Biology subjects

Sciutti, A.

Publications and source records attributed to Sciutti, A..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2021

Can you affect me? The influence of vitality forms on action perception and motor response

During the interaction with others, action, speech, and touches can communicate positive, neutral, or negative attitudes. Offering an apple can be gentle or rude, a caress can be kind or rushed. These subtle aspects of social communication have been named vitality forms by Daniel Stern. Although they characterize all human interactions, to date it is not clear whether vitality forms expressed by an agent affect the action perception and the motor response of the receiver. To this purpose, we carried out a psychophysics study aiming to investigate how perceiving different vitality forms can influence cognitive and motor tasks performed by participants. In particular, participants were stimulated with requests made through a physical contact or vocally and conveying rude or gentle vitality forms, and then they were asked to estimate the end of a passing action observed in a monitor (action estimation task) or to perform an action in front of it (action execution task) with the intention to pass an object to the other person presented in the video. Results showed that the perception of different vitality forms influences both the estimated duration of the action and the motor response of participants, suggesting how these forms of communication can positively or negatively affect our behavior.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2021

Affective contagion: how attitudes expressed by others influence our perception of actions

Vitality forms represent a fundamental aspect of social interactions, characterizing how actions are performed and how words are pronounced, on the basis of the agents attitude. The same action, such as a handshake, has a different impact on the receiver when it is performed kindly or vigorously, and the same happens with a gentle or rude tone of voice. In the present study, we carried out two experiments which aimed to investigate whether and how vocal requests conveying different vitality forms can influence the perception of goal-directed actions and to measure the duration of this effect over time. More specifically, participants listened to an actor voice pronouncing "give me" in a rude or gentle way, and then they were asked to observe the initial part of a rude or gentle passing action, continue it mentally and estimate its conclusion. Results showed that the perception of different vitality forms expressed by vocal requests influenced the estimated action duration. Moreover, we found that this effect was limited to a certain time interval, after which it started to decay.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2017

Energy Exchanges at Contact Events Guide Sensorimotor Integration Across Intermodal Delays

One must know the mass of an object to accurately predict how it moves under the effect of an applied force. Similarly, the brain must represent the arms inertia to predict the arms movements elicited by commands impressed upon the muscles. Here, we present evidence suggesting that the integration of sensory information leading to the representation of the arms inertia does not take place continuously in time but only at discrete transient events, in which kinetic energy is exchanged between the arm and the environment. We used a visuomotor delay to induce crossmodal variations in state feedback and uncovered that the difference between visual and proprioceptive velocity estimations at isolated collision events was compensated by a change in the representation of arm inertia. The compensation maintained an invariant estimate across modalities of the expected energy exchange with the environment. This invariance captures different types of dysmetria observed across individuals following prolonged exposure to a fixed intermodal temporal perturbation and provides a new interpretation for cerebellar ataxia.

neuroscience↗