Biology subjects

Pinti, P.

Publications and source records attributed to Pinti, P..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Prefrontal brain-to-brain synchrony during human group hunting: Evidence from fNIRS hyperscanning

Orca, wolves, chimpanzees and humans share a similarly impressive capacity for group hunting, where individuals coordinate behaviour together to capture prey. Studying hunting behaviours has important implications for understanding how behaviour in group contexts may be indicative of cognitive decline. Despite growing interest in brain circuits for prey capture, the brain regions involved in tracking prey during a hunt and the behaviours in group hunt linked to success remain unclear. Here we combined functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and a virtual minecraft world to examine behaviour, brain dynamics and brain synchrony involved in group hunting behaviour. We focused on the prefrontal cortex (PFC) due to its known role in planning and social coordination and recorded from pairs of individuals as they either cooperated to hunt another person (prey) or simply followed another person. Hunters were more successful if they managed to keep a smaller distance to the prey and moved at speeds that were more synchronised with their co-predator. At high-range frequencies for fNIRS (0.1-0.2Hz), we found greater brain-to-brain synchrony in lateral and medial (frontopolar) PFC regions during hunting compared with chance levels. Together, these findings provide insights into what behaviours and brain dynamics associated with successful group hunting.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Head before heart: cognitive empathy emerges before affective empathy in the developing brain

Empathy is crucial for social interactions across all cultures, and is foundational to establishing social cooperation and group ties in human societies. Challenging the current predominant view, we recently proposed that understanding others emotions (cognitive empathy) might emerge earlier than actually sharing those emotions (affective empathy) (Bulgarelli & Jones, 2023). Here we test this hypothesis by measuring which empathic component matures first during toddlerhood, a critical period for the development of broader social networks. Addressing this question is critical to understand the mechanisms through which caregivers scaffold empathy development. Traditional approaches are inadequate, as they rely on childrens verbal skills or unfamiliar scenarios that lack ecological validity. In this preregistered study, we employed a novel toddler-appropriate task to dissociate neural and physiological correlates of cognitive and affective empathy in N=90 3-to-6-year-olds using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and simultaneous heart rate monitoring to identify internal markers of empathy. We found that brain regions supporting affective and cognitive empathy in young children resemble those observed in adults. Importantly, we showed an effect of age on network specialisation with brain activations of cognitive empathy stronger in younger compared to older preschoolers, and brain activations of affective empathy stronger in older compared to younger preschoolers. These results may provide the first evidence that cognitive empathy is engaged early and develops alongside or ahead of affective empathy in preschoolers, challenging existing models and suggesting a new framework for understanding the development of empathy. Significance statementEmpathy is a crucial social skill, consisting of an affective component--sharing emotion--and a cognitive component--conceptually understanding emotions. While to date it has been predominately accepted that the affective component develops earlier than the cognitive one, we recently proposed the opposite, which could have important implications for understanding the mechanisms that underpin social skills. Here we successfully developed a new task to dissociate physiological and neural markers of affective and cognitive empathy in N=90 preschoolers. We found that brain activations for cognitive empathy are stronger than for affective empathy in young children. This provide the first direct evidence for the earlier emergence of cognitive empathy, suggesting that scaffolding the understanding of others emotions may be crucial for empathy development.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

Ecological fNIRS in mobile children: Using short separation channels to correct for systemic contamination during naturalistic neuroimaging.

AbstractO_ST_ABSSignificanceC_ST_ABSThe advances and the miniaturization in functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) instrumentation offers the potential to move the classical laboratory-based cognitive neuroscience investigations into more naturalistic settings. Wearable and mobile fNIRS devices also provide a novel child-friendly means to image functional brain activity in freely moving toddlers and preschoolers. Measuring brain activity in more ecologically valid settings with fNIRS presents additional challenges, such as the increased impact of physiological interferences. One of the most popular methods to minimize such interferences is to regress out short separation channels from the long separation channels (i.e., superficial signal regression or SSR). Whilst this has been extensively investigated in adults, little is known about the impact of systemic changes on the fNIRS signals recorded in children in either classical or novel naturalistic experiments. AimWe aim to investigate if extracerebral physiological changes occur in toddlers and preschoolers, and whether SSR can help minimize these interferences. ApproachWe collected fNIRS data from 3-to-7 years olds during a conventional computerized static task and in a dynamic naturalistic task in an immersive virtual reality (VR) continuous automatic virtual environment (CAVE). ResultsOur results show that superficial signal contamination data is present in both young children as in adults. Importantly, we find that SSR helps in improving the localization of functional brain activity, both in the computerized task and, to a larger extent, in the dynamic VR task. ConclusionsFollowing from these results, we formulate suggestions to advance the field of developmental neuroimaging with fNIRS, particularly in ecological settings.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2022

Mapping human social brain specialisation beyond the neuron using multimodal imaging in human infants

The specialised regional functionality of the mature human cortex partly emerges through experience-dependent specialisation during early development. Our existing understanding of this process is based on evidence from unitary imaging modalities and has thus focused on isolated changes in spatial or temporal precision of neural or haemodynamic activation alone, giving an incomplete picture of the process. We speculate that neural specialisation of function will be underpinned by better coordinated haemodynamic and metabolic changes in a broader orchestrated physiological response. Thus, we present a harmonised framework in which specialisation is indexed by the emergence of coupling between neuronal activity and vascular supply of oxygen and energy. Here, we combine simultaneous measures of coordinated neural activity (EEG), metabolic rate and oxygenated blood supply (broadband near-infrared spectroscopy) to measure emerging specialisation in the infant brain. In 4-to-7-month-old infants, we show that social processing is accompanied by spatially and temporally specific increases in coupled activation in the temporal-parietal junction, a core hub region of the adult social brain. During non-social processing coupled activation decreased in the same region, indicating specificity to social processing. Coupling was strongest with high frequency brain activity (beta and gamma), consistent with the greater energetic requirements and more localised action of high frequency brain activity. We conclude that functional specialisation of the brain is a coordinated activity across neural, haemodynamic, and metabolic changes, and our ability to measure these simultaneously opens new vistas in understanding how the brain is shaped by its environment.

developmental biology↗