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Imitation can be realized via two different routes: a direct route that translates visual input into motor output when gestures are meaningless or unknown, and a semantic route for known/meaningful gestures. Young infants show imitative behaviours compatible with the direct route, but little is known about the development of the semantic route, studied here for the first time. The present study examined preschool children (3-5years of age) imitating gestures that could be transitive or intransitive, and meaningful or meaningless. Both routes for imitation were already present by three years of age, and children were more accurate at imitating meaningful-intransitive gestures than meaningless-intransitive ones; the reverse pattern was found for transitive gestures. Children preferred to use their dominant hand even if they had to anatomically imitate the model to do this, showing that a preference for specular imitation is not exclusive at these ages., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

The recognition and interpretation of emotional information (e.g., about happiness) has been shown to elicit, amongst other bodily reactions, spontaneous facial expressions occurring in accordance to the relevant emotion (e.g. a smile). Theories of embodied cognition act on the assumption that such embodied simulations are not only an accessorial, but a crucial factor in the processing of emotional information. While several studies have confirmed the importance of facial motor resonance during the initial recognition of emotional information, its role at later stages of processing, such as during memory for emotional content, remains unexplored. The present study bridges this gap by exploring the impact of facial motor resonance on the retrieval of emotional stimuli. In a novel approach, the specific effects of embodied simulations were investigated at different stages of emotional memory processing (during encoding and/or retrieval). Eighty participants underwent a memory task involving emotional and neutral words consisting of an encoding and retrieval phase. Depending on the experimental condition, facial muscles were blocked by a hardening facial mask either during encoding, during retrieval, during both encoding and retrieval, or were left free to resonate (control). The results demonstrate that not only initial recognition but also memory of emotional items benefits from embodied simulations occurring during their encoding and retrieval., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Grasping is a complex action which requires high-level motor control. Although the impact of aging on grasping has been investigated in some studies, to date little is known as to how the aging process interacts with the purpose of the movement. The aims of the present study were (i) to investigate the effect of aging on grasping movements, and to explore on how this effect is modulated by (ii) the goal of the task, and by (iii) the characteristics of the target such as its location in the visual field, its orientation and its size. Young and elderly adults were asked to grasp to move or to grasp to use objects of different sizes and orientations, presented either in the central or the peripheral visual field. Movement duration did not differ between the two groups. However, elderly participants required a longer approach phase and showed a different grasping strategy, characterized by larger grip aperture and smaller percentage of wrist rotation in comparison to young adults. Elderly adults showed a decrease in accuracy when grasping objects presented in the peripheral, but not in the central visual field. A similar modulation of the kinematic parameters consisting in longer planning and execution phases in the grasp to use in comparison to the grasp to move condition was observed in both groups, suggesting that the effect of aging might be minimized and compensated in more goal-directed tasks., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Behavior in one-shot bargaining games, like the Ultimatum Game (UG), has been interpreted as an expression of social preferences, such as inequity aversion and negative reciprocity; however, the traditional UG design limits the range of possible psychological interpretation of the results. Here, we employed three different designs for ultimatum games, finding support for a more comprehensive theory: behavior is driven by cognitive factors implementing rules such as equal splitting, speaking up for the idea that equity works as a cognitive heuristic, applicable when the environment provides no reason to behave otherwise. Instead subjects deviate from this rule when environment changes, as, for instance, when personal interest is at stake. Results show that behavior varies systematically with contextual cues, balancing the self-interest with the automatic application of the equity heuristic. Thus, the context suggests the rule to be applied in a specific situation., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

Previous studies suggest that mental rotation can be accomplished by using different mental spatial transformations. When adopting the allocentric transformation, individuals imagine the stimulus rotation referring to its intrinsic coordinate frame, while when adopting the egocentric transformation they rely on multisensory and sensory-motor mechanisms. However, how these mental transformations evolve during healthy aging has received little attention. Here we investigated how visual, multisensory, and sensory-motor components of mental imagery change with normal aging. Fifteen elderly and 15 young participants were asked to perform two different laterality tasks within either an allocentric or an egocentric frame of reference. Participants had to judge either the handedness of a visual hand (egocentric task) or the location of a marker placed on the left or right side of the same visual hand (allocentric task). Both left and right hands were presented at various angular departures to the left, the right, or to the center of the screen. When performing the egocentric task, elderly participants were less accurate and slower for biomechanically awkward hand postures (i.e., lateral hand orientations). Their performance also decreased when stimuli were presented laterally. The findings revealed that healthy aging is associated with a specific degradation of sensory-motor mechanisms necessary to accomplish complex effector-centered mental transformations. Moreover, failure to find a difference in judging left or right hand laterality suggests that aging does not necessarily impair non-dominant hand sensory-motor programs., (Copyright © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

We explored the impact of motor experience on the interaction between implicit motor simulation and language-processing. In an action familiarity judgment task, expert volleyball players, fans and novices were presented with semantically correct sentences describing possible and not possible motor actions, all as negative or positive contexts, e.g., "Don't shank!" or "Assist!". As processing negated action-phrases is known to reduce simulation states, exposure to negative or positive contexts was used here to test how simulation varies according to motor feasibility (possible, impossible) and experience (experts and fans). A significant group×stimulus×context interaction showed that athletes and fans, took longer to process negative than positive contexts for possible actions, compared to action-impossible sentences. In addition, experts were significantly faster and more accurate than fans and, in turn, they were both more accurate than novices. Thus, implicit motor simulation impacts on action-verb processing depending on (i) the domain-relevant expertise, (ii) the feasibility of the actions, and (iii) on whether scenes are presented in a negated context. These results suggest that the implicit triggering of motor representations is modulated by the context and it is tuned to people's motor repertoire, even when actions are described linguistically., (Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)

In two experiments, we explored whether emotional context influences imitative action tendencies. To this end, we examined how emotional pictures, presented as primes, affect imitative tendencies using a compatibility paradigm. In Experiment 1, when seen index finger movements (lifting or tapping) and pre-instructed finger movements (tapping) were the same (tapping-tapping, compatible trials), participants were faster than when they were different (lifting-tapping, incompatible trials). This compatibility effect was enhanced when the seen finger movement was preceded by negative primes compared with positive or neutral primes. In Experiment 2, using only negative and neutral primes, the influence of negative primes on the compatibility effect was replicated with participants performing two types of pre-instructed finger movements (tapping and lifting). This emotional modulation of the compatibility effect was independent of the participants' trait anxiety level. Moreover, the emotional modulation pertained primarily to the compatible conditions, suggesting facilitated imitation due to negatively valent primes rather than increased interference. We speculate that negative stimuli increase imitative tendencies as a natural response in potential flight-or-fight situations., (Copyright © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)