Antonino Raffone

Objectives Autobiographical memory (AM) is linked to the construct of self, which is influenced by mindfulness training. Furthermore, both self-reference and AM can be affected by psychopathological conditions, such as depression. This article offers a critical review with a systematic search of the studies using different paradigms to investigate the effects of mindfulness training on AM, as well as the relationships between trait mindfulness and AM. Methods The review includes studies with behavioral, self-report, and neuroimaging methods by considering both non-clinical and clinical investigations in an integrative perspective. Fifty articles were reviewed. The review addressed the following main fields: mindfulness and autobiographical memory specificity; mindfulness and emotional autobiographical recall; and self-inquiry into negative autobiographical narratives and mindfulness. An additional section analyzed 18 studies that addressed the effects of mindfulness training on memo...

Objectives According to the core Buddhist psychology models of the “two arrows of pain” and “co-dependent origination,” pain is the resultant of bodily and mental factors, which can be regulated by meditation states and traits. Here we investigated how pain and the related aversion and identification (self-involvement) experiences are modulated by focused attention meditation (FAM), open monitoring meditation (OMM), and loving kindness meditation (LKM), as well as by meditation expertise. Methods Theravada Buddhist long-term meditators were matched with a group of short-term meditators. Nociceptive electrical stimulation was administered during FAM, OMM, and LKM, and in a non-meditative rest condition. Experience reports of pain, aversion, and identification were collected in each trial. Results Pain thresholds were higher in long-term meditators than in short-term meditators. In the short-term meditators, as compared to rest, pain was reduced in FAM and OMM, and aversion and identi...

We consider the framework of attentional processing in light of Gestalt theory. The dichotomy of top-down and bottom-up attention is criticized as an anachronism in light of the interactive character of processing. The Gestalt concept of foreground background organization offers an appropriate contextualization for the notion of attention.

It is often maintained that the brain-as-computer metaphor is ill taken. Nevertheless one can view conscious cognition as a Turing Machine process, Turing (1937), with its discrete, deterministic, and universal aspects. Not being used to the language of science one may object to the statement that computation plays an important role in the life of humans (and in fact all animals). Nevertheless, for goal directed movements fast and accurate (unconscious) computations are necessary. Sensory input has to transformed to output in the form of action. Cognitive scientists, who are aware of the need for computation, still may object to the computer metaphor. Our brain is not a network of Boolean switches and it does neither have numerical input nor output. Our claim is that nevertheless it is useful to interpret cognition as a hybrid Turing Machine process. Modelling systems (machines or living organisms) the notion of ‘state’ is important. Only considering stimulus-reaction (Input, Action...

Conceptual knowledge is acquired through recurrent experiences, by extracting statistical regularities at different levels of granularity. At a fine level, patterns of feature co-occurrence are categorized into objects. At a coarser level, patterns of concept co-occurrence are categorized into contexts. We present and test CONCAT, a connectionist model that simultaneously learns to categorize objects and contexts. The model contains two hierarchically organized CALM modules (Murre, Phaf, & Wolters, 1992). The first module, the Object Module, forms object representations based on co-occurrences between features. These representations are used as input for the second module, the Context Module, which categorizes contexts based on object co-occurrences. Feedback connections from the Context Module to the Object Module send activation from the active context to those objects that frequently occur within this context. We demonstrate that context feedback contributes to the successful cat...

Gaze and arrow induce different effects on attentional orienting as a function of target context Marotta Andrea (andrea.marotta@uniroma1.it) Department of Psychology, “Sapienza” Universita di Roma Casagrande Maria (maria.casagrande@uniroma1.it) Department of Psychology, “Sapienza” Universita di Roma Raffone Antonino (antonino.raffone@uniroma1.it) Department of Psychology, “Sapienza” Universita di Roma Martella Diana (diana.martella@uniroma1.it) Department of Psychology, “Sapienza” Universita di Roma Sebastiani Mara (mara.sebastiani@uniroma1.it) Department of Psychology, “Sapienza” Universita di Roma Maccari Lisa (lisa.maccari@uniroma1.it) Department of Psychology, “Sapienza” Universita di Roma Abstract and human development. Many studies have also demonstrated that gaze direction – used as a spatial cue - reflexively triggers attentional shift (for a review, see Frischen, Bayliss & Tipper, 2007). These studies have applied a spatial cueing paradigm, first introduced by Posner (1980)...

1Department of Psychiatry, Fondazione Policlinico “A. Gemelli” IRCCS, Rome, Italy 2Department of Psychology, Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy 3The International Institute for Psychoanalytic Research and Training of Health Professionals, Rome, Italy 4UOS of Clinical Psychology, Fondazione Policlinico “A. Gemelli” IRCCS, Rome, Italy 5Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford CA, USA 6Department of Otorhinolaryngology, Fondazione Policlinico “A. Gemelli”, Rome, Italy

The training of attention is a central feature of different meditation methods. This aspect has been emphasized with priority by several authors in recent influential work. However, apart from attentional processes, other neurocognitive processes underlying different aspects of consciousness and self-awareness are crucially involved in meditation. It is therefore important to provide broader theoretical frameworks and hypotheses to incorporate neurocognitive processes implicated in consciousness and self-awareness in meditation, with attentional functions. Based on recent experimental findings, we first characterize focused attention and open monitoring, as well as their relationships, in meditation, with reference to mindfulness. We then consider key aspects of conscious processing and its neural substrates, with special reference to global workspace approaches, and crucial relationships between self-reference, consciousness and mindfulness. We then present a novel hypothesis on th...

The global pandemic caused by COVID-19 and the subsequent lockdown have been widely recognized as traumatic events that pose threats to psychological well-being. Recent studies reported that during such traumatic events, women tend to be at greater risk than men for developing symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression. Several studies reported that a mindfulness-based stress reduction protocol (MBSR) provides useful skills for dealing with traumatic events. In our study, a sample of Italian females received an 8-week MBSR course plus 6 weeks of video support for meditation practice during the first total lockdown in Italy. We assessed the participants with questionnaires before and after this period to investigate their mindfulness skills, psychological well-being, post-traumatic growth, and psychological flexibility. After the intervention, the meditators group reported improvement in measures associated with self-acceptance, purpose in life, and relation to others compared to th...

In recent decades, psychological research on the effects of mindfulness-based interventions has greatly developed and demonstrated a range of beneficial outcomes in a variety of populations and contexts. Yet, the question of how to foster subjective well-being and happiness remains open. Here, we assessed the effectiveness of an integrated mental training program The Art of Happiness on psychological well-being in a general population. The mental training program was designed to help practitioners develop new ways to nurture their own happiness. This was achieved by seven modules aimed at cultivating positive cognition strategies and behaviors using both formal (i.e., lectures, meditations) and informal practices (i.e., open discussions). The program was conducted over a period of 9 months, also comprising two retreats, one in the middle and one at the end of the course. By using a set of established psychometric tools, we assessed the effects of such a mental training program on se...

Meditation has been integrated into different therapeutic interventions. To inform the evidence-based selection of specific meditation types it is crucial to understand the neural processes associated with different meditation practices. Here we explore commonalities and differences in electroencephalographic oscillatory spatial synchronisation patterns across three important meditation types. Highly experienced meditators engaged in focused attention, open monitoring, and loving kindness meditation. Improving on previous research, our approach avoids comparisons between groups that limited previous findings, while ensuring that the meditation states are reliably established. Employing a novel measure of neural coupling – the imaginary part of EEG coherence – the study revealed that all meditation conditions displayed a common connectivity pattern that is characterised by increased connectivity of (a) broadly distributed delta networks, (b) left-hemispheric theta networks with a loc...

Mindfulness meditation is based on Buddhist teachings and meditation practices that promote a reduced identification with thoughts and mental states. Mindfulness meditation is also suggested to promote self-other integration, either by decreasing preference for self-related processing or by rebalancing self and other-related processing. However, it is not clear how meditation practice influences attachment to self and more specifically sense of agency. Hence, we investigated how mindfulness meditation (Vipassana or insight meditation) practice influences an implicit measure of sense of agency known as intentional binding effect with self- vs other-associated stimuli by comparing long-term meditators with non-meditators. This study had two phases. The first phase consisted of a perceptual matching task using self-related and other-related shape-label pairings so that participants can learn the shape-label associations. In the second phase, participants performed an intentional binding task with the same self-associated and other-associated stimuli displayed as target outcome of self-generated action. While meditators did show faster responses to self vs other shape-label processing similar to non-meditators, they did not show stronger binding (reduced temporal estimation between action and outcome shape) for self-associated compared with other-associated outcome. The results indicate that even though meditators preferentially process self-related information, they are less attached to self-associated stimuli as indicated by an implicit measure of sense of agency. These results have implications for theories of action and agency based on contemplative traditions that emphasize less attachment to outcomes of our actions.

We investigated the relationship between different kinds of target reports in a rapid serial visual presentation task, and their associated perceptual experience. Participants reported the identity of two targets embedded in a stream of stimuli and their associated subjective visibility. In our task, target stimuli could be combined together to form more complex ones, thus allowing participants to report temporally integrated percepts. We found that integrated percepts were associated with high subjective visibility scores, whereas reports in which the order of targets was reversed led to a poorer perceptual experience. We also found a reciprocal relationship between the chance of the second target not being reported correctly and the perceptual experience associated with the first one. Principally, our results indicate that integrated percepts are experienced as a unique, clear perceptual event, whereas order reversals are experienced as confused, similar to cases in which an entir...

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) provide alternative methods for communicating and acting on the world, since messages or commands are conveyed from the brain to an external device without using the normal output pathways of peripheral nerves and muscles. Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients in the most advanced stages, who have lost the ability to communicate verbally, could benefit from a BCI that may allow them to convey basic thoughts (e.g., "yes" and "no") and emotions. There is currently no report of such research, mostly because the cognitive deficits in AD patients pose serious limitations to the use of traditional BCIs, which are normally based on instrumental learning and require users to self-regulate their brain activation. Recent studies suggest that not only self-regulated brain signals, but also involuntary signals, for instance related to emotional states, may provide useful information about the user, opening up the path for so-called "affe...

1. Introduzione Lo studio scientifico della meditazione, e della meditazione buddhista in particolare, è stato caratterizzato da uno straordinario sviluppo negli ultimi anni. A tale sviluppo hanno contribuito vari fattori, a partire dalla disponibilità di tecniche di ricerca sempre più raffinate e fruibili, con particolare riferimento alle tecniche di neuroimmagine. Ha inoltre contribuito il coinvolgimento di laboratori di ricerca di primo piano, come il laboratorio di "affective neuroscience" di Richard Davidson, con un ruolo importante di Antoine Lutz (allievo di Francisco Varela) al suo interno, così come l'accesso a pubblicazione su riviste ad alto impatto (come sulla rivista prestigiosa "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences U.S.A."). Un ruolo importante per la promozione di tali ricerche è stato poi esercitato dal Dalai Lama, da sempre interessato all'incontro con la scienza, e in particolare dal Mind & Life Institute (http://www.mindandlife.org/) di cui egli è stato fondatore con Francisco Varela, filosofo, scienziato e praticante buddhista tibetano, e nel quale lo stesso Richard Davidson è una presenza importante. Sul versante del buddhismo tibetano, anche Mattieu Ricard, un lama tibetano con una solida formazione di ricerca scientifica, ha svolto un ruolo importante. Altri studiosi e autori di bestseller, come Daniel Goleman, che in particolare ha collaborato con il Dalai Lama scrivendo ben noti libri su emozioni negative (Goleman e Dalai Lama, 2003) e salutari (Dalai Lama e Goleman, 2009), hanno contribuito a diffondere conoscenze sulla meditazione e le pratiche contemplative, con particolare riferimento a pratiche di ispirazione buddhista. Anche contemplativi buddhisti di altre tradizioni, come ad esempio Ajahn Amaro per il buddhismo Theravada e Joan Halifax Roshi per lo Zen, hanno portato importanti contributi negli incontri di dialogo tra buddhismo e scienza negli ultimi anni.

Several neuroimaging studies have provided strong evidence of the possibility to decode mental states from brain activity. Compared to strictly location-based analysis, pattern classification can reveal new information about the way cognitive, emotional, and perceptual states are encoded in patterns of brain activity. The last years have also seen the development of advanced algorithms, which markedly improved the possibility to perform pattern classification. By relying on mental state classification, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) allow individuals who have lost the ability to communicate verbally to convey basic thoughts and emotions. The aim of our study was to discriminate between brain responses associated to affirmative and negative thinking in 10 subjects, in order to develop a BCI that could be used for basic yes/no communication. This discrimination could be achieved using a classical conditioning paradigm, i.e. associating affirmative and negative responses (the conditioned stimuli, CS), respectively associated to congruent and incongruent word-pairs, to pleasant and unpleasant emotional stimuli (the unconditioned stimuli, US) together with Effect Mapping (EM), based on Support Vector Machine (SVM). Using EM as the classifier of the affirmative and negative responses, a classification accuracy of over 90% was reached.

ABSTRACT The learning vector quantization (LVQ) network was used to classify the ECG ST segment into different mor-phological categories. Due to the lack of data in the ST el-evation categories, the classifier was only trained to identify different types of ST depressions (horizontal, upsloping and downsloping). The accuracies were 91%, 85% and 65% re-spectively for the training, validation and testing data respec-tively. Despite the low accuracy for the testing data, most of the mis-classifications were downsloping ST depression be-ing classified as horizontal ST depression. We concluded that more data and more training are needed in order to train the LVQ to recognize other morphological types of ST deviation and to improve the accuracy. Keywords—learning vector quantization, ARTMAP, decision support systems, ischemic heart disease.

Introduction: Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) provide alternative methods for communicating and acting on the world, by conveying messages and commands without using the normal output pathways of peripheral nerves and muscles (Birbaumer et al., 1999; Pasqualotto et al., 2011; Wolpaw et al., 2002). Patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) would benefit from a BCI that is able to convey information about their basic thoughts and emotions. The possibility to discriminate between emotional states by pattern classification of BOLD signals has been demonstrated in both offline (Lee et al., 2010) and online (Sitaram et al., 2011) situations. A possible way to develop a BCI that can be used by AD patients is through the modulation of cerebral responses with a semantic classical conditioning paradigm (Furdea et al., 2011), moving away from the more common operant conditioning paradigm, which requires subjects to actively self-regulate their brain activation (Birbaumer, 2006). The aim of our study is to condition subjects to associate emotionally negative and positive stimuli as unconditioned stimuli (US) with incongruent and congruent word pairs (eliciting "negative" and "affirmative" thinking) as conditioned stimuli (CS), respectively. We investigated whether brain signals related to congruent and incongruent word pairs could be classified with more than chance accuracy, in view of an application for basic yes/no communication in AD patients. Methods: The paradigm consisted of six blocks comprising the different phases of conditioning (habituation, acquisition, extinction) (Fig.1). The US, drawn from the International Affective Digitized Sounds (Bradley & Lang, 1999), consisted of a scream and a baby laugh, representing a negative and a positive emotional sound respectively. The CS, presented aurally, were congruent (e.g. 'animal-dog') and incongruent (e.g. 'animal-chair) word pairs. The unconditioned and conditioned responses (UR and CR) were the changes in the BOLD signal related to the CS and US. In the first block, 50 US and 50 CS were presented randomly. In the second and third blocks, 25 congruent word pairs, followed by the baby laugh, and 25 incongruent word pairs, followed by the scream, were presented randomly. In the fourth and fifth blocks, respectively 40% and 20% of the CS were paired with the US. In the sixth block, only the CS was presented. Functional imaging was performed on 11 healthy subjects (6 females, 5 males, age 21-28) on a 3T scanner. To classify the signals corresponding to congruent and incongruent word pairs, both univariate (General Linear Model) and multivariate (Support Vector Machine, SVM) analyses were performed. Results: The data that emerges from the univariate analysis shows that the classical conditioning allows a differentiation of "yes" and "no" responses. Interestingly, the differential activations took place in brain areas such as insula, superior temporal gyrus and the superior frontal gyrus, which are recognized to be involved in emotional processing (Sitaram et al., 2011). Results from SVM analyses, performed after feature selection from the third, fourth and fifth image after each word pair (temporal-spatial voxel selection performed with a threshold of 7.5% for the percentage of univariately separable samples), indicate that it is possible, after classical conditioning, to discriminate between affirmative and negative responses with more than chance accuracy. Conclusions: The present results are encouraging and show that basic yes/no discrimination may be possible within an fMRI-BCI setting. This discrimination may be obtained using a "passive" procedure, such as classical conditioning, which does not require subjects to be actively involved in a task, and can be therefore used with patients with dementia. A further step, which is already in progress, is the testing of the paradigm with AD patients.

The First International Conference on Mindfulness was held in Rome, Italy, in May 2013, sponsored by the American Health and Wellness Institute, Sapienza University (Rome, Italy) and the Associazione Italiana Mindfulness. Over 330 participants from a wide range of disciplines representing 35 countries attended this first European conference. In addition to scientific presentations, participants were able to attend experiential workshops, guided meditation sessions and contemplative symposia. This summary highlights the neuroscience presentations, evidence for application of mindfulness meditation to diverse clinical issues and populations, and the value of integrating contemporary and traditional practice and perspectives.