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Inf@nzia Digi.Tales 3.6 è un progetto che ha avuto l’obiettivo di sviluppare metodologie e tecnologie di apprendimento innovative a supporto delle attività educative curriculari nella scuola dell’infanzia e nel primo anno della scuola primaria, come l’esplorazione spontanea o guidata, che sfrutta il ruolo centrale del tatto, della manipolazione e di tutti e cinque i sensi. Il progetto ha affrontato l’apprendimento al di fuori del contesto scolastico: ha stabilito un continuum scuola-famiglia-città, valorizzando il contesto socioculturale e territoriale; ha inoltre coinvolto amministrazioni scolastiche, docenti e famiglie, sviluppando metodologie partecipative, per accrescere il senso di corresponsabilità educativa, e promuovendo azioni per migliorare la qualità dei servizi amministrativi.

BACKGROUND: Videomodeling is an effective technological tool for intervention and rehabilitation of children with autism spectrum disorders in different contexts. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this paper is to verify whether a videomodeling intervention is effective for the acquisition of social and emotional behaviour and skills of children with ASD using tablet PC. METHODS: One 6-year-old child with ASD, who does not use verbal communication, was involved in a multiple baseline across behaviours design: the independent variable was the videomodeling intervention, instead the dependent variable was the participant behaviour. Intervention was preceded by a pre-session of Functional Communication training. An intersubject analysis was used to evaluate participant percentage of response through the sessions. RESULTS: The participant showed a marked improvement in his emotional skills. The intersubjective analysis carried out shows the sharp increase in response in many target behaviours from the baseline to the intervention phase. A limitation of the study was the lack of time: there were only two inversion sessions, no follow-up evaluation, no generalization and no double-blind study. CONCLUSIONS: It would be interesting for future research to extend it to everyday life scenarios, to enhance generalization in other contexts, involving a larger number of people with ASD.

International audience; The Baking Tray Task is an ecological task developed for the assessment of unilateral neglect that can also be used for research on neurotypical participants. In this task, participants are asked to place 16 objects inside a board as evenly as possible. In the case of impaired spatial exploration, consequent to right attentional networks damage, asymmetrical object disposition is observed as more objects are placed on the ipsilesional side (typically the right side). The E-BTT is a technology-enhanced version of the Baking Tray Task, implemented with a software platform, E-TAN, which detects the objects and automatically computes their spatial coordinates. This allows a complement to the traditional scoring methods with new measures to extract richer information from the data. In this study, we focus on neurotypical participants to explore if some new indexes, derived from the literature review on similar tasks, can be applied to BTT and E-BTT for research aims. A principal component analysis (PCA) was then performed to verify if these new indexes reflect some common dimensions. Results indicate the emergence of two principal dimensions: spatiality, which summarizes both laterality and verticality, and quality, which regards the explored space and (dis)organization in placing the items.

Education digital storytelling (EDS) refers to digital storytelling in education. EDS is often presented as a technology-enhanced learning approach with powerful educational benefits. The use of EDS as a tool to support students to consider and pursue a meaningful life based on their interests, talents, and aspirations is spreading. Due to its nature, EDS could be an optimal tool to create and share digital stories to stimulate career plans. This paper deals with the educational uses of digital storytelling and presents an overview of how EDS can be used to support career guidance. It concludes with a brief description of the NEFELE Erasmus+ project that will implement tangible user interfaces (TUIs) in the classrooms to promote the EDS as a tool for career intervention.

BackgroundThe measures taken to contain the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, such as the lockdown in Italy, do impact psychological health; yet, less is known about their effect on cognitive functioning. The transactional theory of stress predicts reciprocal influences between perceived stress and cognitive performance. However, the effects of a period of stress due to social isolation on spatial cognition and exploration have been little examined. The aim of the present study was to investigate the possible effects and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on spatial cognition tasks, particularly those concerning spatial exploration, and the physiological leftward bias known as pseudoneglect. A right-hemisphere asymmetry for spatial attention processes crucially contributes to pseudoneglect. Other evidence indicates a predominantly right-hemisphere activity in stressful situations. We also analyzed the effects of lockdown on coping strategies, which typically show an opposite pattern of hemispheric asymmetry, favoring the left hemisphere. If so, then pseudoneglect should increase during the lockdown and be negatively correlated with the efficacy of coping strategies.MethodsOne week before the start of the lockdown due to COVID-19 in Italy (T1), we had collected data from a battery of behavioral tests including tasks of peri-personal spatial cognition. During the quarantine period, from late April to early May 2020 (T2), we repeated the testing sessions with a subgroup of the same participants (47 right-handed students, mean age = 20, SD = 1.33). At both testing sessions, participants performed digitized neuropsychological tests, including a Cancellation task, Radial Arm Maze task, and Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices. Participants also completed a newly developed COVID-19 Student Stress Scale, based on transactional models of stress, and the Coping Orientation to Problems Experienced—New Italian Version (COPE-NIV) to assess coping orientation.ResultsThe tendency to start cancelation from a left-sided item, to explore first a left-sided arm of the maze, and to choose erroneous response items on the left side of the page on Raven’s matrices increased from T1 to T2. The degree of pseudoneglect increment positively correlated with perceived stress and negatively correlated with Positive Attitude and Problem-Solving COPE-NIV subscales.ConclusionLockdown-related stress may have contributed to increase leftward bias during quarantine through a greater activation of the right hemisphere. On the other hand, pseudoneglect was decreased for better coping participants, perhaps as a consequence of a more balanced hemispheric activity in these individuals.

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder is a complex neurodevelopmental disorder. The prevalence ranges between 3% - 5% among school-aged children worldwide. ADHD symptoms are related to poor learning outcomes, low executive functioning, parental stress and conflicting social relationships. Thanks to the diffusion of mobile technologies, specific software for ADHD has been developed: they offer e-Health platforms functional to the management of children's behavior, to the enhancement of cognitive processes and executive functions. Software can record more accurate, direct and reliable data: in this way it is also possible to create a network of caregivers, useful for planning and scheduling interventions. The present review aims to highlight scientific studies on Apps and software developed for children with ADHD and to examine their validity and impact in supporting the management of related learning difficulties. Apps have been mainly selected from Google Play and Apple Store, additional software have been selected from online magazines devoted to ADHD. Applications and software supported by scientific studies were then identified through scientific databases such as Google Scholar, PubMed, APA PsycNET. The review reveals: 1) a critical lack of scientific support for apps: only one application is accompanied by a single case study; and 2) a relatively low use of intelligent tutoring: few software sustain a self-paced learning activity. Finally, we conclude that the software developed so far for treating learning difficulties in individuals with ADHD are promising, however there's a lack of scientific aspects that we deem crucial when an application is intended to improve a specific cognitive process.

Visuospatial orientation of attention is the cognitive process that allows to orient and focus on stimuli presented in the visual field. A cognitive-attentional bias towards one side of the visual field, often the left side, derives from cerebral, evolutionary, and cultural factors. Such a leftward bias is often referred to as “pseudoneglect”. School-aged children gradually shift spatial attention to the left, with differences related to manual dominance or to possible neurodevelopmental disorders. The new Enhanced-Baking Tray Task (E-BTT) is an ecological task that enriches the spatial exploration evaluation procedure by adding a digital/hardware platform to automate the data collection. For the first time we administered the E-BTT to school-aged children with the aim to explore children's initial orientation of spatial attention and to compare their performances to those of a sample of young adults who showed a leftward preference. Results showed that children, as adults, shifted their attention leftward in the E-BTT task, however not prominently as adults. Our results show that performances on E-BTT support what has been reported in the literature on leftward spatial bias shown in other tasks: that it emerges during development in relation to biological, cultural and biomechanical factors.

The explicit goal that the SToP App was to achieve the creation of positive habits which can help prevent and fight the obesity problem. Two main psychological processes are used in order to reach this goal: explicit learning and self-monitoring. In this study, it is described how the SToP App achieves these two objectives through a design and implementation consistent with the psychological processes involved in self-regulation processes. In this sense, the App designed within the SToP (Stop Obesity Platform) project represents an example of integration between technology and psychology.