The Rumiati Lab: Neuroscience and Society Lab (iNSuLa)

The objectives of the lab are to explore social and cognitive processes by using an integrative approach that brings together neurological, psychological and physiological models of the human brain within neuroscience.

More specifically, we are interested in investigating issues of interest to social psychologists (such as intergroup cognition and emotion, stereotyping, self-other distinction, decision making) or cognitive scientists (such as imitation, action simulation, action understanding, body representations) using methods traditionally employed by cognitive neuroscientists (such as human neuropsychology, functional brain imaging, and transcranial magnetic stimulation).

Most facilities are in house (TMS, tDCS, EEG) while the fMRI is located in Udine’s main hospital (Azienda Ospedaliero-Universitaria “Santa Maria della Misericordia”), with which the lab has strong clinical links.

In the Rumiati Lab we have been investigating the involvement of the motor system in higher cognitive functions (for a review, see Rumiati et at., 2010). While it has traditionally been seen as a movement output devise, recent research, including that from this lab, has clearly demonstrated that the motor system is involved in many relevant cognitive functions such as motor imagery, object and action recognition, and language understanding. Thus the key question now is not so much whether the motor system is involved in cognition, but the conditions under which its involvement occurs. This research program is organized in four main lines, all of which have been accomplished using human neuropsychology, TMS and neuroimaging (PET and fMRI).

i) The first line focuses on how we reproduce gestures demonstrated by a human (or non human) model, depending on the input characteristics (e.g., known or novel gestures, object-related or communicative gestures), and on exogenous factors such as the type of list used (i.e., mixed or blocked) or the valence of emotional primes that precede the movements to be imitated. Rumiati Lab’s publications showed how the ability to learn-by-imitation is associated with brain regions that when lesioned produce a specific form of limb apraxia.

ii) The second line deals with the knowledge necessary for successful tool use in humans, its brain correlates and the precise conditions under which this ability results impaired. Rumiati Lab has greatly contributed to clarify that the “motor” knowledge required for actual tool use is different in nature from the conceptual knowledge about objects and tools (e.g., how much a tool weights, how much it costs, of what it is made etc.).

iii) The third line concerns the ability of the motor system (including the primary motor cortex, M1) to simulate movements, which has the very important aim of predicting consequences of actions made by ourselves or by others. In short, Rumiati Lab convincingly showed that there is a brain network that supports overt movement generation as well as motor imagery, and that this is subjected to mental strategies (see Tomasino et al., 2010).

iv) The fourth and most recent line of research on the motor system touches upon the precise conditions in which this system is contacted during language processing. The key finding is that language processing is not fully “embodied” in the sensorimotor system, and that the motor system is engaged in language understanding after, for instance, the concept of an action verb has been accessed (Papeo et al., 2009). More papers on this topic are in press or submitted.

Some of these research lines (i, ii) will continue well into the future of Rumiati Lab. To date it still needs to be better understood whether action learning can be transfer from one body effector to another one and, ultimately, how body representation(s) support imitation (this is the topic of Paola Mengotti and Alessandro Cicerale, Ph.D. students).

Moreover, to go beyond motor chauvinism, Rumiati Lab has begun to study more complex behaviors that only recently have they attracted the attention of neuroscientists. This new research program includes a project on economical decision making as in the Ultimatum Game (with Claudia Civai, Ph.D. student), ingroup and outgroup categorization in patients with brain damage and in healthy individual using fMRI (with Ana Laura Diez, Ph.D., Andrea Carnaghi and Caterina Silveri), and processing of emotional expressions in facial pain patients (with Jenny Baumeister, Ph.D. student, Grazia Devigili and Roberto Eleopra).