Ricerc@Sapienza

Neuroaesthetics, the science studying the biological underpinnings of aesthetic experience,
recently extended its area of investigation to literary art; this was the humus where neurocognitive
poetics blossomed. Divina Commedia represents one of the most important, famous and studied
poems worldwide. Poetry stimuli are characterized by elements (meter and rhyme) promoting
the processing fluency, a core aspect of neuroaesthetics theories. In addition, given the evidence

Discrepancies between sensory predictions and action outcome are at the base of error coding. However, these phenomena have mainly been studied focussing on individual performance. Here, we explored EEG responses to motor prediction errors during a human-avatar interaction and show that Theta/Alpha activity of the frontal error-monitoring system works in phase with activity of the occipito-temporal node of the action observation network.

Previous research suggests that prompting individuals to think on their own mortality affects their perception of painful somatic stimuli and related brain activity. Grounded on the assumption that reminders of mortality may recruit threat-defence mechanisms similar to the ones activated by painful nociceptive stimuli, we hypothesize that the effects exerted by linguistic reminders of death on pain perception and brain activity would be elicited by passive observation of death-related pictures vs. more generic threat-related pictures.

Research suggests that working memory (WM) is impaired in chronic pain. Yet, information on how potentially noxious stimuli are maintained in memory is limited in patients as well as in healthy people. We recorded electroencephalography (EEG) in healthy volunteers during a modified delayed match-to-sample task where maintenance in memory of relevant attributes of nociceptive laser stimuli was essential for subsequent cued-discrimination. Participants performed in high and low load conditions (i.e. three vs. two stimuli to keep in WM).

Tobacco constitutes a global emergency with totally preventable millions of deaths per year and smoking-related illnesses. Public service announcements (PSAs) are the main tool against smoking and by now their efficacy is still assessed through questionnaires and metrics, only months after their circulation.

Human factors’ aim is to understand and evaluate the interactions between people and tasks, technologies, and environment. Among human factors, it is possible then to include the subjective reaction to external stimuli, due to individual’s characteristics and states of mind. These processes are also involved in the perception of antismoking public service announcements (PSAs), the main tool for governments to contrast the first cause of preventable deaths in the world: tobacco addiction.