of the less investigated in humans is the visual perspective from which actions are observed. In the present EEG study, we assessed the reactivity of alpha and beta mu rhyt...

The cingulate cortex is a mosaic of different anatomical fields, whose functional characterization is still a matter of debate. In humans, one method that may provide useful insights on the role of the different cingulate regions, and to tackle the issue of the functional differences between its anterior, middle and posterior subsectors, is intraco...

Coherence is a widely used measure to determine the frequency-resolved functional connectivity between pairs of recording sites, but this measure is confounded by shared inputs to the pair. To remove shared inputs, the 'partial coherence' can be computed by conditioning the spectral matrices of the pair on all other recorded channels, which involve...

In this review, we discuss first the anatomical and lesion studies that allowed the localization of fundamental functions in the cerebral cortex of primates including humans. Subsequently, we argue that the years from the end of the Second World War until the end of the last century represented the “golden age” of system neuroscience. In this perio...

Here we show how anatomical and functional data recorded from patients undergoing stereo-EEG can be used to decompose the cortical processing following nerve stimulation in different stages characterized by specific topography and time course. Tibial, median and trigeminal nerves were stimulated in 96 patients, and the increase in gamma power was e...

Sensorimotor and affective brain systems are known to be involved in language processing. However, to date it is still debated whether this involvement is a crucial step of semantic processing or, on the contrary, it is dependent on the specific context or strategy adopted to solve a task at hand. The present electroencephalographic (EEG) study is...