Systematic Review on Privacy Categorization

In the modern digital world users need to make privacy and security choices that have far-reaching consequences. Researchers are increasingly studying people's decisions when facing with privacy and security trade-offs, the pressing and time consuming disincentives that influence those decisions, and methods to mitigate them. This work aims to present a systematic review of the literature on privacy categorization, which has been defined in terms of profile, profiling, segmentation, clustering and personae. Privacy categorization involves the possibility to classify users according to specific prerequisites, such as their ability to manage privacy issues, or in terms of which type of and how many personal information they decide or do not decide to disclose. Privacy categorization has been defined and used for different purposes. The systematic review focuses on three main research questions that investigate the study contexts, i.e. the motivations and research questions, that propose privacy categorisations; the methodologies and results of privacy categorisations; the evolution of privacy categorisations over time. Ultimately it tries to provide an answer whether privacy categorization as a research attempt is still meaningful and may have a future

Editorial. Creativity and mental imagery

Considering the pivotal role that creative ideas play in human societies, and creativity's contribution to multiple aspects of human life, understanding the cognitive components underlying creativity has become increasingly fundamental. Since the Five-Stages Model of the creative process proposed by Wallas (1926), creativity has become associated with topics as wide-ranging as from problem-solving (Plucker et al., 2004) to art (van Leeuwen et al., 1999; Batt et al., 2010). Furthermore, creativity has been identified as a predictor for educational success and wellbeing (Plucker et al., 2004), and has been proposed as a way to improve the quality of life in healthy and pathological agin

Travel Planning Ability in Right Brain-Damaged Patients: Two Case Reports

Planning ability is fundamental for goal-directed spatial navigation. Preliminary findings from patients and healthy individuals suggest that travel planning (TP)—namely, navigational planning—can be considered a distinct process from visuospatial planning (VP) ability. To shed light on this distinction, two right brain-damaged patients without hemineglect were compared with a control group on two tasks aimed at testing VP (i.e., Tower of London-16, ToL-16) and TP (i.e., Minefield Task, MFT). The former requires planning the moves to reach the right configuration of three colored beads on three pegs, whereas the latter was opportunely developed to assess TP in the navigational environment when obstacles are present. Specifically, the MFT requires participants to plan a route on a large carpet avoiding some hidden obstacles previously observed. Patient 1 showed lesions encompassing the temporoparietal region and the insula; she performed poorer than the control group on the ToL-16 but showed no deficit on the MFT. Conversely, Patient 2 showed lesions mainly located in the occipitoparietal network of spatial navigation; she performed worse than the control group on the MFT but not on the ToL-16. In both cases performances satisfied the criteria for a classical dissociation, meeting criteria for a double dissociation. These results support the idea that TP is a distinct ability and that it is dissociated from VP skills

Exosoul: ethical profiling in the digital world

The development and the spread of increasingly autonomous digital technologies in our society pose new ethical challenges beyond data protection and privacy violation. Users are unprotected in their interactions with digital technologies and at the same time autonomous systems are free to occupy the space of decisions that is prerogative of each human being. In this context the multidisciplinary project Exosoul aims at developing a personalized software exoskeleton which mediates actions in the digital world according to the moral preferences of the user. The exoskeleton relies on the ethical profiling of a user, similar in purpose to the privacy profiling proposed in the literature, but aiming at reflecting and predicting general moral preferences. Our approach is hybrid, first based on the identification of profiles in a top-down manner, and then on the refinement of profiles by a personalized data-driven approach. In this work we report our initial experiment on building such top-down profiles. We consider the correlations between ethics positions (idealism and relativism) personality traits (honesty/humility, conscientiousness, Machiavellianism and narcissism) and worldview (normativism), and then we use a clustering approach to create ethical profiles predictive of user's digital behaviors concerning privacy violation, copy-right infringements, caution and protection. Data were collected by administering a questionnaire to 317 young individuals. In the paper we discuss two clustering solutions, one data-driven and one model-driven, in terms of validity and predictive power of digital behavior

Where do bright ideas occur in our brain? Meta-analytic evidence from neuroimaging studies of domain-specific creativity

Many studies have assessed the neural underpinnings of creativity, failing to find a clear anatomical localization. We aimed to provide evidence for a multi-componential neural system for creativity. We applied a general activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis to 45 fMRI studies. Three individual ALE analyses were performed to assess creativity in different cognitive domains (Musical, Verbal, and Visuo-spatial). The general ALE revealed that creativity relies on clusters of activations in the bilateral occipital, parietal, frontal, and temporal lobes. The individual ALE revealed different maximal activation in different domains. Musical creativity yields activations in the bilateral medial frontal gyrus, in the left cingulate gyrus, middle frontal gyrus, and inferior parietal lobule and in the right postcentral and fusiform gyri. Verbal creativity yields activations mainly located in the left hemisphere, in the prefrontal cortex, middle and superior temporal gyri, inferior parietal lobule, postcentral and supramarginal gyri, middle occipital gyrus, and insula. The right inferior frontal gyrus and the lingual gyrus were also activated. Visuo-spatial creativity activates the right middle and inferior frontal gyri, the bilateral thalamus and the left precentral gyrus. This evidence suggests that creativity relies on multi-componential neural networks and that different creativity domains depend on different brain regions

The Dancers’ Visuospatial Body Map Explains Their Enhanced Divergence in the Production of Motor Forms: Evidence in the Early Development

Dance represents an opportunity to promote not only motor skills but also other cognitive functions and general well-being. In this study, 58 children aged 6–10 years were enrolled in order to test the issue if dance improves divergent thinking in motor and visual domains (domain-general and domain-specificity hypotheses), and whether the topological map of the body mediates their performance at the motor task (mediation hypothesis). Therefore, 33 children practicing dance were compared with a control group (25 children). Children were administered the visual divergent thinking task of the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, consisting in making drawings starting from given shapes, and the motor-form divergent thinking task, opportunely developed consisting in producing acted motor forms in the extrapersonal space. Both tasks were presented for 10 min and were scored in terms of fluency, flexibility, and originality. The ability to form the topological map of the body was measured by the frontal body-evocation test. Results revealed that children practicing dance outperformed the control group only in terms of the ability to perform motor forms. In addition, dancers showed a better topological map of the body, and, most importantly, besides the direct effect of group on the ability to produce acted motor forms, a significant indirect effect of the group, mediated by performances on frontal body-evocation task, was found. These results have important implications for cognition, showing that dance can improve the topological map of the body that in turn enhances creativity in motor domain since the early developmental age

Continuous Environmental Changes May Enhance Topographic Memory Skills. Evidence From L’Aquila Earthquake-Exposed Survivors

Exposure to environmental contextual changes, such as those occurring after an earthquake, requires individuals to learn novel routes around their environment, landmarks and spatial layout. In this study, we aimed to uncover whether contextual changes that occurred after the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake affected topographic memory in exposed survivors. We hypothesized that individuals exposed to environmental changes—individuals living in L’Aquila before, during and after the earthquake (hereafter called exposed participants, EPs)—improved their topographic memory skills compared with non-exposed participants (NEPs) who moved to L’Aquila after the earthquake, as only EPs had to modify their previous cognitive map of L’Aquila. We also hypothesized that memory improvement was selective for the navigational space and did not generalize across other spatial and verbal domains. To test these hypotheses, we compared the topographic and spatial memory skills of 56 EPs without post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms to the skills of 47 NEPs using the Walking Corsi Test (WalCT; memory test in the navigational space) and the Corsi Block-Tapping Test (CBT; visuospatial memory test in the reaching space); EPs and NEPs were matched for gender, education and general navigational skills. A sub-group of participants also underwent the Rey-Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT; verbal memory test). The results showed that only EPs had better performances on topographic learning (TL) assessed using the WalCT rather than spatial learning assessed by the CBT. This outcome suggests the possibility that EPs specifically improved topographic memory. This effect may be due to continuous exposure to environmental changes that have required individuals to learn novel paths within the city and integrate novel information, such as “new towns,” into their pre-existing mental representation of the city. Implications and limitations of the study are discussed

Where Am I? Searching for the Tangle in the Developmental Topographical Disorientation

The Developmental Topographical Disorientation (DTD) is a pathological condition that impairs an individual's ability to orient in space, even in the most familiar environments. It is a lifelong selective condition in individuals without brain damage or without impaired general cognitive functions. Here, we aimed at characterizing 54 individuals with DTD identified in a previous study, aged between 18 and 35 years and assessed through a 4-year-long online survey. To this purpose, we compared them with 54 matched healthy participants. We described the demographics, sense of direction, town knowledge, navigational strategies, left-right confusion as well as agnosic disorders (for landmarks, faces and objects). This novel study attempts to characterize the phenotype of DTD, providing an important contribution to the worldwide definition of a condition that was first described only 13 years ago, but which, considering the growing number of cases complaining of the disorder, deserves continuous and increasing attention