More than smell - COVID-19 is associated with severe impairment of smell, taste, and chemesthesis

Recent anecdotal and scientific reports have provided evidence of a link between COVID-19 and chemosensory impairments, such as anosmia. However, these reports have downplayed or failed to distinguish potential effects on taste, ignored chemesthesis, and generally lacked quantitative measurements. Here, we report the development, implementation, and initial results of a multilingual, international questionnaire to assess self-reported quantity and quality of perception in 3 distinct chemosensory modalities (smell, taste, and chemesthesis) before and during COVID-19. In the first 11 days after questionnaire launch, 4039 participants (2913 women, 1118 men, and 8 others, aged 19-79) reported a COVID-19 diagnosis either via laboratory tests or clinical assessment. Importantly, smell, taste, and chemesthetic function were each significantly reduced compared to their status before the disease. Difference scores (maximum possible change ±100) revealed a mean reduction of smell (-79.7 ± 28.7, mean ± standard deviation), taste (-69.0 ± 32.6), and chemesthetic (-37.3 ± 36.2) function during COVID-19. Qualitative changes in olfactory ability (parosmia and phantosmia) were relatively rare and correlated with smell loss. Importantly, perceived nasal obstruction did not account for smell loss. Furthermore, chemosensory impairments were similar between participants in the laboratory test and clinical assessment groups. These results show that COVID-19-associated chemosensory impairment is not limited to smell but also affects taste and chemesthesis. The multimodal impact of COVID-19 and the lack of perceived nasal obstruction suggest that severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus strain 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection may disrupt sensory-neural mechanisms. © 2020 The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved

Neuroscienze in società: come lo studio del cervello sociale ci aiuta a capire chi siamo

In spite of the intrinsically social nature of human beings, research in Cognitive Neuroscience has mainly focussed on the individual. Only recently have studies started to explore the neurobiological basis of our social abilities and their evolution and thus gave birth to Social Neuroscience (SN), a new research field at the intersection of the Social sciences and Neurosciences. SN mostly inquires how evolutionary pressure has favoured the emergence of the specialized social brain networks that allowed humans to build up complex societies. Related to SN is the field of cultural neuroscience (CN) a discipline aimed at understanding how Society and Culture shape our minds and brains. Scepticism about the possibility of studying the above complex behaviours using the reductionist and oversimplifying methods of Neuroscience has been expressed by traditional scholars of brain and mind. However, we believe that the increasing sensitivity of neuroscience techniques and theoretical approaches will ultimately allow us to understand the neuroplastic processes that allow social interactions to shape of our brains. It has been demonstrated, for example that even very basic behaviours like reflexive social attention, are influenced by higher-order variables such as social status and political affiliation. This shows how our tendency to form groups on the basis of dispositions, preferences and ideologies can affect fundamental cognitive processes. We believe that neural ad behavioural implicit markers of social preferences and bias complement and extend the knowledge deriving from surveys based on explicit responses. Thus, the SN and CN new approach, promises to be very important for both neuroscience and social psychology

Linguistic tools for embodied mind

In this paper, we outline the embodied perspective of language comprehension indicating some of its limitations. We claim that the notions of language as tool-chest (Wittgenstein, 1953), and the notion of words as tools (Clark, 2006a, 2006b), might be useful to overcome a view focused only on referential aspects of language. Words, in quality of tools, can: a. facilitate communication among speakers; b. influence categorization; c. have a different impact on concrete and abstract words; d. increase our memory; e. allow us to construct an inner speech. Finally, we discuss how thinking about language as tool can help inform future research on thought, language, and body

Lingue, corpo e pensiero.

Qual \ue8 il rapporto tra le lingue, il linguaggio e il pensiero? Si pu\uf2 parlare del linguaggio in astratto, senza considerare le differenze tra le lingue che parliamo? Si pu\uf2 parlare del pensiero in generale, senza parlare della diversit\ue0 dei corpi e dei contesti in cui viviamo? In che modo il tipo di corpo che possediamo influenza il nostro modo di pensare, di conoscere, di parlare? Il nostro corpo \ue8 un\u2019entit\ue0 soltanto biologica o anche sociale? In che misura le lingue che parliamo influenzano il nostro modo di pensare? La tesi di questo libro \ue8 allo stesso tempo semplice e radicale: non si possono studiare la mente e il linguaggio umani se non li si radica nell\u2019esperienza corporea. Questo significa, per\uf2, che poich\ue9 questa esperienza non si d\ue0 se non in una situazione, in una cultura, entro una specifica forma di vita, non esiste qualcosa come la cognizione umana, o il linguaggio umano. Di qui l\u2019enfasi che il libro pone, ed \ue8 la sua caratteristica pi\uf9 originale, sulla differenza tra linguaggio e lingue: ecco che il linguaggio non pu\uf2 essere studiato se non come lingua, come prodotto di un\u2019esperienza storicamente, culturalmente situata. Nell\u2019accostarsi a questi temi, il libro adotta una prospettiva multidisciplinare che attraversa la filosofia, la psicologia, le neuroscienze e la robotica. L\u2019obiettivo \ue8 quello di fornire un quadro d\u2019insieme che tenga conto del complesso rapporto tra lingue, corpo e pensiero, e di proporre non tanto risposte quanto interrogativi rilevanti sia per la ricerca sperimentale che per la riflessione filosofica

Varieties of abstract concepts and their multiple dimensions

The issue of how abstract concepts are represented is widely debated. However, evidence is controversial, also because different criteria were used to select abstract concepts - for example, imageability and abstractness were equated. In addition, for many years abstract concepts have been considered as a unitary whole. Our work aims to address these two limitations. We asked participants to evaluate 425 abstract concepts on 15 dimensions: abstractness, concreteness, imageability, context availability, Body-Object-Interaction, Modality of Acquisition, Age of Acquisition, Perceptual modality strength, Metacognition, Social metacognition, Interoception, Emotionality, Social valence, Hand and Mouth activation. Results showed that conceiving concepts only in terms of concreteness/abstractness is too simplified. More abstract concepts are typically acquired later and through the linguistic modality and are characterized by high scores in social metacognition (feeling that others can help us in understanding word meaning), while concrete concepts obtain high scores in Body-Object-Interaction, imageability, and context availability. A cluster analysis indicated four kinds of abstract concepts: philosophical-spiritual (e.g., value), self-sociality (e.g., politeness), emotive/inner states (e.g., anger), and physical, spatio-temporal, and quantitative concepts (e.g., reflex). Overall, results support multiple representation views indicating that sensorimotor, inner, linguistic, and social experience have different weights in characterizing different kinds of abstract concepts

The fall of political leaders reflected in gaze-following behavior of their voters

Gaze-following is a pivotal social behavior that albeit automatic, is permeable to high-order variables like political affiliation. In a previous study we showed that gaze-following is stronger when right-wing participants faced their in-group political leader (vs. the out-group's), namely Silvio Berlusconi (SB), who, dominated the Italian political landscape and had a massive popularity at the time of data collection. This effect paralleled the perceived-similarity between the voters’ and SB’s personality. Since the popularity of the former Prime Minister dramatically dropped down from the year in which we collected those data to the period in which he had to resign, we explored if changes of popularity were reflected in changes of perceived-similarity and gaze-following behavior. We recruited a representative subsample of the original group (N= 15, mean age= 26.73), and split it, on the basis of self-reported ideology and recent voting behavior in two groups (liberals and conservatives). We found that the political fall of SB was mirrored in a significant decrease of the attracting power of his gaze on the voters' gaze. Importantly, our data suggest that the perceived-similarity mediates this relationship. We tested the same hypothesis on a representative group of electors of the former governor of 'Regione Lazio' who also had to resign. A preliminary analysis on perceived-similarity speaks in favor of its prominent role in mediating the attracting power of a political leader. Thus, voters’ proneness to political leaders’ gaze is modulated by real societal changes