The meditative mind: a comprehensive meta-analysis of MRI studies

Over the past decade mind and body practices, such as yoga and meditation, have raised interest in different scientific fields; in particular, the physiological mechanisms underlying the beneficial effects observed in meditators have been investigated. Neuroimaging studies have studied the effects of meditation on brain structure and function and findings have helped clarify the biological underpinnings of the positive effects of meditation practice and the possible integration of this technique in standard therapy. The large amount of data collected thus far allows drawing some conclusions about the neural effects of meditation practice. In the present study we used activation likelihood estimation (ALE) analysis to make a coordinate-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging data on the effects of meditation on brain structure and function. Results indicate that meditation leads to activation in brain areas involved in processing self-relevant information, self-regulation, focused problem-solving, adaptive behavior, and interoception. Results also show that meditation practice induces functional and structural brain modifications in expert meditators, especially in areas involved in self-referential processes such as self-awareness and self-regulation. These results demonstrate that a biological substrate underlies the positive pervasive effect of meditation practice and suggest that meditation techniques could be adopted in clinical populations and to prevent disease

The tower of London (tol) in Italy. standardization of the tol test in an Italian population

Deficit in planning and problem-solving, affecting a wide range of neuropsychological patients, has been widely investigated using the Tower of London (ToL) test, as developed by Shallice (Philos Trans R Soc Lond Ser B Biol Sci 298:199-209, 1). The ToL taps on several executive functions (EF), such as planning, time for planning or rule breaks, which may be usefully indexed by different ToL measurements. However, in its original version, the different aspects involved in ToL are not evaluated in a specific way.Here, we report the standardization of the ToL, on 896 individuals aged 15-86 years, taking in account individual factors (i.e. gender, age, years of education) which may affect performances on ToL. We computed several indexes on the ToL including score, planning and execution times, perseverations, rule breaks and self-monitoring. We found that these indexes were affected by individual factors such as gender, age and education. Present results not only provide extensive normative data according to gender, as well as different age and education ranges, but also represent a very useful instrument for a more fine-grained diagnosis of EF deficits in a wide range of neuropsychological patients, including traumatic brain injury and brain-damaged patients, as well as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease patients

Psychometric properties and validation of the Italian version of the Family Assessment Measure Third Edition - Short Version - in a nonclinical sample

Family functioning plays an important role in developing and maintaining dysfunctional behaviors, especially during adolescence. The lack of indicators of family functioning, as determinants of personal and interpersonal problems, represents an obstacle to the activities aimed at developing preventive and intervention strategies. The Process Model of Family Functioning provides a conceptual framework organizing and integrating various concepts into a comprehensive family assessment; this model underlines that through the process of task accomplishment, each family meets objectives central to its life as a group. The Family Assessment Measure Third Edition (FAM III), based on the Process Model of Family Functioning, is among the most frequently used self-report instruments to measure family functioning

The detail is more pleasant than the whole: global and local prime affect esthetic appreciation of artworks showing whole-part ambiguity

Esthetic experience is the result of the coordination of different cognitive processes. It has been widely reported that top-down processes of orienting of attention interact with bottom-up perceptual facilitation occurring during esthetic experience of artworks. Here we use whole-part ambiguity as a tool to test the effect of global and local prime on esthetic appreciation of complex visual artworks. To this aim 139 healthy young individuals completed an esthetic judgment of Arcimboldo’s ambiguous artworks, which were preceded by a local or global prime. Their perceptual style was also assessed using a Navon task. We found that local prime significantly enhanced esthetic appreciation of ambiguous portraits. Also, we found that prime level interacted with individual’s perceptual style: participants showing local perceptual style liked less ambiguous portraits when they were preceded by global prime. Overall, the present findings shed some light on the processes involved in esthetic experience, pointing towards a pivotal role of re-direction of attention towards perceptual features of the artworks and its interaction with individual factors, such as perceptual style

Women outperform men in remembering to remember

The study of gender differences in prospective memory (i.e., remembering to remember) has received modest attention in the literature. The few reported studies investigating either subjective or objective evaluations of prospective memory have shown inconsistent data. In this study, we aimed to verify the presence of gender differences during the performance of an objective prospective memory test by considering the weight of specific variables such as length of delay, type of response, and type of cue. We submitted a sample of 100 healthy Italian participants (50 men and 50 women) to a test expressly developed to assess prospective memory: The Memory for Intentions Screening Test. Women performed better than men in remembering to do an event-based task (i.e., prompted by an external event) and when the task required a physical response modality. We discuss the behavioural differences that emerged by considering the possible role of sociological, biological, neuroanatomical, and methodological variables

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

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

Body Representations in Children with Cerebral Palsy

We constantly process top-down and bottom-up inputs concerning our own body that interact to form body representations (BR). Even if some evidence showed BR deficits in children with cerebral palsy, a systematic study that evaluates different kinds of BR in these children, taking into account the possible presence of a general deficit affecting non-body mental representations, is currently lacking. Here we aimed at investigating BR (i.e., Body Semantics, Body Structural Representation and Body Schema) in children with cerebral palsy (CP) taking into account performance in tasks involving body stimuli and performance in tasks involving non-body stimuli. Thirty-three CP (age range: 5–12 years) were compared with a group of 103 typically-developing children (TDC), matched for age and sex. 63.64% of children with CP showed a very poor performance in body representation processing. Present data also show alterations in different body representations in CP in specific developmental stages. In particular, CP and TDC performances did not differ between 5 to 7 years old, whereas CP between 8 and 12 years old showed deficits in the Body Structural Representation and Body Schema but not in Body Semantics. These findings revealed the importance of taking into account the overall development of cognitive domains when investigating specific stimuli processing in children who do not present a typical development and were discussed in terms of their clinical implications