Neuropsychologia
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While affordances have been intensively studied, the mechanisms according to how their activation is modulated by context are poorly understood. We investigated how the Agent׳s reach-to-grasp movement towards a target-object (e.g. a can) is influenced by the other׳s interaction with a second object (manipulative/functional) and by his/her eye-gaze communication. To manipulate physical context we showed participants two objects that could be linked by a spatial relation (e.g. can-knife, typically found in the same context), or by different functional relations. ⋯ Consistently participants reached faster the MFA when the objects were related by a functional-individual than a functional-cooperative relation. The Agent׳s getting response strongly affected the grasping component of the movement: in case of eye-gaze sharing, MFA was greater when the other previously performed a manipulative than a functional grip. Results reveal that humans have developed a sophisticated capability in detecting information from hand posture and eye-gaze, which are informative as to the Agent׳s intention.
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How to reduce pain is a fundamental clinical and experimental question. Acute pain is a complex experience which seems to emerge from the co-activation of two main processes, namely the nociceptive/discriminative analysis and the affective/cognitive evaluation of the painful stimulus. Recently it has been found that pain threshold increases following the visual magnification of the body part targeted by the painful stimulation. ⋯ Moreover a reduction of subjective pain experience was found specifically for the magnified hand in explicit pain ratings. These findings suggest that the visual increase of body size enhances the cognitive, anticipatory component of pain processing; such an anticipatory reaction reduces the response to the following contact with the noxious stimulus. The present results support the idea that cognitive aspects of pain experience relay on the multisensory representation of the body, and that could be usefully exploited for inducing a significant reduction of subjective pain experience.
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Previous research has shown that handedness consistency might be a more important factor than direction of hand dominance in the performance of various cognitive and motor tasks. We investigated the effect of handedness consistency in bimanual coordination. We employed a task where participants had to respond to visual cues and perform symmetrical or asymmetrical bimanual movements towards cue-designated targets. ⋯ Behavioural analyses showed that participants with inconsistent hand preference were equally fast in initiating symmetrical and asymmetrical bimanual movements, whereas participants with consistent hand preference were slower in initiating (the more demanding) asymmetrical movements. Moreover, the amplitudes of the Movement Related Potential and the suppression of the 10 Hz-mu rhythm were larger in participants with inconsistent hand preference over premotor and primary sensorimotor areas, although it is possible that the suppression of the mu rhythm may also depend on hand dominance. Our findings suggest that individuals with inconsistent hand preference have an advantage in the planning and organization of bimanual movements, which may not be related to the direction of their hand dominance.