Patients suffering from Unilateral Spatial Neglect (USN) fail to pay attention to, respond to, and report sensory events occurring in the contralesional side of space. The traditional neuropsychological assessment of USN is based on paper-and-pencil tests, whose data recording and scoring may be subjected to human error. The utilization of technological devices can be expected to improve the assessment of USN. Therefore, we built Neurit.Space, a modified digital version of three paper-and-pencil tests, widely used to detect signs of USN, namely: Bells Cancellation, Line Bisection and Five Elements Drawing Test. Administration and data processing is fully automatic. Twelve right brain-damaged patients (six with and six without USN) and 12 age- and education-balanced healthy participants were enrolled in the study. All participants were administered both the computerized and the paper-and-pencil versions of the tests. The results of this preliminary study showed good sensitivity, specificity, and usability of Neurit.Space, suggesting that these digital tests are a promising tool for the evaluation of USN, both in clinical and in research settings.

Interpersonal coordination is fundamental to social evolution. We investigate its phenomenology and neural underpinnings in humans and macaques, examining the behavioral adaptations required for mutual coordination during motor interactions and the extent to which the underlying brain mechanisms are shared across species. Using a common interpersonal coordination paradigm, we conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans and intracranial local field potential (LFP) recordings in macaques. Despite between-species behavioral discrepancies, both monkeys and humans coordinate through adjustments that proved to be based on proactive adaptation of motor planning and execution. Evidence from fMRI and time-resolved decoding analysis of LFPs converged to show modulation of premotor brain activity associated with interpersonal coordination and its effectiveness. Moreover, a dynamic sequential coding emerged, whereby the action context is represented early during planning, and coordination features near movement onset. Our findings reveal an evolutionarily conserved cortical architecture across primates that supports cooperative motor behavior.

This study investigates incremental processing of subject and object relatives in Italian by comparing two experimental paradigms. Previous research has shown that object relatives are more difficult to process than subject relatives, but the source and timing of this object disadvantage remain debated. Two experiments were conducted using the same linguistic stimuli. Experiment 1 employed a novel mixed design: a lexical maze task for the relative clause combined with a self-paced reading task for the matrix clause. Experiment 2 used a self-paced reading paradigm. Results confirmed a disadvantage for object relatives across both tasks. Critically, the modified maze task revealed that this difficulty emerges immediately after the complementizer and persists in later regions, a finding that was not evident in the self-paced reading task or in previous maze task studies. This shows the greater temporal resolution of the maze paradigm for identifying the locus of syntactic difficulty in incremental processing. Although frequency-based surprisal and memory-based integration accounts explain portions of data, we consider two approaches that can offer a unified account for both early and late effects: an extension of featural relativized minimality and the cue-based retrieval account. We conclude by indicating how future research can disentangle the two accounts.