1,721,036 research outputs found
Oltre il linguaggio: meccanismi ricorsivi nella struttura delle azioni intenzionali
No full textIn un articolo seminale Hauser, Chomsky e Fitch (2002) ipotizzano che la ricorsività sia l’unico meccanismo della facoltà del linguaggio ad essere specifico del linguaggio e dell’architettura cognitiva umana. Mentre il dibattito su tale ipotesi si è per lo più concentrato sul significato del concetto di “ricorsività” (riferimenti) e sulla sua natura specificamente umana (Abe e Watanabe, 2011; cf. Bloomfield et al., 2011) e sintattica (Schreuder et al., 2009; Koschmann, 2010; Bara, 2010) il nostro lavoro si focalizza sull’ipotesi che la ricorsività sia un meccanismo specificamente linguistico. Estendendo l’analisi dell’azione intenzionale proposta da John R. Searle (1983) noi argomentiamo che esistono strutture ricorsive nel dominio dell’intenzionalità motoria (cf. Pastra e Aloimonos, 2012). Discutiamo quindi alcune evidenze empiriche a sostegno dell’ipotesi che tale ricorsività motoria sia indipendente dal linguaggio e suggeriamo alcune ipotesi esplicative: 1) la ricorsività linguistica è incorporata (embodied) nella ricorsività motoria (Lieberman, 2010; Clerget et al. 2013); 2) ricorsività linguistica e motoria sono meccanismi distinti e indipendenti l’uno dall’altro (Mengotti et al., 2013). Proponiamo infine alcune riflessioni sullo statuto epistemologico dell’ipotesi avanzata da Hauser, Chomsky e Fitch in quanto ipotesi empiricamente falsificabile e sulla possibilità di testare empiricamente la ricorsività in differenti domini cognitivi (Traxler et al, 2012; Friederici et al., 2011)
The comprehension of social situations in a small group of patients with frontotemporal dementia and Alzheimer's disease
No full textBackground: 'Social understanding' refers to the everyday-life complex ability of interpreting social situations properly. It has been recently proposed that the severe social and behavioural problems that often characterize frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients may at least partially be the result of an impairment in social understanding. The present study was thus designed to investigate the possible presence of defective social understanding ability in a small group encompassing both FTD and AD patients.
Material and methods: Small groups of dementia patients (n = 12) and matched healthy controls (n = 15) underwent standard clinical, neurological and neuropsychological assessments. Then, the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test and a validated story completion task encompassing both social and non-social stereotyped situations was administered to all of the participants.
Results: Dementia patients' performances on both the tasks proposed were worse than healthy controls' performances. Interestingly, both the non-social and the social parts of the story completion task were significantly impaired, but with the social part being more compromised.
Conclusions: These preliminary findings suggest the presence of patients' significant difficulties in attributing mental states to others appropriately and interpreting properly stories that explicitly referred to social situations. Our results underline the needs for further research to gain a deeper understanding on the possible link between patients' behavioural problems and their social understanding impairment
Is Recursion Language-Specific? Evidence of Recursive Mechanisms in the Structure of Intentional Action
Full text linkIn their 2002 seminal paper Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch hypothesize that recursion is the only human-specific and language-specific mechanism of the faculty of language.
While debate focused primarily on the meaning of recursion in the hypothesis and on the human-specific and syntax-specific character of recursion, the present work focuses on the claim that recursion is language-specific. We argue that there are recursive structures
in the domain of motor intentionality by way of extending John R. Searle’s analysis of intentional action. We then discuss evidence from cognitive science and neuroscience supporting the claim that motor-intentional recursion is language-independent and suggest some explanatory hypotheses: (1) linguistic recursion is embodied in sensory-motor
processing; (2) linguistic and motor-intentional recursions are distinct and mutually independent mechanisms. Finally, we propose some reflections about the epistemic status of HCF as presenting an empirically falsifiable hypothesis, and on the possibility of testing recursion in different cognitive domains
Theory of Mind ability in the behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia: An analysis of the neural, cognitive, and social levels.
No full textThe paper reviews convergent evidence on the ability to attribute mental states to one???s self and to others (i.e., Theory of Mind, ToM) in patients affected by the behavioural variant of frontotemporal dementia (bv-FTD). This disease represents a particular challenge for researchers and clinicians, due to its insidious onset and ambiguous clinical features, which frequently render difficult a precise and timely diagnosis. The paper proposes a way to shed new light on the hypothesis that the neuropsychiatric profile of individuals with bv-FTD can be at least partially explained by a deficit in ToM ability. We examined both neuroimaging data on the neural correlates of ToM ability in healthy participants and studies investigating the progressive cerebral atrophy in patients with bv-FTD. Our findings suggest a link between the progressive degeneration of the anterior regions of medial frontal structures characterising the early stages of the bv-FTD and the ToM deficit these patients show. They also suggest the importance of using ToM tests during the diagnostic process of bv-FTD
Loneliness: Association with individual differences in socioemotional skills
Full text linkLoneliness is defined as the discrepancy between the desired and actual quality and quantity of social relationships a person maintains. Several factors, such as socioemotional skills (emotion recognition, empathy, and emotion regulation), may play a role in the experience of loneliness. Socioemotional skills represent a complex set of abilities that enable individuals to understand, share, and regulate their own feelings and those of others. The present study aimed to investigate whether lonely individuals had greater difficulties in socioemotional skills compared to non-lonely individuals.A total of 298 participants (age range: 18-68) were recruited for this study and asked to complete a series of measures assessing loneliness, facial emotion recognition, empathy, and difficulties in emotion regulation.Results of comparisons between lonely and non-lonely participants (De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale cut-off score >= 3) revealed that the former had higher scores on facial expression recognition of fear, lower levels of empathy, and greater difficulties in emotion regulation compared to non-lonely individuals.Taken together the present findings indicate that lonely individuals may have greater difficulties with socioemotional skills than non-lonely individuals. Therefore, appropriate assessment of these abilities should be conducted when dealing with people who report high levels of perceived social isolation
La Teoria della Mente nei disturbi neurodegenerativi: La comprensione del comportamento sociale altrui in persone con Malattia del Motoneurone.
No full text
Theory of mind performance predicts tdcs-mediated effects on the medial prefrontal cortex: A pilot study to investigate the role of sex and age
Full text linkTranscranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) has become an increasingly promising tool for understanding the relationship between brain and behavior. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the magnitude of sex-and age-related tDCS effects previously found in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) during a Theory of Mind (ToM) task correlates with social cognition performance; in particular, we explored whether different patterns of activity would be detected in high-and low-performing participants. For this, young and elderly, male and female participants were categorized as a low-or high-performer according to their score on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes task. Furthermore, we explored whether sex-and age-related effects associated with active tDCS on the mPFC were related to cognitive functioning. We observed the following results: (i) elderly participants experience a significant decline in ToM performance compared to young participants; (ii) low-performing elderly females report slowing of reaction time when anodal tDCS is applied over the mPFC during a ToM task; and (iii) low-performing elderly females are characterized by lower scores in executive control functions, verbal fluency and verbal short-term memory. The relationship between tDCS results and cognitive functioning is discussed in light of the neuroscientific literature on sex-and age-related differences
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