Ricerc@Sapienza

The ability to anticipate and detect changes in human movement helps people to modify their behaviors in ever changing environments. Studies indicate that expertise modulates observation of domain-specific actions in sports-a process that is crucial for adapting rapidly to a new situation, often before awareness of environmental changes is achieved. Here, we explored the electrophysiological underpinnings of wheelchair basketball players predicting the fate of free throws performed by wheelchair basketball athletes.

Brain activity related to orienting of attention with spatial cues and brain responses to attentional targets are influenced the probabilistic contingency between cues and targets. Compared to predictive cues, cues predicting at chance the location of targets reduce the filtering out of uncued locations and the costs in reorienting attention to targets presented at these locations. Slagter et al.

Transcranial cerebellar direct current stimulation (tcDCS) can offer new insights into the cerebellar function and disorders, by modulating noninvasively the activity of cerebellar networks. Taking into account the functional interplay between the cerebellum and the cerebral cortex, we addressed the effects of unilateral tcDCS (active electrode positioned over the right cerebellar hemisphere) on the electroencephalographic (EEG) oscillatory activity and on the cortical network organization at resting state.

Although cerebellar-cortical interactions have been studied extensively in animal models and humans using modern neuroimaging techniques, the effects of cerebellar stroke and focal lesions on cerebral cortical processing remain unknown. In the present study, we analyzed the large-scale functional connectivity at the cortical level by combining high density electroencephalography (EEG) and source imaging techniques to evaluate and quantify the compensatory reorganization of brain networks after cerebellar damage.

Flexible and adaptive behavior requires the ability to contextually stop inappropriate actions and select the right one as quickly as possible. Recently, it has been proposed that three brain regions, i.e., the inferior frontal gyrus (iFg), the anterior insula (aIns), and the anterior intraparietal sulcus (aIPs), play an important role in several processing phases of perceptual decision tasks, especially in the preparation, perception and action phases, respectively.

Conditions of extreme neurological disability prevent any form of communication, even to show the emotional state. Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI) often use Electro-encephalography (EEG) measurements of the voluntary brain activity for driving a communication system. A BCI usage requires the activation of mental tasks. In the last few years, a new paradigm of activation has been used consisting in the autonomous brain activation through self-induced emotions, remembered on autobiographical basis.

Objective Here we evaluated the hypothesis that resting state electroencephalographic (EEG) cortical sources correlated with cognitive functions and discriminated asymptomatic treatment-naïve HIV subjects (no AIDS). Methods EEG, clinical, and neuropsychological data were collected in 103 treatment-naïve HIV subjects (88 males; mean age 39.8 years ± 1.1 standard error of the mean, SE). An age-matched group of 70 cognitively normal and HIV-negative (Healthy; 56 males; 39.0 years ± 2.0 SE) subjects, selected from a local university archive, was used for control purposes.

Citizens in an ageing World population are at higher risk of cognitive impairment and dementia with considerable negative consequences for their autonomy and quality of life, that of those who care for them, and the sustainability of health and care systems. Thus, the need for strategies to avoid or delay the process of cognitive decline. Innovative ICT solutions should play a role in tertiary prevention of cognitive decline supporting active and healthy ageing and countering the cognitive decline in the elderly subjects.

Introduction: Molecular, functional, and structural neuroimaging biomarkers are largely used to study neurodegenerative diseases, but their benefits to patients/science might be greatly enhanced by improving standardization and cross-validation. In this EU Joint Programme-Neurodegenerative Diseases Research–funded project, we surveyed the neuroimaging community to assess perceived barriers in multicentric neuroimaging harmonization and actions to overcome them.

Discriminating mental states from brain signals is crucial for many applications in cognitive and clinical neuroscience. Most of the studies relied on the feature extraction from the activity of single brain areas, thus neglecting the potential contribution of their functional coupling, or connectivity. Here, we consider spectral coherence and imaginary coherence to infer brain connectivity networks from electroencephalographic (EEG) signals recorded during motor imagery and resting states in a group of healthy subjects.