Ricerc@Sapienza

Absorption, the ability to highly focus attention, as well as openness to self-altering experiences, is an important psychological construct, closely related to deep-meditation states and other altered states of consciousness. Yet, little is known about the electrophysiological profile of states of absorption, possibly due to the difficulty to induce this state in the lab.

Studies with event-related potentials have highlighted deficits in the early phases of orienting to left visual targets in right-brain-damaged patients with left spatial neglect (N). However, brain responses associated with preparatory orienting of attention, with target novelty and with the detection of a match/mismatch between expected and actual targets (contextual updating), have not been explored in N.

EEG studies in healthy humans have highlighted that alpha-band activity is relatively reduced over the occipital-parietal areas of the hemisphere contralateral to the direction of spatial attention. Here, we investigated the hemispheric distribution of alpha during orienting of attention in male and female right-brain-damaged patients with left spatial neglect.

Introduction: Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep behavior disorder (RBD) is a REM sleep parasomnia characterized by dream enacting behaviors allowed by the loss of physiological atonia during REM sleep. This disorder is recognized as a prodromal stage of neurodegenerative disease, in particular Parkinson’s Disease (PD) and Dementia with Lewy Bodies (DLB). Therefore, a timely identification of biomarkers able to predict an early conversion into neurodegeneration is of utmost importance.

Several findings underlined that the electrophysiological (EEG) background of the last segment of sleep before awakenings may predict the presence/absence of dream recall (DR) in young subjects. However, little is known about the EEG correlates of DR in elderly people. Only an investigation found differences between recall and non-recall conditions during NREM sleep EEG in older adults, while—surprisingly—no EEG predictor of DR was found for what concerns REMsleep.

During the sleep onset (SO) process, the human electroencephalogram (EEG) is characterized by an orchestrated pattern of spatiotemporal changes. Sleep deprivation (SD) strongly affects both wake and sleep EEG, but a description of the topographical EEG power spectra and oscillatory activity during the wake-sleep transition after a period of prolonged wakefulness is still missing. The increased homeostatic sleep pressure should induce an earlier onset of sleep-related EEG oscillations. The aim of the present study was to assess the spatiotemporal EEG pattern at SO following SD.

Several findings support the activation hypothesis, positing that cortical arousal promotes
dream recall (DR). However, most studies have been carried out on young participants, while the
electrophysiological (EEG) correlates of DR in older people are still mostly unknown. We aimed to
test the activation hypothesis on 20 elders, focusing on the Non‐Rapid Eye Movement (NREM) sleep
stage. All the subjects underwent polysomnography, and a dream report was collected upon their

Neuroimaging and EEG studies have shown that passive observation of the full body and of specific body parts is associated with: 1) activity of an occipito-temporal region named the Extrastriate Body Area (EBA), 2) amplitude modulations of a specific posterior ERP component (N1/N190), and 3) a theta-band (4-7Hz) synchronization recorded from occipito-temporal electrodes compatible with the location of EBA.

Purpose: Recent studies demonstrate that 5-Hz bilateral transcranial alternating current stimulation (θ-tACS) on fronto-temporal areas affects resting EEG enhancing cortical synchronization, but it does not affect subjective sleepiness. This dissociation raises questions on the resemblance of this effect to the physiological falling asleep process. The current study aimed to evaluate the ability of fronto-temporal θ-tACS to promote sleep.

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.