Research Projects
Action and Perception
Project Leader: Corrado Sinigaglia
How deep is the link between action and perception? Much is known about how perception impacts on action, much less about how action affects perception. Does action performance influence perception? Do motor processes and representations typically involved in planning and performing action influence perceptual experience?
Answering these questions is the main aim of the current project. We investigate action and perception processes by using psychophysical as well as neurostimulation techniques.
Fundings
2013-2015 British Academy / Leverhulme Small Grant Motor Planning and Practical Reasoning 20.000 £. (PI in collaboration with Steven Butterfill)
2007-2009 PRIN GRANT ‘Intentional Understanding & Social Cognition: Neural Basis, Biological Models and Epistemological Issues’ €200.000 (PI in collaboration with Telmo Pievani).
External Collaborators
- Luigi Cattaneo
- Marcello Costantini
- Vittorio Gallese
- Francesca Garbarini
- Giacomo Rizzolatti
- Marco Tamietto
Collective Goal and Joint Action
Project Leader: Corrado Sinigaglia
Acting jointly differs from acting side-by-side, as anyone who has ever walked, cooked, or danced a tango with a friend knows. While side-by-side action involves individual goals, joint action requires sharing a collective goal. This fundamental difference permeates our daily lives and matters in understanding human sociality. Yet cognitive neuroscience has largely overlooked it, thereby failing to isolate what makes joint action distinctive. To address this gap we conduct behavioral and electrophysiological (dual EEG, TMS-EEG) experiments where agents acting with a collective goal are compared to agents acting in parallel but merely individually. These studies form the foundation for individuating the brain and psychological processes underlying true joint action and their interplay.
Fundings
2017-2020 – PRIN Grant: ‘The Cognitive Neuroscience of Interpersonal Coordination and Cooperation: a Motor Approach in Human and Non-Human Primates’ €680,000. (PI in collaboration with Eraldo Paulesu and Alexandra Battaglia-Mayer)
2018-2019 – BIAL Foundation Grant Program ‘The Motor Roots of Acting Together: a Psychophysiological Investigation’ €50,000. (PI in collaboration with Marta Bortoletto).
2015-2017 – UNIMI Transition Grant ‘Coordination around Goals’ €80,000. (PI)
External Collaborators
- Alexandra Battaglia Mayer
- Marta Bortoletto
- Stephen A. Butterfill
- Maurizio Ferrarin
- Eraldo Paulesu
- Marco Rabuffetti
Commitment
Project Leader: John Michael
Commitment is a cornerstone of human social life. Commitments render individuals’ behaviour predictable despite regular fluctuations in their desires and interests, and this enables humans to plan and coordinate joint actions involving multiple agents. Yet, despite its importance, our sense of commitment has remained poorly understood. To address this, we conduct experiments designed to illuminate the cognitive and motivational mechanisms by which people from diverse cultural backgrounds identify and assess the level of commitment agents bring to a given social interaction.
Fundings
2022-2025 – PRIN Grant: From individual to shared sense of agency in humans and non-human primates (Co-PI, in collaboration with Eraldo Paulesu, Lucia Sacheli, Laura Zapparoli)
2024-2026 – CEU Project: Effort Matching and Partner Markets (Co-PI, in collaboration with Christophe Heintz and Günther Knoblich)
2023- 2025 – BIAL Foundation Grant: ‘The Psychophysiology of Commitment’ €60,000. (PI, in collaboration with Martina Fanghella, Corrado Sinigaglia, and Stephen Butterfill)
2020-2025 – AUFF NOVA: THE DARK SIDE OF COMMITMENT: INVESTIGATING HOW A SENSE OF COMMITMENT CAN MOTIVATE AND JUSTIFY CORRUPT BEHAVIOR (Co-PI, in collaboration with Panos Mitkidis)
External Collaborators
Extended Embodiment
Project Leader: Corrado Sinigaglia
4E approaches to cognition have become increasingly popular across a variety of disciplines. Such approaches frequently emphasise that the situated body in action is extended via external objects. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to how this framework applies to recent technological innovations such as wearable robotic devices. Such research is especially pertinent considering that these devices straddle the border between tools and the body itself and are increasingly used in both clinical and commercial settings, such as to relieve workload on the body or restore a lost body part (e.g., thumb) following illness or injury. An outstanding research question is if – and to what extent – these devices can be seamlessly integrated into the body schema. In our case, we investigate the grasping function provided by a supernumerary robotic digit called the ‘Sixth Soft Finger’ (SSF). To examine this, we first investigate whether motor adaptation following reach-to-grasp actions penetrates the visuomotor system in the ‘natural’ hand. This behavioural experiment acts as a standalone contribution to the literature. Subsequently, we repeat this logic with the SSF, examining for the first time whether motor-to-visuomotor adaptation extends to a wearable robotic device which also indexes the device’s embodiment. Finally, this project simultaneously probes unanswered theoretical issues highlighted in the extant literature.
Fundings
2022-2025 – PRIN GRANT The extended hand: psychophysical and neural foundations of a robotic supernumerary finger’s use for grasping augmentation or recovery 161.571 €. (PI in collaboration with Simone Rossi)
External Collaborators
- Dario Prattichizzo
- Simone Rossi
Motor Preparation vs. Motor Resonance Interaction
Project Leader: Guido Barchiesi
In our daily life we are continuously exposed to the sight of others’ actions but, in spite of the recruitment of our motor system during action observation we do not turn our motor activation into an echopraxic reproduction of the observed action. Nonetheless, when asked to provide a motor response to an observed action in lab context, subjects tend to make errors that reflect the observed action: an effect called “automatic imitation”. One possible explanation lies in how the motor preparation state interacts with the effects of action observation within the motor system. In order to tackle this question we are conducting EEG-TMS experiments to understand how the motor cortex reacts in situations where actions observed and actions prepared are very similar or very different, as it usually happens in real-life situations.
Fundings
PRIN 2022 – “Risonanza motoria durante la pianificazione dell’azione e le interazioni sociali: dai singoli neuroni ai circuiti cerebrali” (205.984 €)
External Collaborators
- Marta Bortoletto
- Gianpaolo Demarchi
- Monica Maranesi
- Nathan Weisz
- Agnese Zazio
Multidimensional Motor Evoked Potentials (MultiMEP)
Project Leader: Guido Barchiesi
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) has been the most utilized neuroscientific tool to test the state of the motor cortex and the corticospinal tract. Moreover, based on the motor evoked potentials (MEPs) recorded from different muscles, researchers have inferred what action was processed by the motor system during covert motor activities such as motor imagery, motor preparation, motor inhibition and action observation. However, the inference is often performed based on average data, a procedure that underlies the implicit claim that the signal extracted from MEPs is too noisy in order to extract relevant information at the single trial level. With MultiMEP we propose a paradigm shift to test if action-specific information is available even at the single-trial level during covert motor processing. Preliminary data show that we can distinguish which actions (among three) participants were processing during a motor imagery task with a 75% accuracy (chance = 33%). These results are promising as they show that the MultiMEP approach will heavily impact the way the state of the motor system will be tested (non-invasively) in the future.
Fundings
—
External Collaborators
- Marta Bortoletto
- Luigi Cattaneo
- Francesco Negro
- Paolo Rota
- Agnese Zazio
Normativity and Joint Action
Project Leader: John Michael
As humans, we are remarkable for the versatility and flexibility with which we coordinate our actions in space and time. Whether in small-scale joint actions – as when two partners cook meals, dance or assemble furniture together – or in large-scale collective actions – as when we organize resources for refugees, respond to pandemics, or attempt to mitigate climate change – our affinity for coordination enables us to achieve our goals more efficiently than we otherwise could, and in many cases to achieve goals that could not otherwise be achieved. It also requires us to rely upon others to act as we expect them to, and sometimes to persist in carrying out actions because others are expecting and relying on us to do so. But how do we know when to rely on others? And how do we determine when to persist in carrying out actions that others are relying on us to perform? These challenges become all the more pressing when we interact with members of diverse groups with whom we lack shared experience and a shared understanding of norms.
The current line of research develops the core insight that joint action inherently gives rise to a sense of commitment, which in turn stabilizes joint action even when agents’ interests are not perfectly aligned. To this end, we conduct experiments in the lab as well as online, involving participants from diverse cultural backgrounds. The experiments are designed to illuminate the cognitive and motivational mechanisms underpinning people’s decisions about how long to persist and how much effort to invest in joint action, as well as their judgments about attitudes towards others’ persistence and effort investment.
Fundings
2023-2025 – PRIN Grant: ‘The Normativity of Joint Action’ €250,000. (PI, in collaboration with Luca Tummolini)