2024-08-15 06:38:56
¿Why is it that when we find a friend, we always hate each other? Or why is it that when a person laughs loudly next to us, we laugh too? An international team of researchers, led by scientists from the University of Bologna (Italy), has studied the neural mechanisms underlying imitative behavior, a phenomenon that facilitates interaction and social cohesion and allows people to relate spontaneously to others.
The study – published in the ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’ (PNAS) – has recently revealed knowledge about how the brain controls this behavioropening new horizons for medical and therapeutic applications.
“Our findings open new avenues for understand how to manipulate brain plasticity to increase or decrease imitative behavior and make people less sensitive to interference during the performance of tasks,” explains Alessio Avenanti, professor at the “Renzo Canestrari” Department of Psychology at the University of Bologna, who coordinated the study.
“This could lead to therapeutic applications to improve cognition in patients with neurological impairments and social impairments,” he said.
What is automatic imitation?
Imitation is under many circumstances complex social interactions and can influence interpersonal relationshipsas well as group dynamics. Furthermore, imitation can have negative consequences and often has to be controlled: to save a penalty, for example, a speaker has to prevent the imitation of offensive movements.
“Automatic imitation is a widespread behavior in everyday life: think about when we see someone yawn and immediately feel the urge to do the sameor when we notice that our way of speaking or our facial expressions correspond to that of the friend we are talking to,” testified Sonia Turrini, researcher at the ‘Renzo Canestrari’ Department of Psychology at the University of Bologna and first author of the study.
“Understand the principles underlying this phenomenontherefore, provide new perspectives on behavior societywhich is the context in which most of our daily lives take place,” he added.
Advanced brain stimulation technique
It is known that the motor system is always involved in the automatic imitation of actions, facial expressions and words, but Exact services have not yet been defined and differential ability to different cortico-cortical circuits within the motor system.
To shed light on this question, researchers used an advanced non-invasive brain stimulation technique called “paired cortico-cortical associative stimulation” (ccPAS), which Professor Avenanti’s research group helped develop.
“Thanks to this inspiring process, it is possible to focus on the principles of plasticity of the brain connectiona completed map of neuronal connections in the brain, “Professor Avenanti explains. “By temporarily stimulating or blocking the communication between different areas of the motor system, it is possible to specify the causal effect of different circuits easily or banning the phenomenon of automatic imitation,” he added.
The test
The study included 80 healthy participants who were divided into four groups, each of which received a different ccPAS procedure. Each participant performed two behavioral tasks, before and after ccPAS treatment: a voluntary-imitation task and an automatic-learning task.
The reason was Check whether the connection manipulation between the front regions – specifically the ventral premotor area (PMv), the motor area (SMA) and the primary motor cortex (M1) – are involved in automatic and voluntary imitation.
The results show that there is a different circuit of the motor system they serve specific and dissociable social functionsand that the direction of stimulation and the target region affect the neural circuits in the simulation differently.
“We found that increased connectivity between the ventral premotor area (PMv) and the primary motor cortex (M1) makes the tendency to automatically imitate the behavior of otherswhile tired it has the opposite effect,” said Sonia Turrini.
“On the contrary, the supplementary motor cortex (SMA) seems to have a cognitive control effect on the motor system: strengthening its connection with the primary motor cortex (M1) in fact causes a greater ability to avoid imitation when it is inappropriate for speech, ” he finished.
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