The Social and Cognitive Neuroscience laboratory was founded in 2003. Originally, the main research interest revolved around the neural representation of body image in healthy and brain damaged patients. In the last ten years several new research lines, all related to the emerging field of social neuroscience, were opened and integrated with the original one under the assumption that the body is t
he psychic object par excellence, at the core of many higher order cognitive and social processes. Among the new lines the most prominent are those concerning:
- Normal and abnormal functioning of social interactions, empathy and personality;
- Neural basis of corporeal awareness in healthy and brain damaged patients;
- Sensorimotor processing in expert brains including elite athletes and musicians;
- Voluntary action and bodily sensations in healthy humans and brain damaged and spinal cord injured patients. The new research lines benefit from the use of a variety of state-of-the-art techniques like Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, EEG, Laser Evoked potentials, thermal imaging and autonomic recording responses, high-sensitivity infrared eye-movement recording, kinematics analysis of movements, immersive virtual reality for investigating social brain and behaviour. Thanks to collaborations with other research groups magnetoencephalography and fMRI studies can also be performed. This variety of themes, models and techniques makes the laboratory a kind of unique environment that, also thanks to its link with the International PhD Program in Cognitive, Social and affective Neuroscience, is populated by scholars with different historical and geographical background. Principal Investigator:
Salvatore Maria Aglioti, MD
Behavioural Neurologist,
Full professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychological Physiology,
Sapienza University of Rome, Italy and
IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia Roma, Rome, Italy
