Vittorio Gallese

University of Parma | UNIPR · Dipartimento di Medicina e Chirurgia- Unità di Neuroscienze

The nature of concepts has always been a hotly debated topic in both philosophy and psychology and, more recently, also in cognitive neuroscience. Different accounts have been proposed of what concepts are. These accounts reflect deeply different conceptions of how the human mind works. In the last decades, two diametrically opposed theories of hum...

Brains have been copying reality imagetically for a few million years. This nervous obsession was essential for constructing consciousness and for creating descriptions of what is as well as predictions of what may be or will be. One curious consequence of this ability, for humans, was the invention of cinema, the art that Vittorio Gallese and Mich...

If cognitive neuroscience is meant to investigate what makes us human, cultural artifacts and artistic expressions should be at the top of the list of its explananda. Cognitive neuroscience, in tight cooperation and dialogue with the humanities, can shed new light on several theoretical issues related to aesthetics, traditionally dealt with exclusi...

The main gist of the present article consists in a call to arms for experimental aesthetics, motivated by the conviction that aesthetics is the still poorly investigated key entry point to a deeper understanding of how digital technologies shape our identity, our social relationships and the world where we are living. Aesthetics, as normally concei...

In this chapter, we analyze our emotional engagements with fictional characters using embodied cognitive theory. The theory of embodied simulation holds that when reading fictional texts, readers reuse the brain-body mechanisms employed in daily life. There are, however, also key differences between the ways we relate to humans, animals, and other...

This study investigates the proposed mechanism of mindfulness, its impact on body awareness and interoception, and its potential benefits for mental and physical health. Using psychophysical assessments, we compared 31 expert meditators with 33 matched controls (non-meditators who engage in regular reading, more than 5 h per week) in terms of somat...

Successful motor coordination in social interactions needs the swift interpretation of others’ actions, yet the pivotal social cues guiding these interactions remain incompletely understood. We conducted three experiments focusing on the execution (Action Execution task) and observation (Action Obseration 1 and 2) of a basic motor act—grasping an o...

Introduction Individuals with schizophrenia present anomalies in the extension and plasticity of the peripersonal space (PPS), the section of space surrounding the body, shaped through motor experiences. A weak multisensory integration in PPS would contribute to an impairment of self‐embodiment processing, a core feature of the disorder linked to s...

Childhood maltreatment (CM) deeply impacts victims’ social competences. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect that CM duration exerts on victims’ affective and social development testing three different impact trajectories (i.e., linear, logarithmic and quadratic) and its physiological (facial mimicry and autonomic regulation o...

Introduction The sense of agency (SoA) indicates a person’s ability to feel her/his own motor acts as actually being her/his, and through them to exert control over the course of external events. Disruptions in SoA may profoundly affect the individual’s functioning, as observed in several neuropsychiatric disorders. Objectives This is the first ar...

Heart rate variability (HRV) has been linked to resilience and emotion regulation (ER). How HRV and brain processing interact during ER, however, has remained elusive. Sixty-two subjects completed the acquisition of resting HRV and task HRV while performing an ER functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) paradigm, which included the differential...

Perception of one's own body in time and space is a fundamental aspect of self-consciousness. It scaffolds our subjective experience of being present, in the here and now, a vital condition for our survival and well-being. Depersonalisation (DP) is characterized by a distressing feeling of being 'spaced out', detached from one's self, as well as at...

In this study we carried out a behavioral experiment comparing action language comprehension in L1 (Italian) and L2 (English). Participants were Italian native speakers who had acquired the second language late (after the age of 10). They performed semantic judgments on L1 and L2 literal, idiomatic and metaphorical action sentences after viewing a...

Despite the historically consolidated psychopathological perspective, on the one hand, contemporary organicistic psychiatry often highlights abnormalities in neurotransmitter systems like dysregulation of dopamine transmission , neural circuitry, and genetic factors as key contributors to schizophrenia. Neuroscience, on the other, has so far almost...

The digital technological revolution shifted the balance of world perceptual experience, increasing exposure to digital content, introducing a new quality to our perceptual experiences. embodied cognition offers an ideal vantage point to study how digital technologies impact on selves and their social relations for at least two reasons: first, beca...

The terminology used in discussions on mental state attribution is extensive and lacks consistency. In the current paper, experts from various disciplines collaborate to introduce a shared set of concepts and make recommendations regarding future use.

In this study, we conducted a behavioural experiment using literal, idiomatic, conventional and novel metaphorical action sentences. Participants viewed an action video, immediately after a sentence containing a verb that did (matching modality) or did not (mismatching modality) match the observed action. All the sentences were presented both in th...

Several studies demonstrated that explicit forms of negation processing (e.g., “I don’t know”) recruits motor inhibitory mechanisms. However, whether this is also true for implicit negation, in which the negative meaning is implicated but not explicitly lexicalized in the sentence (e.g., “I ignore”), has never been studied before. Two Go/No-Go stud...

Una rivoluzione della portata di quella copernicana è sotto i nostri occhi. Coinvolge ognuna e ognuno di noi e ridefinisce alla radice cosa siamo come esseri umani. Dal primato del soggetto scopriamo la centralità della relazione e che l’“io” che pensavamo di essere deriva dai “noi” di cui siamo parte; oltre la centralità della mente riconosciamo d...

Alcune persone con diagnosi di schizofrenia mostrano un'alterazione del senso di Sé. Da una prospettiva psicodinamica, si è ipotizzato che abbiano disturbi dell'integrazione dei processi di identificazione e differenziazione del Sé/altro. Da un punto di vista neuroscientifico, alcuni pazienti con diagnosi di schizofrenia pre-sentano disfunzioni nei...

Embodied music cognition predicts that our understanding of human-made sounds relates to our experience of making the same or similar movements and sounds, which involves imitation of the source of visual and auditory information. This embodiment of sound may lead to numerous kinetic cross-modal correspondences (CMCs). This article investigates mus...

The effects of mindfulness on body awareness and interoception have been proposed as potential mechanisms for its salutary effects. However, research investigating the relationship between mindfulness and body awareness using psychophysical measures is limited. In this study, we compared 31 expert meditators with 33 matched controls on somatosensor...

Sense of agency (SoA) indicates a person's ability to perceive her/his own motor acts as actually being her/his and, through them, to exert control over the course of external events. Disruptions in SoA may profoundly affect the individual's functioning, as observed in several neuropsychiatric disorders. This is the first article to systematically...

The effects of mindfulness on body awareness and interoception have been proposed as potential mechanisms for its salutary effects. However, research investigating the relationship between mindfulness and body awareness using psychophysical measures is limited. In this study, we compared 31 expert meditators with 33 matched controls on somatosensor...

Although many studies have investigated spectators' cinematic experience, only a few of them explored the neurophysiological correlates of the sense of presence evoked by the spatial characteristics of audio delivery devices. Nevertheless, nowadays both the industrial and the consumer markets have been saturated by some forms of spatial audio forma...

In the last 25 years, a new foundational perspective has emerged in the cognitive sciences under the title of embodied cognition. The core of embodied cognition can be expressed by the general hypothesis that cognitive processes are fundamentally rooted in the morphological traits and sensorimotor and affective systems of the human body. Thinking i...

In the last 25 years, a new foundational perspective has emerged in the cognitive sciences under the title of embodied cognition. The core of embodied cognition can be expressed by the general hypothesis that cognitive processes are fundamentally rooted in the morphological traits and sensorimotor and affective systems of the human body. Thinking i...

Human–robot interaction requires that competent robot partners have a multiplicity of human characteristics. Can we accept that these competencies extend to the artistic domain, where humans have always expressed their uniqueness as a species? This study investigated whether aesthetic judgments evoked by abstract artworks vary depending on whether...

Embodied cognition and bounded rationality

The perception of social exclusion among patients with opioid use disorder (OUD) could be affected by long-term opioid use. This study explores the emotional and cardiac autonomic responses to an experience of ostracism in a sample of participants with OUD on opioid agonist treatment (OAT). Twenty patients with OUD and twenty healthy controls (HC)...

Introduction In schizophrenia, there is evidence for anomalies in the extension and plasticity of the peripersonal space (PPS), the portion of space surrounding our body, plastically shaped through motor experiences. An impaired multisensory integration at the PPS level would underpin the disembodiment, a core feature of the disorder linked to subj...

It is widely known that among others, a pervasive symptom characterizing anorexia nervosa (AN) concerns body image overestimation, which largely contributes to the onset and maintenance of eating disorders. In the present study, we investigated the nature of the body image distortion by recording accuracy and reaction times in both a group of healt...

This article aims to show that there is an alternative way to explain human action with respect to the bottlenecks of the psychology of decision making. The empirical study of human behaviour from mid-20th century to date has mainly developed by looking at a normative model of decision making. In particular Subjective Expected Utility (SEU) decisio...

The self has been conceived as a theoretical construct (Baars, 1997; Metzinger, 2000) underlying our ability to coherently act in the world. Despite its intuitive nature, the problem of defining the self has captivated philosophers and psychologists for centuries. As a result, several models have been proposed to describe the multi- layered nature...

We thank Beatrice de Gelder [1] for the opportunity to clarify some important points about our recent article in TiCs on the trends in mirror neuron research 30 years after their first description [2]. The mainstream view of the mirror mechanism classically focused on agent-shared representations as a ground for social perception. Based on evidence...

A classical theoretical frame to interpret motor reactions to emotional stimuli is that such stimuli, particularly those threat-related, are processed preferentially, i.e., they are capable of capturing and grabbing attention automatically. Research has recently challenged this view, showing that the task relevance of emotional stimuli is crucial t...

Expertise in several areas appears to modulate neurocognitive processes. These processes have been observed to differ in visual arts experts compared to the general population. Here, we aimed to investigate whether visual artists' neural responses to tasks within and outside their field of expertise are contrasting to the responses of non-experts....

Introduction A primary disruption of the bodily self is considered a core feature of schizophrenia patients (SCZ). The “disembodied” self would be underpinned by an inefficient body-related multisensory integration mechanism occurring in the Peripersonal Space (PPS). PPS is a plastic sector of space surrounding our body, whose extent is altered in...

One of the most surprising features of our brain is the fact that it is extremely plastic. Among the various plastic processes supported by our brain, there is the neural representation of the space surrounding our body, the peripersonal space (PPS). The effects of real-world tool use on the PPS are well known in cognitive neuroscience, but little...

The topic of the human face is addressed from a biocultural perspective, focusing on the empirical investigation of how the face is represented, perceived, and evaluated in artistic portraits and self-portraits from the XVth to the XVIIth century. To do so, the crucial role played by the human face in social cognition is introduced, starting from d...

Mirror neurons (MNs) were first described in a seminal paper in 1992 as a class of monkey premotor cells discharging during both action execution and observation. Despite their debated origin and function, recent studies in several species, from birds to humans, revealed that beyond MNs properly so called, a variety of cell types distributed among...

Background and Hypothesis A primary disruption of the bodily self is considered a core feature of schizophrenia (SCZ). The “disembodied” self might be underpinned by inefficient body-related multisensory integration processes, normally occurring in the peripersonal space (PPS), a plastic sector of space surrounding the body whose extent is altered...

In the last decades, the contribution of cognitive neuroscience to fi lm studies has been invested in at least three diff erent lines of research. The fi rst one has to do with fi lm theory and history: the new attention, inspired by cognitive neuroscience, to the viewer's brain-body, the senso-rimotor basis of fi lm cognition, and the forms of emb...

Trait empathy is an essential personality feature in the intricacy of typical social inclinations of individuals. Empathy is likely supported by multilevel neuronal network functioning, whereas local topological properties determine network integrity. In the present functional MRI study (N=116), we aimed to trace empathic traits to the intrinsic br...

Citation: Ebisch, S.J.H.; Scalabrini, A.; Northoff, G.; Mucci, C.; Sergi, M.R.; Saggino, A.; Aquino, A.; Alparone, F.R.; Perrucci, M.G.; Gallese, V.; Di Plinio, S.

Depersonalisation is a common dissociative experience characterised by distressing feelings of being detached or 'estranged' from one's self and body and/or the world. The COVID-19 pandemic forcing millions of people to socially distance themselves from others and to change their lifestyle habits. We have conducted an online study of 622 participan...

Purpose Anorexia nervosa-restrictive subtype (AN-R) is a life-threatening disorder relying on behavioural abnormalities, such as excessive food restriction or exercise. Such abnormalities may be secondary to an “objectified” attitude toward body image and self. This is the first study exploring the impact of anomalous self-experience (ASEs) on abno...

Abstract We will describe in two articles (“Sense of self and psychosis”, 1 and 2) the theoretical basis and the methodology of a new therapeutic group approach called amniotic therapy, which aims to improve the sense of self of psychotic patients. In this first article we explore the role of the surface of the body and its early sensorimotor inter...

Some people diagnosed with schizophrenia show an alteration of the sense of self. From a psychodynamic perspective, it has been hypothesized they have disorders of the integration of self/other identification/differentiation processes. From a neuroscientific view some with this diagnosis present dysfunctions in neural correlates of representation o...

In this chapter, the authors comment on their original review published in 2009 in Current Opinion in Neurobiology where, as they build a general theoretical framework that encompasses major empirical work in the field of neuroaesthetics since then, they also emphasize the role of the motor system and emotions in building an aesthetic experience. I...

In this review, we discuss the topic of intersubjectivity and its disruption in Autism Spectrum Disorder, both from a developmental and neuroscientific perspective. We present evidence of the impact of an early neurodevelopmental disorder on the blooming of intersubjective abilities. We propose the existence of a basic, pre-reflective social cognit...

In the present essay, we summarize our research in the experimental aesthetics of visual art and cinema, motivated by the following assumptions: 1) Vision is more complex than the mere activation of the ‘visual brain’; 2) Our visual experience of the world is the outcome of multimodal integration processes, with the motor system as key player; 3) A...

Background Individuals with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) feel rejected even when socially included. The pathophysiological mechanisms of this rejection bias are still unknown. Using the Cyberball paradigm, we investigated whether patients with BPD, display altered physiological responses to social inclusion and ostracism, as assessed by ch...

Neuroscience joins the long history of discussions about aesthetics in psychology, philosophy, art history, and the creative arts. In this volume, leading scholars in this nascent field reflect on the promise of neuroaesthetics to enrich our understanding of this universal yet diverse facet of human experience. The volume will inform and stimulate...

Several studies demonstrated that the processing of explicit forms of negation recruits motor inhibitory mechanisms. However, whether this is also true for implicit negation, in which the negative meaning is implicated but not explicitly lexicalized in the sentence (e.g., “I ignore”), has never been studied before. This study aims to address this i...

Background and aims: Gambling Disorder (GD) entails maladaptive patterns of decision-making. Neurophysiological research points out the effect of parasympathetic arousal, including phasic changes in heart rate variability (HRV), and interoceptive accuracy (IA, i.e., the ability to track changes in bodily signals), on decision-making. Nevertheless,...

Depersonalisation is a common dissociative experience characterised by distressing feelings of being detached or ‘estranged’ from one’s self and body and/or the world. The COVID-19 pandemic forced millions of people to socially distance from others and to change life habits. We have conducted an online study on 622 participants worldwide to investi...

Depersonalisation is a common dissociative experience characterised by distressing feelings of being detached or 'estranged' from one's self and body and/or the world. The COVID-19 pandemic forced millions of people to socially distance from others and to change life habits. We have conducted an online study on 622 participants worldwide to investi...

Abstract Bodily postures are essential to correctly comprehend others' emotions and intentions. Nonetheless, very few studies focused on the pattern of eye movements implicated in the recognition of emotional body language (EBL), demonstrating significant differences in relation to different emotions. A yet unanswered question regards the presence...

The meaning of music may rely upon perceived motion (Zuckerkandl, 1971). Recently, the framework of embodied music cognition, which draws on the discovery of mirror neurons and the theory of embodied simulation (Gallese, 2007), makes the claim that our understanding of human-made sounds draws upon our experience of making the same or similar moveme...

According to embodied simulation theory, humans tacitly ‘simulate’ the actions of the other by mapping them in the sensorimotor cortex of the brain. According to the framework of embodied cinema, the meaning-making process in film is considered to be inextricably linked to the interrelation between the brain, body and environment of the viewer. Ath...

Empathy for pain involves sensory and visceromotor brain regions relevant also in the first-person pain experience. Focusing on brain activations associated to vicarious experiences of pain triggered by artistic or non-artistic images, the present study aims to investigate common and distinct brain activation patterns associated to these two vicari...

Empathy for pain involves sensory and visceromotor brain regions relevant also in the first-person pain experience. Focusing on brain activations associated to vicarious experiences of pain triggered by artistic or non-artistic images, the present study aims to investigate common and distinct brain activation patterns associated to these two vicari...

In the last decades, the embodied approach to cognition and language gained momentum in the scientific debate, leading to evidence in different aspects of language processing. However, while the bodily grounding of concrete concepts seems to be relatively not controversial, abstract aspects, like the negation logical operator, are still today one o...

In spite of the historically consolidated psychopathological perspective, neuroscientific research applied to schizophrenia has so far almost entirely neglected the first-person experiential dimension of this syndrome, mainly focusing on higher-order cognitive functions such as executive function, working memory, theory of mind, and the like. An al...

On the occasion of our 30th anniversary, the Association of Psychoanalytic Studies would like to open a scientific debate on what has been considered a deep paradigmatic transformation, "the intersubjective revolution". We will host the leading exponents of two different disciplines, Otto Kernberg and Vittorio Gallese. They will evaluate the recipr...

The series is the expression of the Center for Research on Teaching of Languages, which in Edizioni Ca’ Foscari also has a magazine, Linguistics Education - Language Education, EL.LE, and a necklace, Intercultural Communication, COMINT, dedicated to this important but overlooked aspect of language mastery. In the series, the volumes of which are ap...

Certainly one of the main messages (if not the main) of Simon’s entire scientific career was that of founding the notion of bounded rationality upon cognitive psychology (Simon, 1976). Accordingly, Simon established his notion of bounded rationality in the cognitive psychology thread named ‘cognitivism’ (Haugeland, 1978) – also called ‘information-...

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed the nature of our social interactions. In order to understand how protective equipment and distancing measures influence the ability to comprehend others' emotions and, thus, to effectively interact with others, we carried out an online study across the Italian population during the first pandemic peak...

Although we spend more than ninety percent of our lives inside buildings, we understand very little about how the built environment affects our behavior, thoughts, emotions, and well-being. We are biological beings whose senses and neural systems have developed over millions of years; it stands to reason that research in the life sciences, particul...

In questo articolo proponiamo una modalità con cui la neuroscienza cognitiva può fornire nuovi insight su tre aspetti della cognizione sociale. Intersoggettività, Sé umano e linguaggio. Sottolineiamo il ruolo sociale del corpo, concepito come sor-gente costitutiva della coscienza preriflessiva del Sé e degli altri. Intendiamo fornire una visione cr...

On the occasion of our 30th anniversary, the Association of Psychoanalytic Studies would like to open a scientific debate on what has been considered a deep paradigmatic transformation, the intersubjective revolution. We will host the leading exponents of two different disciplines, Otto Kernberg and Vittorio Gallese. They will evaluate the reciproc...

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed the nature of our social interactions. In order to understand how protective equipment and distancing measures influence the ability to comprehend others’ emotions and, thus, to effectively interact with others, we carried out an online survey across the Italian population during the first pandemic pea...

There is a growing consensus that our most fundamental sense of self is structured by the ongoing integration of sensory and motor information related to our own body. Depersonalisation (DP) is an intriguing form of altered subjective experience in which people report feelings of unreality and detachment from their sense of self. The current study...

The space surrounding our body, defined as peripersonal space (PPS), is dynamically shaped by our motor experiences. For instance, PPS extends after using a tool to reach far objects. Several studies have demonstrated how PPS size varies across people, depending on different individual characteristics, including schizotypy. Coherently, narrower PPS...

Cardiac synchrony is a crucial component of shared experiences, considered as an objective measure of emotional processes accompanying empathic interactions. No study has investigated whether cardiac synchrony among people engaged in collective situations links to the individual emotional evaluation of the shared experience. We investigated theatri...