Orientador: Amauri Gouveia Júnior / Banca: Sílvio Morato de Carvalho / Banca: Kester Carrara / Resumo: O objetivo do presente estudo foi avaliar o comportamento de preferência por escuridão em peixes da espécie C. auratus. No primeiro experimento avaliamos os efeitos das condições de alojamento sobre o comportamento de preferência, comparando posteriormente a situações onde foi inserido um substrato de cor intermediária (cinza). No segundo experimento avaliamos se a preferência por escuridão alterava-se após expor os sujeitos a variados regimes de luz. No primeiro experimento utilizamos 48 peixes (c. auratus), medindo entre cinco e sete centímetros, alojados em grupo (n = 24) em aquários de vidro (30 x 45 x 35 cm), com água filtrada e tamponada ph = 7,5 ± 5, sob temperatura de 27 ± 2ºc, ciclo de luz alternados em 12:12 h, controle de luz externa e alimentados uma vez ao dia. O aparato utilizado constituiu-se por seis aquários (15 x 10 x 45 cm) nas cores: preto, branco, cinza, branco-preto, cinza-branco e cinza-preto, com coluna d'água de 10 cm. No segundo experimento utilizamos 32 peixes da mesma espécie e com as mesmas características, mantidos em grupo (n = 11) em condições similares (4h, 8h, 12h, 16h ou 20h de luz). Foi utilizado aparato com medida similar ao experimento anterior e nas cores preto-branco. Após 5 minutos de habituação no centro do aquário as comportas eram removidas. As sessões tiveram duração de quinze 15 min. O procedimento foi o mesmo nos 2 experimentos. Os resultados indicaram maior preferência dos animais pelo substrato preto quando em contraste com o substrato branco, e do cinza, em relação ao preto e ao branco. O segundo experimento indicou que a exposição a regimes de luz diferenciados altera a preferência dos animais fazendo com que no regime de 20 h a preferência por substrato escuro desapareça, desta forma, alguns regimes luminosos, em específico os mais longos,...(Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: The aim of the present study was to evaluate the darkeness preference behavior in fish . The first experiment evaluated the preference among three substratum (dark, white and ash) . The second experiment evaluated the preference by darkness after exposition to differentes light regimes. In the first experiment 48 fish (c. auratus), five to seven centimeters of body size, were housed in group (n = 24) with light cycle alternated in 12:12 h, light control expresses and they were fedded once a day. The apparatus was constituted by six aquariums (15 x 10 x 45 cm) in colors (black, white, ash, white-black, ash-white and ash-black) and column of water of 10 cm. In the second experiment 32 fish of the same species and with the same characteristics, under similar conditions, were exposed to inverted and alternated light cycles (4 h, 8 h, 12 h, 16 h or 20h). The apparatus had similar measures and black-white colors to the previous experiment. After 5 minutes of habituation in the center of the aquarium the floodgates were removed. The sessions finished at 15 minutes. The procedure was the same in two experiments. The data of teh first experiment shows that the subjects prefer black substract than white and they o prefer ash than blak or white. The second experiment suggested that the kind of exposure of light regime effects the preferency in fishes. Twenty hours lighting regime faded out the darkeness preferency. Some luminous regimes, in specific the longest, altered the preference for darkness in the fish. There is preference for the intermediate substratum (ash) when available. / Mestre

Las Unidades de Cuidados Intensivos presentan características diferenciales que junto a la gravedad médica del paciente pueden contribuir a que el ingreso en las mismas constituya una experiencia estresante y disruptiva para las personas implicadas. Desde este marco, la presente tesis doctoral se centra en el análisis del grado de afectación psicológica de pacientes y familiares de UCI, valorando el posible papel modulador de distintos factores en dicha afectación. De esta manera se pretende mejorar el bienestar y calidad de vida de las personas que, por diversas circunstancias, se ven sometidas al impacto de la experiencia del ingreso en una Unidad de Cuidados Intensivos, bien como pacientes bien como familiares. / Differentiating characteristics of the Intensive Care Units and the medical severity of the patient in this context could contribute to become the admission to these units in a very stressful and disruptive experience for those involved. Within this framework, the thesis focuses on the analysis of the psychological distress of ICU patients and families, assessing the possible modulatory role of different factors in such distress. In this sense, our objective would be to improve the welfare and the quality of life of people who, for various reasons, suffer the impact of this experience being patient or relative in an ICU.

That humans and animals learn from interaction with the environment is a foundational idea underlying nearly all theories of learning and intelligence. Learning that certain outcomes are associated with specific actions or stimuli (both internal and external), is at the very core of the capacity to adapt behaviour to environmental changes. In the present work, appetitive and aversive reinforcement learning paradigms have been used to investigate the fronto-striatal loops and behavioural correlates of adaptive and maladaptive reinforcement learning processes, aiming to a deeper understanding of how cortical and subcortical substrates interacts between them and with other brain systems to support learning. By combining a large variety of neuroscientific approaches, including behavioral and psychophysiological methods, EEG and neuroimaging techniques, these studies aim at clarifying and advancing the knowledge of the neural bases and computational mechanisms of reinforcement learning, both in normal and neurologically impaired population.

The motor system can no longer be considered as a mere passive executive system of motor commands generated elsewhere in the brain. On the contrary, it is deeply involved in perceptual and cognitive functions and acts as an “anticipation device”. The present thesis investigates the anticipatory motor mechanisms occurring in two particular instances: i) when processing sensory events occurring within the peripersonal space (PPS); and ii) when perceiving and predicting others’actions. The first study provides evidence that PPS representation in humans modulates neural activity within the motor system, while the second demonstrates that the motor mapping of sensory events occurring within the PPS critically relies on the activity of the premotor cortex. The third study provides direct evidence that the anticipatory motor simulation of others’ actions critically relies on the activity of the anterior node of the action observation network (AON), namely the inferior frontal cortex (IFC). The fourth study, sheds light on the pivotal role of the left IFC in predicting the future end state of observed right-hand actions. Finally, the fifth study examines how the ability to predict others’ actions could be influenced by a reduction of sensorimotor experience due to the traumatic or congenital loss of a limb. Overall, the present work provides new insights on: i) the anticipatory mechanisms of the basic reactivity of the motor system when processing sensory events occurring within the PPS, and the same anticipatory motor mechanisms when perceiving others’ implied actions; ii) the functional connectivity and plasticity of premotor-motor circuits both during the motor mapping of sensory events occurring within the PPS and when perceiving others’ actions; and iii) the anticipatory mechanisms related to others’ actions prediction.

One of the most intriguing topic addressed by researchers across the cognitive sciences concerns the “self” and the self-other distinction. The present thesis adds to this debate by exploring the recognition of bodily self, based on visual and acoustical information. The first part of the present dissertation focuses on mechanisms and neural bases of bodily self, adopting a classical neuropsychological approach. Brain damaged patients were submitted to two different tasks designed for testing implicit and explicit self-body recognition using pictures depicting left and right hands as stimuli that belong to the participant or to other people. In Study 1, right and left brain damaged patients’ performance was compared to verify whether implicit and explicit self-body recognition are mediated by different cerebral networks that can be selectively impaired after focal brain lesion. A Voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping analysis revealed that an integrated cortical–subcortical right frontal (motor) network is crucial for an implicit knowledge of one’s own body. Conversely, both hemispheres contribute to an explicit knowledge of our body. In addition, Study 2 demonstrates how the implicit and explicit bodily knowledge is selectively impaired in patients with and without pathological embodiment of others’ body. The second part of the thesis explores the contribution of voice to self/other distinction. In Study 3, implicit and explicit self-voice recognition was investigated in healthy individuals. Interestingly, self-voice was better processed when an implicit rather than an explicit recognition was required. Finally, in Study 4, the anatomical basis of implicit and explicit self-voice recognition was investigated in neuropsychological patients. Behavioural and anatomical data demonstrates the involvement of right hemisphere in implicit processing and the joint contribution of both hemispheres in explicit recognition of self-voice. Overall, this thesis highlights the role played by visual and acoustic cues in building the sense of body-ownership.

No description available.

Alexithymia refers to difficulties in recognizing one’s own emotions and others emotions. Theories of emotional embodiment suggest that, in order to understand other peoples’ feelings, observers re-experience, or simulate, the relevant component (i.e. somatic, motor, visceral) of emotion’s expressed by others in one’s self. In this way, the emotions are “embodied”. Critically, to date, there are no studies investigating the ability of alexithymic individuals in embodying the emotions conveyed by faces. In the present dissertation different implicit paradigms and techniques falling within the field of affective neuroscience have been employed in order to test a possible deficit in the embodiment of emotions in alexithymia while subjects were requested to observe faces manifesting different expression: fear, disgust, happiness and neutral. The level of the perceptual encoding of emotional faces and the embodiment of emotions in the somato-sensory and sensory-motor system have been investigated. Moreover, non-communicative motor reaction to emotional stimuli (i.e. visceral reactions) and interoceptive abilities of alexithymic subjects have been explored. The present dissertation provided convergent evidences in support of a deficit in the processing of fearful expression in subjects with high alexithymic personality traits. Indeed, the pattern of fear induced changes in the perceptual encoding, in the somato-sensory and in the somato-motor system (both the communicative and non communicative one) is widely and consistently altered in alexithymia. This support the hypothesis of a diminished responses to fearful stimuli in alexithymia. In addition, the overall results on happiness and disgust, although preliminary, provided interesting results. Indeed, the results on happiness revealed a defective perceptual encoding, coupled with a slight difficulty (i.e. delayed responses) at the level of the communicative somato-motor system, and the emotion of disgust has been found to be abnormally embodied at the level of the somato-sensory system.

The body is represented in the brain at levels that incorporate multisensory information. This thesis focused on interactions between vision and cutaneous sensations (i.e., touch and pain). Experiment 1 revealed that there are partially dissociable pathways for visual enhancement of touch (VET) depending upon whether one sees one’s own body or the body of another person. This indicates that VET, a seeming low-level effect on spatial tactile acuity, is actually sensitive to body identity. Experiments 2-4 explored the effect of viewing one’s own body on pain perception. They demonstrated that viewing the body biases pain intensity judgments irrespective of actual stimulus intensity, and, more importantly, reduces the discriminative capacities of the nociceptive pathway encoding noxious stimulus intensity. The latter effect only occurs if the pain-inducing event itself is not visible, suggesting that viewing the body alone and viewing a stimulus event on the body have distinct effects on cutaneous sensations. Experiment 5 replicated an enhancement of visual remapping of touch (VRT) when viewing fearful human faces being touched, and further demonstrated that VRT does not occur for observed touch on non-human faces, even fearful ones. This suggests that the facial expressions of non-human animals may not be simulated within the somatosensory system of the human observer in the same way that the facial expressions of other humans are. Finally, Experiment 6 examined the enfacement illusion, in which synchronous visuo-tactile inputs cause another’s face to be assimilated into the mental self-face representation. The strength of enfacement was not affected by the other’s facial expression, supporting an asymmetric relationship between processing of facial identity and facial expressions. Together, these studies indicate that multisensory representations of the body in the brain link low-level perceptual processes with the perception of emotional cues and body/face identity, and interact in complex ways depending upon contextual factors.

This thesis will focus on the residual function and visual and attentional deficits in human patients, which accompany damage to the visual cortex or its thalamic afferents, and plastic changes, which follow it. In particular, I will focus on homonymous visual field defects, which comprise a broad set of central disorders of vision. I will present experimental evidence that when the primary visual pathway is completely damaged, the only signal that can be implicitly processed via subcortical visual networks is fear. I will also present data showing that in a patient with relative deafferentation of visual cortex, changes in the spatial tuning and response gain of the contralesional and ipsilesional cortex are observed, which are accompanied by changes in functional connectivity with regions belonging to the dorsal attentional network and the default mode network. I will also discuss how cortical plasticity might be harnessed to improve recovery through novel treatments. Moreover, I will show how treatment interventions aimed at recruiting spared subcortical pathway supporting multisensory orienting can drive network level change.

The first part of my thesis presents an overview of the different approaches used in the past two decades in the attempt to forecast epileptic seizure on the basis of intracranial and scalp EEG. Past research could reveal some value of linear and nonlinear algorithms to detect EEG features changing over different phases of the epileptic cycle. However, their exact value for seizure prediction, in terms of sensitivity and specificity, is still discussed and has to be evaluated. In particular, the monitored EEG features may fluctuate with the vigilance state and lead to false alarms. Recently, such a dependency on vigilance states has been reported for some seizure prediction methods, suggesting a reduced reliability. An additional factor limiting application and validation of most seizure-prediction techniques is their computational load. For the first time, the reliability of permutation entropy [PE] was verified in seizure prediction on scalp EEG data, contemporarily controlling for its dependency on different vigilance states. PE was recently introduced as an extremely fast and robust complexity measure for chaotic time series and thus suitable for online application even in portable systems. The capability of PE to distinguish between preictal and interictal state has been demonstrated using Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) analysis. Correlation analysis was used to assess dependency of PE on vigilance states. Scalp EEG-Data from two right temporal epileptic lobe (RTLE) patients and from one patient with right frontal lobe epilepsy were analysed. The last patient was included only in the correlation analysis, since no datasets including seizures have been available for him. The ROC analysis showed a good separability of interictal and preictal phases for both RTLE patients, suggesting that PE could be sensitive to EEG modifications, not visible on visual inspection, that might occur well in advance respect to the EEG and clinical onset of seizures. However, the simultaneous assessment of the changes in vigilance showed that: a) all seizures occurred in association with the transition of vigilance states; b) PE was sensitive in detecting different vigilance states, independently of seizure occurrences. Due to the limitations of the datasets, these results cannot rule out the capability of PE to detect preictal states. However, the good separability between pre- and interictal phases might depend exclusively on the coincidence of epileptic seizure onset with a transition from a state of low vigilance to a state of increased vigilance. The finding of a dependency of PE on vigilance state is an original finding, not reported in literature, and suggesting the possibility to classify vigilance states by means of PE in an authomatic and objectic way. The second part of my thesis provides the description of a novel behavioral task based on motor imagery skills, firstly introduced (Bruzzo et al. 2007), in order to study mental simulation of biological and non-biological movement in paranoid schizophrenics (PS). Immediately after the presentation of a real movement, participants had to imagine or re-enact the very same movement. By key release and key press respectively, participants had to indicate when they started and ended the mental simulation or the re-enactment, making it feasible to measure the duration of the simulated or re-enacted movements. The proportional error between duration of the re-enacted/simulated movement and the template movement were compared between different conditions, as well as between PS and healthy subjects. Results revealed a double dissociation between the mechanisms of mental simulation involved in biological and non-biologial movement simulation. While for PS were found large errors for simulation of biological movements, while being more acurate than healthy subjects during simulation of non-biological movements. Healthy subjects showed the opposite relationship, making errors during simulation of non-biological movements, but being most accurate during simulation of non-biological movements. However, the good timing precision during re-enactment of the movements in all conditions and in both groups of participants suggests that perception, memory and attention, as well as motor control processes were not affected. Based upon a long history of literature reporting the existence of psychotic episodes in epileptic patients, a longitudinal study, using a slightly modified behavioral paradigm, was carried out with two RTLE patients, one patient with idiopathic generalized epilepsy and one patient with extratemporal lobe epilepsy. Results provide strong evidence for a possibility to predict upcoming seizures in RTLE patients behaviorally. In the last part of the thesis it has been validated a behavioural strategy based on neurobiofeedback training, to voluntarily control seizures and to reduce there frequency. Three epileptic patients were included in this study. The biofeedback was based on monitoring of slow cortical potentials (SCPs) extracted online from scalp EEG. Patients were trained to produce positive shifts of SCPs. After a training phase patients were monitored for 6 months in order to validate the ability of the learned strategy to reduce seizure frequency. Two of the three refractory epileptic patients recruited for this study showed improvements in self-management and reduction of ictal episodes, even six months after the last training session.