Implicit Associations between Adverbs of Place and Actions in the Physical and Digital Space

An embodied approach to fetal and newborn perceptual and sensorimotor development

The embodied approach argues that interaction with the environment plays a crucial role in brain development and that the presence of sensory effects generated by movements is fundamental. The movement of the fetus is initially random. Then, the repeated execution of the movement creates a link between it and its sensory effects, allowing the selection of movements that produce expected sensations. During fetal life, the brain develops from a transitory fetal circuit to the permanent cortical circuit, which completes development after birth. Accordingly, this process must concern the interaction of the fetus with the intrauterine environment and of the newborn with the new aerial environment, which provides a new sensory stimulation, light. The goal of the present review is to provide suggestions for neuroscientific research capable of shedding light on brain development process by describing from a functional point of view the relationship between the motor and sensory abilities of fetuses and newborns and the increasing complexity of their interaction with objects in the womb and outside of it.

Digital Intentions in the Fingers: I Know What You Are Doing with Your Smartphone

Every day, we make thousands of finger movements on the touchscreen of our smartphones. The same movements might be directed at various distal goals. We can type "What is the weather in Rome?" in Google to acquire information from a weather site, or we may type it on WhatsApp to decide whether to visit Rome with a friend. In this study, we show that by watching an agent's typing hands, an observer can infer whether the agent is typing on the smartphone to obtain information or to share it with others. The probability of answering correctly varies with age and typing style. According to embodied cognition, we propose that the recognition process relies on detecting subtle differences in the agent's movement, a skill that grows with sensorimotor competence. We expect that this preliminary work will serve as a starting point for further research on sensorimotor representations of digital actions.

Grasping the semantic of actions: a combined behavioral and MEG study

There is experimental evidence that the brain systems involved in action execution also play a role in action observation and understanding. Recently, it has been suggested that the sensorimotor system is also involved in language processing. Supporting results are slower response times and weaker motor-related MEG Beta band power suppression in semantic decision tasks on single action verbs labels when the stimulus and the motor response involve the same effector. Attenuated power suppression indicates decreased cortical excitability and consequent decreased readiness to act. The embodied approach forwards that the simultaneous involvement of the sensorimotor system in the processing of the linguistic content and in the planning of the response determines this language-motor interference effect. Here, in a combined behavioral and MEG study we investigated to what extent the processing of actions visually presented (i.e., pictures of actions) and verbally described (i.e., verbs in written words) share common neural mechanisms. The findings demonstrated that, whether an action is experienced visually or verbally, its processing engages the sensorimotor system in a comparable way. These results provide further support to the embodied view of semantic processing, suggesting that this process is independent from the modality of presentation of the stimulus, including language.