Renata del Giudice

University of Milan | UNIMI · Department of Health Science - DISS

Among auditory stimuli, the own name is one of the most powerful and it is able to automatically capture attention and elicit a robust electrophysiological response. The subject's own name (SON) is preferentially processed in the right hemisphere, mainly because of its self-relevance and emotional content, together with other personally relevant in...

Introduction Neurofilmology is a young and evolving research field, at the intersection between neuroscience and movie experiences, that explores how the brain processes and responds to visual storytelling. It involves examining the cognitive and emotional effects of movies on viewers, including social cognition and perspective-taking aspects. Howe...

Introduction COVID-19 had a significant impact on the mental health of the affected population. Such multifactorial risk for a deterioration of mental health suggests the need to identify groups of patients with psychiatric vulnerability and to establish strategies of intervention based on scientific evidence. Objectives The aim of the study was t...

Background: Attachment theory represents one of the most important references for the study of the development of an individual throughout their life cycle and provides the clinician with a profound key for the purposes of understanding the suffering that underlies severe psychopathologies such as eating disorders. As such, we conducted a cross-se...

Dreaming has progressively been marginalized in modern clinical approaches to the mental health and psychopathology. Scientific interest in dreams survived, only partially in the field of sleep and consciousness research, where the study of subjective experiences when the brain is disengaged from environmental stimuli may contribute to investigate...

Past research has demonstrated differential responses of the brain during sleep in response especially to variations in paralinguistic properties of auditory stimuli, suggesting they can still be processed “offline”. However, the nature of the underlying mechanisms remains unclear. Here, we therefore used multivariate pattern analyses to directly t...

In our pilot study, we exposed third-trimester fetuses, from week 34 of gestation onwards, twice daily to a maternal spoken nursery rhyme. Two and five weeks after birth, 34 newborns, who were either familiarized with rhyme stimulation in utero or stimulation naïve, were (re-)exposed to the familiar, as well as to a novel and unfamiliar, rhyme, bot...

In a pilot study, 34 fetuses were stimulated daily with a maternal spoken nursery rhyme from week 34 of gestation onward and re-exposed two and five weeks after birth to this familiar, as well as to an unfamiliar rhyme, both spoken with the maternal and an unfamiliar female voice. During auditory stimulation, newborns were continuously monitored wi...

Background Self-disturbances reflect a core dimension of Schizophrenia that can be identified before disease onset and might underlie the development of typical psychotic symptoms. The Sense of Agency (SoA) can be conceptualized as the pre-reflective sensation of being the one who is causing or generating an action or thought. Passivity phenomena,...

Background Slow waves, the hallmark of the deep nonrapid eye movement sleep electroencephalogram (EEG), are critical for restorative sleep and brain plasticity. They arise from the synchronous depolarization and hyperpolarization of millions of cortical neurons and their proper generation and propagation relies upon the integrity of widespread cort...

Human newborns spend up to 18 hours sleeping. The organization of their sleep differs immensely from adult sleep, and its quick maturation and fundamental changes correspond to the rapid cortical development at this age. Manual sleep classification is specifically challenging in this population given major body movements and frequent shifts between...

Human newborns spend up to 18 hours sleeping. The organization of their sleep differs immensely from adult sleep, and its quick maturation and fundamental changes correspond to the rapid cortical development at this age. Manual sleep classification is specifically challenging in this population given major body movements and frequent shifts between...

In a community-based sample of 104 infants and their mothers, we hypothesized a pathway from postnatal maternal symptoms of depression to child emotion dysregulation, and tested at 6 months of age the mediation role of alpha asymmetry at frontal and parietal sites. We recorded infant resting-state EEG at 6 months of age. Child emotion dysregulation...

Introduction Healthy circadian rhythmicity has been suggested to relate to a better state of brain‐injured patients and to support the emergence of consciousness in patient groups characterised by a relative instability thereof such as patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC). Methods Going beyond earlier studies, we have adopted a systems‐l...

While it is a well-established finding that subject's own names (SON) or familiar voices are salient during wakefulness, we here investigated processing of environmental stimuli during sleep including deep N3 and REM sleep. Besides the effects of sleep depth we investigated how sleep-specific EEG patterns (i.e. sleep spindles and slow oscillations...

While it is a well-established finding that subject’s own names (SON) or familiar voices are salient during wakefulness, we here investigated processing of environmental stimuli during sleep including deep N3 and REM sleep. Besides the effects of sleep depth we investigated how sleep-specific EEG patterns (i.e. sleep spindles and slow oscillations...

Sleep has been proposed to indicate preserved residual brain functioning in patients suffering from disorders of consciousness (DOC) after awakening from coma. However, a reliable characterization of sleep patterns in this clinical population continues to be challenging given severely altered brain oscillations, frequent and extended artifacts in c...

Demographic data for patients. The analyzed patient sample 12 UWS and 11 MCS subjects. Abbreviations: M = male, F = female, TBI = Traumatic Brain Injury, CVA-Cerebrovascular Accident, SSPE = Subacute Sclerosing Panencephalitis, SD- = lower severe disability (3 points on Extended Glasgow Outcome Scale), eMCS = emergence from MCS; CRC-R = Coma Recove...

Objective: To investigate the relationship between the presence of a circadian body temperature rhythm and behaviorally assessed consciousness levels in patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC; i.e., vegetative state/unresponsive wakefulness syndrome or minimally conscious state). Methods: In a cross-sectional study, we investigated the pres...

Brain injuries substantially change the entire landscape of oscillatory dynamics and render detection of typical sleep patterns difficult. Yet, sleep is characterized not only by specific EEG waveforms, but also by its circadian organization. In the present study we investigated whether brain dynamics of patients with disorders of consciousness sys...

Emotionally relevant stimuli and in particular anger are, due to their evolutionary relevance, often processed automatically and able to modulate attention independent of conscious access. Here, we tested whether attention allocation is enhanced when auditory stimuli are uttered by an angry voice. We recorded EEG and presented healthy individuals w...

Emotional and self-relevant stimuli are able to automatically attract attention and their use in patients suffering from disorders of consciousness (DOC) might help detecting otherwise hidden signs of cognition. We here recorded EEG in three Locked-in syndrome (LIS) and four Vegetative State/ Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome (VS/UWS) patients whil...

It is a common belief that learning begins far before birth. This conviction raises interesting questions about how and what exactly an unborn baby is able to learn. Furthermore, prenatal learning will inform about the maturation of human memory, learning as well as more general domains of development and (un)conscious cognitive processing in infan...

Information processing has been suggested to depend on the current state of the brain as well as stimulus characteristics (e.g. salience). We compared processing of salient stimuli (subject’s own names [SONs] and angry voice [AV] stimuli) to processing of unfamiliar names (UNs) and neutral voice (NV) stimuli across different vigilance stages (i.e....

One of the strongest stimuli to automatically catch attention is a person’s own name (ON). Auditory presentation of the ON has been shown to evoke electrophysiological markers of attention-orienting that even persist in states of diminished consciousness such as sleep (Perrin et al., 1999). Likewise, the emotional content such as familiarity of voi...

Several studies using various paradigms indicate that learning begins far before birth. This idea raises a whole series of questions about how and what exactly an unborn baby can learn. Research on prenatal learning offers a preferential way to assess early manifestation of human memory and learning as well as more general domains of development an...

The ability to attribute independent mental states (e.g. opinions, perceptions, beliefs) to oneself and others is termed Theory of Mind (ToM). Previous studies investigating ToM usually employed verbal paradigms and functional neuroimaging methods. Here, we studied oscillatory responses in the electroencephalogram (EEG) in a non-verbal social cogni...

Advances in the development of new paradigms as well as in neuroimaging techniques nowadays enable us to make inferences about the level of consciousness patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC) retain. They, moreover, allow to predict their probable development. Today, we know that certain brain responses (e.g., event-related potentials or o...

With the advent of neuroimaging techniques the level of consciousness in patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC) is better assessable today. What we know so far, is that presence or absence of certain brain responses to stimulation, circadian rhythms or sleep patterns as well as certain forms of resting state activity can serve in the diagno...

The ability to attribute independent mental states to oneself and others for the prediction and explanation of behaviour is a typically human characteristic termed “Theory of Mind” (ToM). Castelli et al. [1] introduced a paradigm for the investigation of ToM in which simple geometric shapes move in a random (R), goal-directed (GD) or complex way (T...

Due to improvement in the medical treatment of severely brain-injured patients, we have seen an increase in the number of patients suffering from disorders of consciousness (DOC) during the last years. DOC comprises two different states: the unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS) and the minimally conscious state (MCS). While the former is charact...

Minimally Conscious State and Vegetative State/Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome are two of the possible outcomes for patients recovering from coma. The conventional assessment for consciousness, such as the Coma Recovery Scale – Revised [1] relies on overt motor responses to command. However, such responses are very challenging for patients and le...