1,721,114 research outputs found
Effects of the Brain Wave Modulation Technique Administered Online on Stress, Anxiety, Global Distress, and Affect During the First Wave of the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Randomized Clinical Trial
No full textThis study aims to evaluate the effects of an innovative mind-body practice named the brain wave modulation technique (BWM-T) on stress, anxiety, global distress, and affect. The technique was administered online through a web-based video conferencing platform. The intervention started on week four of the first quarantine in Italy (week commencing 30th March 2020), for a duration of 4 weeks and ended before lockdown measures were loosened. 310 people participated in the study, mean age 28.73 years old (SD = 9.16), 77.8% women. Of these, about half were randomly assigned to the experimental group and the other half served as controls. Participants completed online psychological tests before and after the intervention. 266 people (144 experimental, 122 controls) completed the post-intervention tests. Consistent with our hypothesis, the study’s findings indicate a reduction in the levels of stress, anxiety, global distress, and negative affect in the experimental group, compared to the control group. Moreover, the experimental group also showed higher levels of positive affect, compared to controls after the intervention. The present findings add to the current literature in suggesting that the BWM-T reduced stress not only when administered face-to face but also when administered online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, we also noted that the BWM-T has an effect on anxiety, global distress, and affect, which we had not investigated in previous studies
Commentary: From 'sense of number' to 'sense of magnitude' - The role of continuous magnitudes in numerical cognition
No full textColours + Numbers differs from colours of numbers: cognitive and visual illusions in grapheme-colour synaesthesia
No full textThis study investigates the bi-directionality of synaestesic experience by means of a flanked bisection paradigm in TT, a number-colour synaesthete. Previous studies have shown that bisection is shifted towards the larger digit flanker (e.g., Ranzini & Girelli, 2012). TT and controls performed line bisections with lines flanked by black digits (experiment 1), by TT’s photism colours (experiment 2), and by congruently (experiment 3), or incongruently coloured digits (experiment 4). While the results of the control group mainly replicated previous findings, only the colour-digit congruence elicited in TT the larger-digit bias. TT’s absence of effects in the other conditions was not due to reduced sensitivity to luminance effects (experiment 5), or to mathematical expertise (experiment 6). We suggest that grapheme-colour synaesthesia might be characterised by a rigid access to semantic representation when the inducer is task-irrelevant
A Place for Zero in the Brain
No full textIt has long been thought that the primary cognitive and neural systems responsible for processing numerosities are not predisposed to encode empty sets (i.e., numerosity zero). A new study challenges this view by demonstrating that zero is translated into an abstract quantity along the numerical continuum by the primate parietofrontal magnitude system
The role of number-space associations in preschoolers' numerical competence
No full textThe existence of an association between numbers and space is widely supported by cumulative data from behavioral, neuropsychological and neuroanatomical studies in adult subjects (de Hevia, Vallar and Girelli, 2006; 2008), but little is known about its ontogenetic origin. Recent evidence suggests that spatial-numeric association develops long before children begin formal reading-writing instruction (Opfer, Thompson and Furlong, 2010). The present study explores, in preschoolers, the presence of early directional indexes in processing of magnitude information and the association between these indexes and a mature numerical representation by means of a numerical estimation task (Siegler and Opfer, 2003). Results indicate that only a limited number of children expects magnitude increase (i.e., symbolic and non-symbolic) to occur from left to right and that this preference does not correlate with age. However, regardless of the directionality preferred (i.e., from left to right vs. from right to left), children who presented a stable number-space mapping performed more accurately a numerical estimation task
Gender differences in visuo-spatial processing: The importance of distinguishing between passive storage and active manipulation
No full textDevelopmental Coordination Disorder and Developmental Dyspraxia. Towards a shared knowledge and clinical practice? Disturbo di sviluppo della coordinazione motoria e disprassia evolutiva. È possibile una condivisione di conoscenze e pratiche cliniche?
No full textDespite increasing attention towards Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD), as reflected by the
publication of the International Clinical Practice Recommendations (Blank et al., 2012; 2019), the absence of prevalence
data in the Italian population well attests the extent to which this clinical condition is overlooked and misrecognised
in our country. Aim of this discussion is to call for a concerted effort in understanding the reasons for which
DCD is still unfamiliar to most of the clinicians facing with the assessment and the diagnosis of neurodevelopmental
disorders. By defining DCD and Developmental dyspraxia respectively, as well as by promoting general awareness on
the psychosocial consequences of DCD, the hope is to extend to the Italian community recognition, early identification,
and targeted support to individuals with developmental coordination disorders
The ratio effect in visual numerosity comparisons is preserved despite spatial frequency equalisation
No full textHow non-symbolic numerosity is visually extracted remains a matter of intense debate. Most evidence suggests that numerosity is directly extracted on individual objects following Weber's law, at least for a moderate numerical range. Alternative accounts propose that, whatever the range, numerosity is indirectly derived from summary texture-statistics of the raw image such as spatial frequency (SF). Here, to disentangle these accounts, we tested whether the well-known behavioural signature of numerosity encoding (ratio effect) is preserved despite the equalisation of the SF content. In Experiment 1, participants had to select the numerically larger of two briefly presented moderate-range numerical sets (i.e., 8–18 dots) carefully matched for SF; the ratio between numerosities was manipulated by levels of increasing difficulty (e.g., 0.66, 0.75, 0.8). In Experiment 2, participants performed the same task, but they were presented with both the original and SF equalised stimuli. In both experiments, the results clearly showed a ratio-dependence of the performance: numerosity discrimination became harder and slower as the ratio between numerosities increased. Moreover, this effect was found to be independent of the stimulus type, although the overall performance was better with the original rather than the SF equalised stimuli (Experiment 2). Taken together, these findings indicate that the power spectrum per se cannot explain the main behavioural signature of Weber-like encoding of numerosities (the ratio effect), at least over the tested numerical range, partially challenging alternative indirect accounts of numerosity processing
Spatial-numerical consistency impacts on preschoolers' numerical representation: Children can count on both peripersonal and personal space
No full textAlthough the existence of an association between numbers and space has been largely documented in educated adults, the origin of this association still remains debated. Recent evidence suggests that associations between numbers and space might originate during the preschool years from the repeated action of counting in peripersonal space. However, it is also possible that preschoolers may additionally acquire directional preferences by counting on their own body, specifically on their fingers. To address this hypothesis, the present study explores the presence of early directional indexes in processing numerical information in both peripersonal and personal space in a sample of 90 preschoolers. We identified children who consistently exhibited a counting directional bias and generalized it to their processing of numbers in space. Moreover, given the tight connection between counting routine and numerical knowledge, we investigated the relation between these indexes and numerical achievement, evaluated by means of various tasks. Results indicate that distinct spatial-numerical associations, in both peripersonal and personal space, coexist from an early age and can be used flexibly. However, regardless of its directionality, the presence of a consistent spatial-numerical association appears to be related to numerical comprehension
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