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Bodily self consciousness is a blooming field of research where a lot of questions are still unsolved. From a psychological point of view de Vignemont (2011) proposed an agenda of main issues wondering what is the fundamental role of body ownership, what grounds the sense of ownership, how is the sense of ownership related to bodily sensations, action and emotion, and whether it is possible to feel a sense of ownership for any extracorporeal object. In the present thesis I am going to present a progression of seven studies where I tried to characterize how body representation interacts with pain processing, investigating either patients presenting with body representation disorders and healthy people experiencing bodily misperceptions, by means of recording responses from the autonomous nervous system and ratings of pain experience under different conditions of body representation distortion. Taken together the studies presented show three main findings: an anticipatory response to incoming noxious stimuli is recordable when stimuli enter in the peripersonal space; an intact body representation is necessary to properly monitor noxious stimuli approaching to our own body; when the sense of ownership is transferred to an external object or a virtual body, a visual treat to that external object elicits anticipatory responses akin to those elicited by a menace directed to our own body. The present set of studies provide novel experimental evidence showing the critical influence of body representation for the mapping of sensory experience, in particular pain processing, and how the sense of ownership critically governs this interaction. Overall, the key contribution of the present work is to provide converging data, gathered from different models ranging from the study of pathological populations to the assessment of neurologically intact individuals by means of experimental manipulations, about the role of body representation for the efficient and safe interaction with the world around us, by correctly anticipating potentially dangerous incoming stimuli.

Introduction: Patients with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) suffer from several neurocognitive deficits. We investigated the cognitive and socio-cognitive profiles of patients with severe OSA, controlling for potentially relevant mediating variables (i.e. age, body-mass index, cognitive reserve and depression). Moreover, we studied the neuropsychological profile of a high-risk OSA phenotype characterized by severe OSA and severe nocturnal hypoxemia. Method: We assessed 29 previously untreated severe OSA patients with a mean age of 55.6 ( 9.9 years) and a mean apnea-hypopnea index (AHI) of 53.1 ( 17.4). A control group of 34 healthy participants was also enrolled. Participants completed an extensive neuropsychological battery that included social cognition, a relatively new investigation area among OSA patients. Data analysis: Data were analyzed with a Bayesian approach. Specifically, Bayesian ANCOVA was used to investigate whether the grouping variable could predict test performance. Age, body-mass index, cognitive reserve and state of depression were added as covariates to the null model to weight the effects of these potential confounding factors. Three groups were analyzed: healthy controls (H), OSA with severe apnea and severe nocturnal oxygen desaturation (D+), and OSA with severe apnea non-desaturators (D−). Performances on the various neuropsychological tests were treated as the dependent variables. Results: The results indicate that non-verbal reasoning, the theory of mind skills, and mental shifting ability were impaired in OSA patients. Patients with severe nocturnal hypoxemia underperformed compared to patients with the same severity of apnea but non-desaturators. Additionally, we observed a trend toward a worse performance among OSA desaturator patients in the following abilities: constructional ability, short term verbal memory, phonological fluency, and the ability to inhibit automatic and dominant responses. Conclusion: The data suggest a key role of hypoxemia in affecting cognitive functioning in OSA patients. Executive functions and the concomitant involvement of social cognition are particularly affected.

Visuo-spatial working memory is one of the main domain-general cognitive mechanisms underlying mathematical abilities and their development in children. However, if visuo-spatial working memory involves different processes and components, then the term ‘mathematics’ refers to a broad concept that includes multiple domains and skills. The aim of this present study was to investigate the relationship between different visuo-spatial working memory components and several mathematical abilities in a sample of third- to fifth-grade Italian children. To assess the relationships between different visuo-spatial working memory components and different mathematical abilities, we relied on Network Analysis (NA). Results indicate that some but not all visuo-spatial working memory components are associated with some mathematical abilities.

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is one of the most common sleep breathing disorders (SRBDs). It is associated with (under-recognized) cognitive impairment as well as with psychiatric disorders, motor vehicle accidents, low work performance, low social functioning and decrease in quality of life. As a result of the cognitive deficits that characterize patients with OSA, the syndrome has been included in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders. However, it is not clear whether OSA causes an impairment in the majority cognitive processes or whether it affects only some and specific cognitive skills. In this study we assessed 29 previously untreated severe OSA patients (mean age of 55.6 ± 9.9 years) on wide range of cognitive skills as well as (for first time) on socio-cognitive skills. A control group was also enrolled. Data were analysed with a Bayesian approach. The final aim of the study was to address an open fundamental question in experimental psychology and socio-cognitive neuroscience literatures: is there a "social brain" specialized in the processing social stimuli? Results indicate that OSA does not affect all cognitive processes, but mainly executive and socio-cognitive skills. Finally, our results support a dissociation between socio-cognitive ability and other domain-general cognitive functions. OSA affect mainly (and independently of each other) executive and social brain.

In the present study, we explored the unique contribution of reading accuracy, reading fluency and linguistic comprehension within the frame of Simple View of Reading (SVR). The experimental sample included 118 3rd to 5th grade children learning Italian, a language with a highly regular orthography. We adopted a flexible method of analysis, i.e., the Network Analysis (NA), particularly suited for exploring relations among different domains and where the direct relations between a set of intercorrelated variables is the main interest. Results indicated an independent and unique contribution of syntactic comprehension skills as well as reading fluency and reading accuracy in the comprehension of a written text. The decoding measures were not directly associated with non-verbal reasoning and the latter was not directly associated with reading comprehension but was strongly related to oral syntactic comprehension. Overall, the pattern of findings is broadly consistent with the predictions of SVR and underscores how, in an orthographically regular language, reading fluency and reading accuracy as well as oral comprehension skills directly influence reading comprehension. Data are discussed in a cross-linguistic perspective. Implications for education and rehabilitation are also presented.