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Social dimensions of pain. Comment on "Facing the experience of pain: a neuropsychological perspective" by Fabbro and Crescentini.
No full textIn this issue, Fabbro and Crescentini [1] provide an integrative review of neuroscientific, psychological, cultural and philosophical aspects of pain experience and discuss some critical examples of its regulation. Here we focus on the two main social phenomena that are addressed in the review, namely the ‘pain of separation’ and ‘empathy for pain’ and further support the idea that these phenomena are intrinsically linked to physical pain, which may provide a ‘proximal’ physiological base to further understand them. In addition, we discuss the evolutionary ‘ultimate’ bases of such phenomena and suggest that they are linked to the evolution of parental care in social animals and as such support the development of social bonds. We conclude by considering the effect that positive social relationships and empathy have on the experience of pain
Left hand dominance affects supra-second time processing
No full textPrevious studies exploring specific brain functions of left- and right-handed subjects have
shown variances in spatial and motor abilities that might be explained according to consistent structural and functional differences. Given the role of both spatial and motor
information in the processing of temporal intervals, we designed a study aimed at investigating timing abilities in left-handed subjects. To this purpose both left- and right-handed
subjects were asked to perform a time reproduction of sub-second vs. supra-second time
intervals with their left and right hand
Timing flickers across sensory modalities
No full textIn tasks requiring a comparison of the duration of a reference and a test visual cue, the spatial position of test cue is likely to be implicitly coded, providing a form of a congruency effect or introducing a response bias according to the environmental scale or its vectorial reference. The precise mechanism generating these perceptual shifts in subjective duration is not understood, although several studies suggest that spatial attentional factors may play a critical role. Here we use a duration comparison task within and across sensory modalities to examine if temporal performance is also modulated when people are exposed to spatial distractors involving different sensory modalities. Different groups of healthy participants performed duration comparison tasks in separate sessions: a time comparison task of visual stimuli during exposure to spatially presented auditory distractors; and a time comparison task of auditory stimuli during exposure to spatially presented visual distractors. We found the duration of visual stimuli biased depending on the spatial position of auditory distractors. Observers underestimated the duration of stimuli presented in the left spatial field, while there was an overestimation trend in estimating the duration of stimuli presented in the right spatial field. In contrast, timing of auditory stimuli was unaffected by exposure to visual distractors. These results support the existence of multisensory interactions between space and time showing that, in cross-modal paradigms, the presence of auditory distractors can modify visuo-temporal perception but not vice versa. This asymmetry is discussed in terms of sensory-perceptual differences between the two systems
Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in Anxiety Disorders
No full textTranscranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a well-established noninvasive brain stimulation tool that allows to stimulate the cerebral cortex. In the current chapter, we examined all available research using this neurostimulation technique for the treatment of specific phobias, social anxiety disorder, panic disorder, agoraphobia, and generalized anxiety disorder. Overall, our work provides preliminary evidence that both excitatory stimulation of the left prefrontal cortex and inhibitory stimulation of the right prefrontal cortex can reduce symptom severity in anxiety disorders, although the low number of high-quality investigations in this field does not allow to make definite conclusions
Optokinetic stimulation affects temporal estimation in healthy humans.
No full textThe representation of time and space are closely linked in the cognitive system. Optokinetic stimulation modulates spatial attention in healthy subjects and patients with spatial neglect. In order to evaluate whether optokinetic stimulation could influence time perception, a group of healthy subjects performed "time-comparison" tasks of sub- and supra-second intervals before and after leftward or rightward optokinetic stimulation. Subjective time perception was biased by the direction of optokinetic stimulation. Rightward optokinetic stimulation induced an overestimation of time perception compared with baseline and leftward optokinetic stimulation. These results indicate a directional bias in time perception induced by manipulation of spatial attention and could argue for a mental linear representation of time intervals
Temporal abnormalities in children with developmental dyscalculia
No full textRecent imaging studies have associated Developmental dyscalculia (DD) to structural and functional alterations corresponding Parietal and the Prefrontal cortex (PFC). Since these areas were shown also to be involved in timing abilities, we hypothesized that time processing is abnormal in DD. We compared time processing abilities between 10 children with pure DD (8 years old) and 11 age-matched healthy children. Results show that the DD group underestimated duration of a sub-second scale when asked to perform a time comparison task. The timing abnormality observed in our DD participants is consistent with evidence of a shared fronto-parietal neural network for representing time and quantity
Perceiving numbers alters time perception
No full textThe representation of time, space and numbers are strictly linked in the primate’s cognitive system. Here
we show that merely looking at number symbols biases a temporal judgment on their duration depending
upon the number’s magnitude. In a first experiment, a group of healthy subjects was submitted to a time
estimation task, requiring to judge whether the duration of a test stimulus was longer or shorter than
that of a previous reference fixed stimulus (digit 5; duration 300 ms). Test stimuli were the digits 1, 5
and 9 ranging between 250 and 350 ms. The main results showed that temporal perception was biased
according to the magnitude expressed by the digit: low digits (i.e. 1) leading to underestimation and high
digits (i.e. 9) an overestimation of perceived duration. Control experiments showed that this result was
consistent whatever digits were tested but not when letters of the alphabet were used. These findings
argue for a functional interaction between time and numbers in the cognitive syste
Interazione tra spazio e tempo in compiti linguistici: implicazioni per una rappresentazione lineare del tempo
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