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Introduzione I benefici che l’attività motoria opera sia nell’età adulta che durante l’infanzia sono molteplici. Tra questi, si annoverano i miglioramenti delle abilità percettive, attentive e mnestiche. Lo scopo del presente lavoro è verificare se le capacità mnestiche ed attentive possano essere incrementate dalla messa in opera di un’offerta formativa specifica. Metodo Due gruppi di bambini, di età compresa tra i sei e i dieci anni sono stati avviati al gioco della pallavolo. Un gruppo è stato allenato con un metodo che carica di significati i movimenti corporei dell’allenatore e dei compagni al fine di associare tali movimenti allo svolgimento di future indicazioni da eseguire (Pittera, Pedata e Ligas, 2008). L’altro gruppo ha svolto esercizi propedeutici alla pallavolo attraverso la focalizzazione sull’apprendimento dei gesti tecnici. Risultati La differenza tra i dati raccolti all’inizio e alla fine del periodo di allenamento preso in esame evidenziarono un miglioramento della capacità di ricordare azioni motorie; nessun miglioramento apparve però per quanto ha riguardato il numero di posizioni spaziali o il numero di componenti verbali da ricordare. Sorprendentemente, poi, nessun miglioramento emerse nelle misure di attenzione sostenuta. Conclusioni I risultati suggeriscono come, focalizzando l’attenzione dei discenti sugli aspetti motori dell’esercizio, e facendo in modo che questi aumentino di significato al fine della successiva realizzazione di nuovi compiti, si possa aumentare una capacità basilare di ogni apprendimento sportivo, ovvero la capacità di ricordare nuove azioni. Background The benefits that physical activity operates express themselve both in aldulhood and in childhood. Among these, perceptual, attentional and mnemonic improvements are the most frequently reported. The purpose of the present study is to verify whether both the ability to memorize new item and to pay substained attention can increase via specific training. Method Two group of children- aged between six and ten years- were launched to the game of volleyball. One group was trained with a method that focuses the attention on the body movements coach and teammates exectuted aimed by the goal to associate the movements to instructions to be executed afterwards (Pittera, Tread and Ligas, 2008). The other group was trained via exercises that focused on developing technical volleyball abilities. Results The difference between the data collected at the beginning and at the end of the training period highligheted an improvement of the ability to remember meaningless motor actions; no improvement emerged, however, in the number of spatial positions or the number of verbal item to remember. Moreover, no improvement emerged in the measures of sustained attention. Conclusions The results suggest that, by bringing the attention of the learners on the motor aspects of the exercises, and making sure that the latter acquired an agumented meaning, e.g., by becoming indices for subsequent new tasks- for example- the number of actions that one can memorize increase.

Some studies on Social Cognition demonstrated that high level cognitive processes, such as empathy for pain, are influenced by racial bias. In this study we investigated whether this bias modulates the (lower) mechanism of attribution of intention too. We used a Simon-like paradigm, consisting of judging the colour of a circle at the centre of photographs of Caucasian and Black hands, from palm or back view, slightly rotated along their axes, implying a motor attitude/movement. Results were compatible with the hypothesis that palm views are interpreted as threatening by the observer. Moreover, women and men showed different reactions to black palm views (threatening stimuli): while the former showed a speeding up of reaction times, witnessing a defensive inherent response, men showed a slowing down of reaction times, suggesting a deeper analysis of stimuli (counterattack response).

International audience; In an editorial commentary accompanying a recent study on the prevalence of apraxia in dementia patients [1], Bak emphasizes two facts: 1) research in cognitive neuroscience is contributing to increase the awareness of a close relationship between cognitive and motor functions and, by extension, cognitive and motor disorders in clinical populations; 2) despite so, the examination of motor functions in patients with cognitive disorders is not part of the routine clinical evaluation. Apraxia is a disorder in executing voluntary motor programming, in the absence of deficits in primary motor or sensory processes, comprehension of task instructions, object recognition or frontal inertia. Bak identifies apraxia as the critical disorder to address in routine clinical evaluation of patients with cognitive symptoms, as "it is exactly at the intersection between both [movement and cognition]". In Bak's view, a major obstacle to the improvement of clinical practice in this direction, is the absolute lack of tests for apraxia, practical and fast to use as part of routine evaluation. The Edinburgh Motor Assessment, in preparation by Bak and colleagues, is thus introduced as the first tool to respond to this urge. We could not agree more with the importance of considering apraxia in the routine clinical evaluation of cognitive functions in neurological patients, including those with dementia. Apraxia is indeed a cognitive deficit, affecting the higher-order mechanisms that govern purposeful motor production. However, if poverty or absence of tools is the problem, then we might not have a problem. Researchers have long since recognized apraxia as a cognitive disorder (with consequences on motor production). Moreover, efforts have been made to offer handy, standardized tests of praxis functions (e.g., the test TULIA [2]), based on models of apraxia, whose anatomo-functional correlates have been extensively studied in brain- damaged patients and in healthy individuals, with neuroimaging research. A problem with most previous tests, evaluating gesture recognition, identification and production in great detail, is the administration time, usually so long as to advise their use in a post-screening phase (i.e., after the patient received a diagnosis of apraxia). Addressing this problem, Tessari et al. [3] have developed STIMA (short test for ideomotor apraxia), a standardized test for an accurate but quick diagnosis of apraxia. The test, also usable for bedside screening, requires the patient to imitate 36 gestures that form eight subscales. The test and each individual subscale are accompanied by tables to correct raw-scores for age and education, and convert raw-scores into equivalent scores (useful for clinicians to estimate deficit severity) and percentiles (more often used for diagnosis in research). Different subscales test for different praxic impairments. In particular, STIMA emphasizes the distinctions between: 1) imitation errors indicative of cortical damage (e.g., sequence errors or unrecognizable gestures) versus subcortical damage (e.g., postural or timing errors); 2) producing distal (fingers/hand) versus proximal (arm) components of gesture; 3) producing known gestures, which recruits semantic structures in the left temporo-parietal cortex, versus producing novel gestures, which relies on a bilateral cortical network, to transform the visual input (the seen gesture) in a motor act. The evaluation of novel gestures is also crucial to detect praxis deficits in patients who can properly use objects and tools in their domestic context. Evaluation of praxis solely based on execution or reports of daily activities may leave those cases unnoticed. STIMA has been used and proven sensitive to apraxic deficits in patients with stroke [4], as well as neurodegenerative pathologies [5]. Our short (and non-exhaustive) overview of available standardized tests of apraxia shows a scenario brighter than the total absence of suitable tools depicted by Bak, and does justice to the numerous research teams in cognitive neuropsychology and neuroscience, who have paid more attention than Bak fears, to the clinical scopes of their activity and the constraints of the clinical setting (i.e., time pressure). Since the Edinburgh Motor Assessment by Bak et al. comes after recent and less recent attempts to provide clinicians with a fast and accurate test of apraxia, one may ask: do we really need this new tool? Perhaps, the Edinburgh Motor Assessment introduces features that make it more suitable to dementia patients, than other tests; or it relates to a model of apraxia, not represented in the other tests. Presenting the Edinburgh Motor Assessment as the first step toward an apraxia test for clinical practice precludes the possibility to clarify those or other potentially important aspects of that test. Considering its relation to extant tools rather appears as a good method to provide clear indications about which tool one (e.g., a clinician) should select in which case. This may help reducing the noise in the exchange between researchers and clinical practitioners as well as within our research field. References1. Ahmed S, Baker I, Thompson S et al. Utility of testing for apraxia and associated features in dementia. J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry 2016; doi:10.1136/jnnp-2015-3129452. Vanbellingen T, Kersten B, Van Hemelrijk B et al. Comprehensive assessment of gesture production: a new test of upper limb apraxia (TULIA). Eur J Neurol 2010;17:59-66.3. Tessari A, Toraldo A, Lunardelli A, et al. STIMA: a short screening test for ideo-motor apraxia, selective for action meaning and bodily district. Neurol Sci 2015;36: 977-984.4. Mengotti P, Corradi-Dell'Acqua C, Negri GA, et al. Selective imitation impairments differentially interact with language processing. Brain 2013;136:2602-26185. Papeo L, Cecchetto C, Mazzon G et al. The processing of actions and action-words in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patients. Cortex 2015; 64:136-147.Conflict of Interest:None declared

According to the embodied perspective, cognitive processes are entwined with sensory-motor processes (Shapiro, 2011). The present study investigates the implications of such a perspective in the sport domain. We provided a group of athletes with sessions of embodied relaxation exercises designed to increase their body awareness, in addition to standard Taekwondo training while a control group of athletes received an extra period of standard training. Sport performance was assessed for the two groups by means of Taekwondo exams. Athletes performed better on the Taekwondo exam with the addition of embodied relaxation training and this effect was influenced by the number of sessions each athlete attended. The positive effect of embodied relaxation training on taekwondo performance suggests that embodied cognition may have an applied influence in the domain of sports.

Athletes are often required to anticipate others’ actions and to interact with moving objects whose motion has to be anticipatory represented in order to properly react. To this aim visual and motor experience become essential in developing such predictor abilities. We here investigated if volleyball players were able to process the intention to act transmitted by the posture of hands’ picture. In three experiments we used an attentional paradigm, a Simon-like task called Sidedness paradigm (Ottoboni, Tessari, Cubelli & Umiltà, 2005) and highlighted as professional volleyball players differ from non-players in the ability to encode specific spatial and bodily indexes and to direct attention according to them. Images of hands of potential adversaries incorporate meanings related to sport that makes volleyball athletes sensitive to directional spatial characteristics previously unobserved. What appears to be crucial in the generation of such effect is the ability to predict the direction of an action by single body postures and to anticipatorily prepare the motor behavior in order to oppose them.

Theories that account for the imitative mechanisms primarily consider the role of bodily representations and their involvement during storage of information. However, these theories neglect an evolutionary perspective. To bridge the gap, a group of primary school children were requested to imitate actions of different difficulty performed by 2 models, an adult and a child. Simple actions were imitated by children in a similar manner, regardless of whether the model was an adult or another child.; however, complex actions were imitated better when children copied the adult model. Results suggest a functional role of the model: when the cognitive load increases, it becomes more adaptive to rely on a more reliable model, e.g. the adult.

Nel presente studio sono stati testati tre diversi gruppi di atleti (Pallavolisti di Serie A1, pallavolisti under 16, calciatori under 16) al fine di indagare le loro capacita' di predire il risultato di un'azione di palleggio. Le azioni di palleggio sono state videoriprese durante partite reali di pallavolo di Serie A e somministrate a computer attraverso la tecnica di occlusione temporale. La capacita' predittiva e' risultata essere in funzione dello sport praticato, con migliori risultati da parte degli atleti piu' evoluti. Contrariamente a quanto atteso, non e', pero', emerso un vantaggio per gli atleti che erano usi compiere le stesse azioni mostrate in video (i.e., i palleggiatori). I risultati sono stati discussi alla luce delle informazioni motorie condivise tra chi osserva e chi compie l'azione. English abstract Title: The sport action prediction emerges in function of sport expertise: a pilot study with volleyball players and footballers. In the present study we tested three different groups of athletes (volleyball Serie A1, under-16 volleyball players, soccer players under 16) to investigate their ability to predict the results of volleyball settings performed by a professional setter. The settings were presented in videos recorded during real games played by team of the Major Italian League. They were administered using the technique of temporal occlusion to athletes sat in front of a computer screen. The ability to predict the result of the setting actions emerged to be in function of the practiced sport with expert athletes responding better. Contrary to what expected we did not find higher performance for those athletes who share the more the same motor repertoire with the observed setter. The results are discussed in light of amount of motor information shared between observer and observed.

Due to the arousal increment, physical exercise has been shown to improve cognitive abilities such as frontal and long-term memory processes. In the present work we aim at understanding whether different types of physical exercise -i.e. team-games, mainly relying on visuo-spatial abilities, and circuits, mainly relying on motor patterns- might specifically modulate different short-term-memory (STM) subsystems. We compared the performances on verbal, visuo-spatial, and motor STM spans in 3 groups of 10-11-years-old children: the control group was tested before and after an Italian class, the second group before and after 40-minutes on a circuit exercise and the third group before and after 40-minutes of team-game. Besides a general incremented performance, a double dissociation emerged: while the circuit improved the motor span, the team-game did the same for the visuo-spatial span However, no effect emerged in the control group. The finding might cast useful insight about how structuring specific training activities for children with learning deficits because it claims the specific positive effects of sport on different cognitive abilities.

Introduzione Studi recenti hanno indagato il ruolo dell'esercizio fisico intenso sulle capacità cognitive di adulti e bambini. È stato dimostrato che l’elevato grado di attivazione che ne consegue ha un effetto positivo sia sulle funzioni frontali che sulla memoria a lungo termine. Nel presente studio abbiamo quindi cercato di capire se e come l’esercizio fisico abbia un effetto anche sulla memoria a breve termine (MBT) ed in particolare se due differenti tipologie di esercizio, il gioco di squadra ed il circuito, possano avere un ruolo specifico su sottosistemi di MBT diversi. Il gioco di squadra è stato scelto perché si riteneva si basasse principalmente sulle abilità visuo-spaziali mentre il circuito sulle abilità motorie. Metodo 3 gruppi di bambini, tra i 10 e gli 11 anni, sono stati testati in compiti di span di MBT verbale, visuo-spaziale e motorio prima e dopo: a) una lezione di Italiano (gruppo di controllo); b) 40 minuti di circuito; c) 40 minuti di gioco di squadra,. Risultati I risultati non hanno mostrato alcun incremento nella prestazione dopo la lezione di italiano. Tuttavia, si è trovata una doppia dissociazione con lo span motorio che aumentava dopo il circuito (one-tailed t(20)=2,91, p

The dual-route models of action imitation predict that, normally, known actions are imitated by using a semantic route - i.e. by activating a representation of the action from memory - whereas unknown, new actions are reproduced by using a direct route - i.e. by performing a visuo-motor transformation of the input into an output. Here we aimed at establishing the nature of the dominant process used by healthy adult individuals in imitation. Participants performed an imitation task with both predictable switches and pseudorandom, unpredictable switches The predictable switches are less cognitively demanding, and allow the voluntary selection of the most suitable process for performing the task; whereas the unpredictable switches are more demanding and lead to a more intense use of strategies. We observed significant switch costs only in the predictable switch condition, when subjects had to rely on working memory to keep track of the underlying sequence, but not in the pseudorandom sequences, where participants could select the direct route to decrease the cognitive effort. These findings suggest that the semantic route is the dominant, more automatic and less-demanding process for action imitation. The strategic selection of route in action imitation and in monitoring behaviour seems to be an adaptive acquisition.

The aim of the present paper is to provide further evidence for an effect related to early hand recognition processing, i.e. the sidedness effect (Ottoboni, Tessari, Cubelli & Umiltà, 2005). Little is known about the sidedness effect as it has only been reported in relation to a single set of stimuli and responses. For this reason, we decided to investigate the role of the posture of the hand stimulus in Experiment 1 by presenting pictures of hands rotated upside-down, and, in Experiment 2, the role of response hand posture by moving the response plane behind the participants’ back. The results indicate that the sidedness effect manifests itself in an inverted form when the stimuli, but not the response plane, are rotated. We conclude that ultimately the effect must be based on a structural representation of the body and not on the body schema because of its dependence on stimulus posture but not on response posture.

Imitation is a very important ability that allows an agent to acquire efficiently a wide range of movements by observing a demonstrator performing them. The tendency to imitate has long been noted in normal and abnormal human behaviour, and in the last decade there has also been an increase in the number studies of imitation in children, monkeys and great apes. In this chapter we will review some main issues related to imitation, including whether imitation is innate or is the outcome of a learning process, whether it is a uniquely human or is shared with other primates, as well as the most prominent accounts that have been put forward to explain how it works. We will then summarize the results from different sets of experiments (Tessari and Rumiati 2004; Rumiati et al. 2005; Tessari et al. 2006; Tessari et al. in press) which we have interpreted within a dual-route model. Normally, individuals use the sublexical, direct route to imitate novel, meaningless (ML) gestures and the lexical-semantic, indirect route (and possibly the sublexical route) to reproduce meaningful (MF) actions that are already in one’s repertoire. We will show how a reduction in cognitive resources, caused either by experimental manipulations with healthy participants (Tessari and Rumiati 2004) or by brain damage (Tessari et al. in press), may end up affecting the route selection in imitation. In particular, when MF and ML actions are presented intermingled, participants selected the direct route because it is suitable for imitating both stimulus types (Tessari and Rumiati 2004). Moreover, in the new Experiments 1-2 we also demonstrated that the sublexical route is selected even when either ML (Experiment 1) or both ML and MF actions (Experiment 2) were presented for more time. Finally we will illustrate the cerebral correlates of imitation of different action types, derived from the lesion analysis of patients with a selective stimulus specific apraxia (Tessari et al. in press), and from a PET study with healthy participants performing an imitation task (Rumiati et al. 2005). Based on our results, we propose that imitation of MF and ML actions is supported by common as well by dedicated brain regions.

In the context of a dual route model for action imitation, we investigated the strategic selection of imitation routes in meaningful and meaningless actions. Four experiments were carried out: predictable switches between meaningful and meaningless actions and pseudorandom unpredictable switches between those actions. Two experiments used cues, whereas two did not contain cues. A significant switch cost emerged only in the predictable switch condition without cues, that is when subjects had to observe the action to decide which route to choose and/or base their selection of routes on working memory; in the remaining experiments we found no costs. This suggests that when subjects were presented with cued switches the selection of the appropriate route can be prepared. With regard to pseudorandom, uncued sequences, subjects may decide to rely only on the direct route to decrease cognitive effort. These results confirm that we strategically select the most suitable route for action imitation.

We investigated the activation of action information elicited by inanimate and animate entities. We hypothesized a stronger activation of action information with inanimate objects, and a stronger activation of motion information with animate entities. Target words (animate and inanimate object concepts) were preceded by 4 primes: a moving downward arm with hand in grasping position ('action and motion'), or with hand closed as fist ('motion only'), a static arm with hand in grasping position ('action only'), and a catch trial. Participants decided whether the target could move by itself or not. Results showed slower RTs for inanimate objects in the 'action and motion' condition relative to the inanimate in 'motion only' condition and both inanimate and animate entities in 'action only' conditions. An interference between the action afforded by inanimate entities and that displayed in the prime was found, while no such an effect was registered for animate entities.

In this study we investigated whether implied motion in static photograph of hands may convey information about intended actions and whether this interacts with their automatic coding in generating the Sidedness effect (Ottoboni et al., 2005). A modified Simon task was used showing a hand with a colored circle in the centre. In the first experiment we replicated the Sidedness effect. In the second experiment, hands were rotated along their vertical axes in order to give the sense of motion and to test whether the direction of the implied action might interact with the sidedness effect. Both non-athletes and volleyball players were tested. Results showed a normal Sidedness effect for the back views in both groups. A Sidedness effect emerged in non athletes, but directionality contrasted the sidedness effect only in the volleyball players for the back views. Thus, action directionality seems to be coded only under special expertise requirement.

In this work we investigate whether the dynamic information that can be extracted by static hands can interact with the sidedness effect previously described in (Ottoboni, Tessari, Cubelli, & Umiltà, 2005). In two experiments, we tested the sidedness effect for hands showed in both a frontal view and rotated along their vertical axes in order to investigate any possible effect due to attribution of action intentionality. Results only showed a classical sidedness effect suggesting that hands are automatically linked to a mental body image and this is the only spatial information they seem to convey.