Skip to main content

Vittorio Gallese

Università degli Studi di Parma (Italy), Neuroscience, Faculty Member +1Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Einstein Fellow (2016-2020)Università degli Studi di Parma (Italy), Neuroscience, Faculty Member

Cognitive Neuroscience +8

My research activity since its beginning has been focusing on the relationship between the sensory-motor system and cognition, in non-human primates and humans. I am currently investigating the neurobiological and bodily roots of intersubjectivity, empathy, language, aesthetic experience and of a variety of psychoathological conditions, among which Schizophrenia. Check the FB page of the Lab Neuroscience: https://www.facebook.com/Neuroscience-Humanities-LAB-UNiversity-of-Parma-104668111214012/?modal=admin_todo_tour

less

6,014 Followers 169 Following 48 Co-authors Total Views

Papers

Emotional body postures affect inhibitory control only when task-relevant

Frontiers Psychology, 2022

A classical theoretical frame to interpret motor reactions to emotional stimuli is that such stim... more A classical theoretical frame to interpret motor reactions to emotional stimuli is that such stimuli, particularly those threat-related, are processed preferentially, i.e., they are capable of capturing and grabbing attention automatically. Research has recently challenged this view, showing that the task relevance of emotional stimuli is crucial to having a reliable behavioral effect. Such evidence indicated that emotional facial expressions do not automatically influence motor responses in healthy young adults, but they do so only when intrinsically pertinent to the ongoing subject’s goals. Given the theoretical relevance of these findings, it is essential to assess their generalizability to different, socially relevant emotional stimuli such as emotional body postures. To address this
issue, we compared the performance of 36 right-handed participants in
two different versions of a Go/No-go task. In the Emotional Discrimination
task, participants were required to withhold their responses at the display of emotional body postures (fearful or happy) and to move at the presentation of neutral postures. Differently, in the control task, the same images were shown, but participants had to respond according to the color of the actor/actress’ t-shirt, disregarding the emotional content. Results showed that participants made more commission errors (instances in which they moved even though the No-go signal was presented) for happy than fearful body postures in the Emotional Discrimination task. However, this difference disappeared in the control task. Such evidence indicates that, like facial emotion, emotional body expressions do not influence motor control automatically, but only when they are task-relevant.

The Remapping of Peripersonal Space in a Real but Not in a Virtual Environment

Brain Sciences, 2022

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more

Zoomed out: digital media use and depersonalization experiences during the COVID-19 lockdown

Scientific Reports, 2022

Depersonalisation is a common dissociative experience characterised by distressing feelings of be... more Depersonalisation is a common dissociative experience characterised by distressing feelings of being detached or ‘estranged’ from one’s self and body and/or the world. The COVID-19 pandemic forcing millions of people to socially distance themselves from others and to change their lifestyle habits. We have conducted an online study of 622 participants worldwide to investigate the relationship between digital media-based activities, distal social interactions and peoples’ sense of self during the lockdown as contrasted with before the pandemic. We found that increased use of digital media-based activities and online social e-meetings correlated with higher feelings of depersonalisation. We also found that the participants reporting higher experiences of depersonalisation, also reported enhanced vividness of negative emotions (as opposed to positive emotions). Finally, participants who reported that lockdown influenced their life to a greater extent had higher occurrences of depersonal...

Zoomed out? Depersonalization is Related to Increased Digital Media Use During the COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdown

Depersonalisation is a common dissociative experience characterised by distressing feelings of be... more Depersonalisation is a common dissociative experience characterised by distressing feelings of being detached or ‘estranged’ from one’s self and body and/or the world. The COVID-19 pandemic forced millions of people to socially distance from others and to change life habits. We have conducted an online study on 622 participants worldwide to investigate the relationship between digital media-based activities and distal social interactions in influencing peoples’ sense of self during the lockdown as opposed to before the pandemic. We found that increased use of digital media-based activities and online social e-meetings correlated with higher feelings of depersonalisation. We also found that people reporting higher experiences of depersonalisation also reported enhanced vividness of negative emotions (as opposed to positive emotions). Our study also reveals a weak negative correlation between the frequency of physical exercise during the lockdown and the occurrence of depersonalisatio...

Haptic Aesthetics and Bodily Properties of Ori Gersht’s Digital Art: A Behavioral and Eye-Tracking Study

Frontiers in Psychology, 2019

Pain Mirrors: Neural Correlates of Observing Self or Others' Facial Expressions of Pain

Frontiers in psychology, 2018

Facial expressions of pain are able to elicit empathy and adaptive behavioral responses in the ob... more Facial expressions of pain are able to elicit empathy and adaptive behavioral responses in the observer. An influential theory posits that empathy relies on an affective mirror mechanism, according to which emotion recognition relies upon the internal simulation of motor and interoceptive states triggered by emotional stimuli. We tested this hypothesis comparing representations of self or others' expressions of pain in nineteen young healthy female volunteers by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We hypothesized that one's own facial expressions are more likely to elicit the internal simulation of emotions, being more strictly related to self. Video-clips of the facial expressions of each volunteer receiving either painful or non-painful mechanical stimulations to their right hand dorsum were recorded and used as stimuli in a 2 × 2 (Self/Other; Pain/No-Pain) within-subject design. During each trial, a 2 s video clip was presented, displaying either the su...

Seeing a Blush on the Visible and Invisible Spectrum: A Functional Thermal Infrared Imaging Study

Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2017

So far blushing has been examined in the context of a negative rather than a positive reinforceme... more So far blushing has been examined in the context of a negative rather than a positive reinforcement where visual displays of a blush were based on subjective measures. The current study used infrared imaging to measure thermal patterns of the face while with the use of a video camera quantified on the visible spectrum alterations in skin color related to a compliment. To elicit a blush a three-phase dialog was adopted ending or starting with a compliment on a female sample (N = 22). When the dialog ended with a compliment results showed a linear increase in temperature for the cheek, and forehead whereas for the peri-orbital region a linear decrease was observed. The compliment phase marked the highest temperature on the chin independent of whether or not the experiment started with a compliment contrary to other facial regions, which did not show a significant change when the experiment started with a compliment. Analyses on the visible spectrum showed that skin pigmentation was ge...

How Context Influences Our Perception of Emotional Faces: A Behavioral Study on the Kuleshov Effect

Frontiers in psychology, 2017

Facial expressions are of major importance in understanding the mental and emotional states of ot... more Facial expressions are of major importance in understanding the mental and emotional states of others. So far, most studies on the perception and comprehension of emotions have used isolated facial expressions as stimuli; for example, photographs of actors displaying facial expressions corresponding to one of the so called 'basic emotions.' However, our real experience during social interactions is different: facial expressions of emotion are mostly perceived in a wider context, constituted by body language, the surrounding environment, and our beliefs and expectations. Already in the early twentieth century, the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov argued that such context, established by intermediate shots of strong emotional content, could significantly change our interpretation of facial expressions in film. Prior experiments have shown behavioral effects pointing in this direction, but have only used static images as stimuli. Our study used a more ecological design with parti...

Evidence for Anger Saliency during the Recognition of Chimeric Facial Expressions of Emotions in Underage Ebola Survivors

Frontiers in psychology, 2017

One of the crucial features defining basic emotions and their prototypical facial expressions is ... more One of the crucial features defining basic emotions and their prototypical facial expressions is their value for survival. Childhood traumatic experiences affect the effective recognition of facial expressions of negative emotions, normally allowing the recruitment of adequate behavioral responses to environmental threats. Specifically, anger becomes an extraordinarily salient stimulus unbalancing victims' recognition of negative emotions. Despite the plethora of studies on this topic, to date, it is not clear whether this phenomenon reflects an overall response tendency toward anger recognition or a selective proneness to the salience of specific facial expressive cues of anger after trauma exposure. To address this issue, a group of underage Sierra Leonean Ebola virus disease survivors (mean age 15.40 years, SE 0.35; years of schooling 8.8 years, SE 0.46; 14 males) and a control group (mean age 14.55, SE 0.30; years of schooling 8.07 years, SE 0.30, 15 males) performed a force...

Interoception and Autonomic Correlates during Social Interactions. Implications for Anorexia

Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2017

The aim of this study is to investigate the bodily-self in Restrictive Anorexia, focusing on two ... more The aim of this study is to investigate the bodily-self in Restrictive Anorexia, focusing on two basic aspects related to the bodily self: autonomic strategies in social behavior, in which others' social desirability features, and social cues (e.g., gaze) are modulated, and interoception (i.e., the sensitivity to stimuli originating inside the body). Furthermore, since previous studies carried out on healthy individuals found that interoception seems to contribute to the autonomic regulation of social behavior, as measured by Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA), we aimed to explore this link in anorexia patients, whose ability to perceive their bodily signal seems to be impaired. To this purpose, we compared a group of anorexia patients (ANg; restrictive type) with a group of Healthy Controls (HCg) for RSA responses during both a resting state and a social proxemics task, for their explicit judgments of comfort in social distances during a behavioral proxemics task, and for their...

Frontal Functional Connectivity of Electrocorticographic Delta and Theta Rhythms during Action Execution Versus Action Observation in Humans

Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 2017

“Cuts in Action”: A High-Density EEG Study Investigating the Neural Correlates of Different Editing Techniques in Film

Cognitive Science, 2016

Less Empathic and More Reactive: The Different Impact of Childhood Maltreatment on Facial Mimicry and Vagal Regulation

PloS one

Facial mimicry and vagal regulation represent two crucial physiological responses to others' ... more Facial mimicry and vagal regulation represent two crucial physiological responses to others' facial expressions of emotions. Facial mimicry, defined as the automatic, rapid and congruent electromyographic activation to others' facial expressions, is implicated in empathy, emotional reciprocity and emotions recognition. Vagal regulation, quantified by the computation of Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA), exemplifies the autonomic adaptation to contingent social cues. Although it has been demonstrated that childhood maltreatment induces alterations in the processing of the facial expression of emotions, both at an explicit and implicit level, the effects of maltreatment on children's facial mimicry and vagal regulation in response to facial expressions of emotions remain unknown. The purpose of the present study was to fill this gap, involving 24 street-children (maltreated group) and 20 age-matched controls (control group). We recorded their spontaneous facial electromyo...

Interoception and Positive Symptoms in Schizophrenia

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2016

Proactive Control Strategies for Overt and Covert Go/NoGo Tasks: An Electrical Neuroimaging Study

PLOS ONE, 2016

Human, Nature, Dynamism: The Effects of Content and Movement Perception on Brain Activations during the Aesthetic Judgment of Representational Paintings

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2016

Ardizzi M, Sestito M, Martini F, Umiltà MA, Ravera R, Gallese V. (2014) When Age Matters: Differences in Facial Mimicry and Autonomic Responses to Peers' Emotions in Teenagers and Adults. PLoS ONE 9(10): e110763. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0110763

Motor Inhibition during Overt and Covert Actions: An Electrical Neuroimaging Study

PLOS ONE, 2015

Alpha, beta and gamma electrocorticographic rhythms in somatosensory, motor, premotor and prefrontal cortical areas differ in movement execution and observation in humans

Clinical Neurophysiology, 2016

How the Context Matters. Literal and Figurative Meaning in the Embodied Language Paradigm

PLoS ONE, 2014

Emotional body postures affect inhibitory control only when task-relevant

Frontiers Psychology, 2022

A classical theoretical frame to interpret motor reactions to emotional stimuli is that such stim... more A classical theoretical frame to interpret motor reactions to emotional stimuli is that such stimuli, particularly those threat-related, are processed preferentially, i.e., they are capable of capturing and grabbing attention automatically. Research has recently challenged this view, showing that the task relevance of emotional stimuli is crucial to having a reliable behavioral effect. Such evidence indicated that emotional facial expressions do not automatically influence motor responses in healthy young adults, but they do so only when intrinsically pertinent to the ongoing subject’s goals. Given the theoretical relevance of these findings, it is essential to assess their generalizability to different, socially relevant emotional stimuli such as emotional body postures. To address this
issue, we compared the performance of 36 right-handed participants in
two different versions of a Go/No-go task. In the Emotional Discrimination
task, participants were required to withhold their responses at the display of emotional body postures (fearful or happy) and to move at the presentation of neutral postures. Differently, in the control task, the same images were shown, but participants had to respond according to the color of the actor/actress’ t-shirt, disregarding the emotional content. Results showed that participants made more commission errors (instances in which they moved even though the No-go signal was presented) for happy than fearful body postures in the Emotional Discrimination task. However, this difference disappeared in the control task. Such evidence indicates that, like facial emotion, emotional body expressions do not influence motor control automatically, but only when they are task-relevant.

The Remapping of Peripersonal Space in a Real but Not in a Virtual Environment

Brain Sciences, 2022

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more

Zoomed out: digital media use and depersonalization experiences during the COVID-19 lockdown

Scientific Reports, 2022

Depersonalisation is a common dissociative experience characterised by distressing feelings of be... more Depersonalisation is a common dissociative experience characterised by distressing feelings of being detached or ‘estranged’ from one’s self and body and/or the world. The COVID-19 pandemic forcing millions of people to socially distance themselves from others and to change their lifestyle habits. We have conducted an online study of 622 participants worldwide to investigate the relationship between digital media-based activities, distal social interactions and peoples’ sense of self during the lockdown as contrasted with before the pandemic. We found that increased use of digital media-based activities and online social e-meetings correlated with higher feelings of depersonalisation. We also found that the participants reporting higher experiences of depersonalisation, also reported enhanced vividness of negative emotions (as opposed to positive emotions). Finally, participants who reported that lockdown influenced their life to a greater extent had higher occurrences of depersonal...

Zoomed out? Depersonalization is Related to Increased Digital Media Use During the COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdown

Depersonalisation is a common dissociative experience characterised by distressing feelings of be... more Depersonalisation is a common dissociative experience characterised by distressing feelings of being detached or ‘estranged’ from one’s self and body and/or the world. The COVID-19 pandemic forced millions of people to socially distance from others and to change life habits. We have conducted an online study on 622 participants worldwide to investigate the relationship between digital media-based activities and distal social interactions in influencing peoples’ sense of self during the lockdown as opposed to before the pandemic. We found that increased use of digital media-based activities and online social e-meetings correlated with higher feelings of depersonalisation. We also found that people reporting higher experiences of depersonalisation also reported enhanced vividness of negative emotions (as opposed to positive emotions). Our study also reveals a weak negative correlation between the frequency of physical exercise during the lockdown and the occurrence of depersonalisatio...

Haptic Aesthetics and Bodily Properties of Ori Gersht’s Digital Art: A Behavioral and Eye-Tracking Study

Frontiers in Psychology, 2019

Pain Mirrors: Neural Correlates of Observing Self or Others' Facial Expressions of Pain

Frontiers in psychology, 2018

Facial expressions of pain are able to elicit empathy and adaptive behavioral responses in the ob... more Facial expressions of pain are able to elicit empathy and adaptive behavioral responses in the observer. An influential theory posits that empathy relies on an affective mirror mechanism, according to which emotion recognition relies upon the internal simulation of motor and interoceptive states triggered by emotional stimuli. We tested this hypothesis comparing representations of self or others' expressions of pain in nineteen young healthy female volunteers by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We hypothesized that one's own facial expressions are more likely to elicit the internal simulation of emotions, being more strictly related to self. Video-clips of the facial expressions of each volunteer receiving either painful or non-painful mechanical stimulations to their right hand dorsum were recorded and used as stimuli in a 2 × 2 (Self/Other; Pain/No-Pain) within-subject design. During each trial, a 2 s video clip was presented, displaying either the su...

Seeing a Blush on the Visible and Invisible Spectrum: A Functional Thermal Infrared Imaging Study

Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2017

So far blushing has been examined in the context of a negative rather than a positive reinforceme... more So far blushing has been examined in the context of a negative rather than a positive reinforcement where visual displays of a blush were based on subjective measures. The current study used infrared imaging to measure thermal patterns of the face while with the use of a video camera quantified on the visible spectrum alterations in skin color related to a compliment. To elicit a blush a three-phase dialog was adopted ending or starting with a compliment on a female sample (N = 22). When the dialog ended with a compliment results showed a linear increase in temperature for the cheek, and forehead whereas for the peri-orbital region a linear decrease was observed. The compliment phase marked the highest temperature on the chin independent of whether or not the experiment started with a compliment contrary to other facial regions, which did not show a significant change when the experiment started with a compliment. Analyses on the visible spectrum showed that skin pigmentation was ge...

How Context Influences Our Perception of Emotional Faces: A Behavioral Study on the Kuleshov Effect

Frontiers in psychology, 2017

Facial expressions are of major importance in understanding the mental and emotional states of ot... more Facial expressions are of major importance in understanding the mental and emotional states of others. So far, most studies on the perception and comprehension of emotions have used isolated facial expressions as stimuli; for example, photographs of actors displaying facial expressions corresponding to one of the so called 'basic emotions.' However, our real experience during social interactions is different: facial expressions of emotion are mostly perceived in a wider context, constituted by body language, the surrounding environment, and our beliefs and expectations. Already in the early twentieth century, the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov argued that such context, established by intermediate shots of strong emotional content, could significantly change our interpretation of facial expressions in film. Prior experiments have shown behavioral effects pointing in this direction, but have only used static images as stimuli. Our study used a more ecological design with parti...

Evidence for Anger Saliency during the Recognition of Chimeric Facial Expressions of Emotions in Underage Ebola Survivors

Frontiers in psychology, 2017

One of the crucial features defining basic emotions and their prototypical facial expressions is ... more One of the crucial features defining basic emotions and their prototypical facial expressions is their value for survival. Childhood traumatic experiences affect the effective recognition of facial expressions of negative emotions, normally allowing the recruitment of adequate behavioral responses to environmental threats. Specifically, anger becomes an extraordinarily salient stimulus unbalancing victims' recognition of negative emotions. Despite the plethora of studies on this topic, to date, it is not clear whether this phenomenon reflects an overall response tendency toward anger recognition or a selective proneness to the salience of specific facial expressive cues of anger after trauma exposure. To address this issue, a group of underage Sierra Leonean Ebola virus disease survivors (mean age 15.40 years, SE 0.35; years of schooling 8.8 years, SE 0.46; 14 males) and a control group (mean age 14.55, SE 0.30; years of schooling 8.07 years, SE 0.30, 15 males) performed a force...

Interoception and Autonomic Correlates during Social Interactions. Implications for Anorexia

Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2017

The aim of this study is to investigate the bodily-self in Restrictive Anorexia, focusing on two ... more The aim of this study is to investigate the bodily-self in Restrictive Anorexia, focusing on two basic aspects related to the bodily self: autonomic strategies in social behavior, in which others' social desirability features, and social cues (e.g., gaze) are modulated, and interoception (i.e., the sensitivity to stimuli originating inside the body). Furthermore, since previous studies carried out on healthy individuals found that interoception seems to contribute to the autonomic regulation of social behavior, as measured by Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA), we aimed to explore this link in anorexia patients, whose ability to perceive their bodily signal seems to be impaired. To this purpose, we compared a group of anorexia patients (ANg; restrictive type) with a group of Healthy Controls (HCg) for RSA responses during both a resting state and a social proxemics task, for their explicit judgments of comfort in social distances during a behavioral proxemics task, and for their...

Frontal Functional Connectivity of Electrocorticographic Delta and Theta Rhythms during Action Execution Versus Action Observation in Humans

Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 2017

“Cuts in Action”: A High-Density EEG Study Investigating the Neural Correlates of Different Editing Techniques in Film

Cognitive Science, 2016

Less Empathic and More Reactive: The Different Impact of Childhood Maltreatment on Facial Mimicry and Vagal Regulation

PloS one

Facial mimicry and vagal regulation represent two crucial physiological responses to others' ... more Facial mimicry and vagal regulation represent two crucial physiological responses to others' facial expressions of emotions. Facial mimicry, defined as the automatic, rapid and congruent electromyographic activation to others' facial expressions, is implicated in empathy, emotional reciprocity and emotions recognition. Vagal regulation, quantified by the computation of Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA), exemplifies the autonomic adaptation to contingent social cues. Although it has been demonstrated that childhood maltreatment induces alterations in the processing of the facial expression of emotions, both at an explicit and implicit level, the effects of maltreatment on children's facial mimicry and vagal regulation in response to facial expressions of emotions remain unknown. The purpose of the present study was to fill this gap, involving 24 street-children (maltreated group) and 20 age-matched controls (control group). We recorded their spontaneous facial electromyo...

Interoception and Positive Symptoms in Schizophrenia

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2016

Proactive Control Strategies for Overt and Covert Go/NoGo Tasks: An Electrical Neuroimaging Study

PLOS ONE, 2016

Human, Nature, Dynamism: The Effects of Content and Movement Perception on Brain Activations during the Aesthetic Judgment of Representational Paintings

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2016

Ardizzi M, Sestito M, Martini F, Umiltà MA, Ravera R, Gallese V. (2014) When Age Matters: Differences in Facial Mimicry and Autonomic Responses to Peers' Emotions in Teenagers and Adults. PLoS ONE 9(10): e110763. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0110763

Motor Inhibition during Overt and Covert Actions: An Electrical Neuroimaging Study

PLOS ONE, 2015

Alpha, beta and gamma electrocorticographic rhythms in somatosensory, motor, premotor and prefrontal cortical areas differ in movement execution and observation in humans

Clinical Neurophysiology, 2016

How the Context Matters. Literal and Figurative Meaning in the Embodied Language Paradigm

PLoS ONE, 2014

Finding the Body in the Brain. From Simulation Theory to Embodied Simulation. From: Goldman and His Critics, First Edition. Edited by Brian McLaughlin and Hilary K. Kornblith. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. In press.

Mirror Neurons and the Evolution of Brain and language. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, pp. 390, 2002.

La Nascita dell'Intersoggettività. Lo Sviluppo del Sé tra Psicodinamica e Neurobiologia.

by Massimo Ammaniti and Vittorio Gallese

Lo Schermo Empatico. Cinema e neuroscienze. Raffaello Cortina Editore, Milano, 2015. 315 pp.

by Michele Guerra and Vittorio Gallese

Brief Description: - Our book is the outcome of five years of intense dialogue, discussions, the... more Brief Description: - Our book is the outcome of five years of intense dialogue, discussions, theoretical and empirical work, jointly carried out by a cognitive neuroscientist and a film scholar and it offers a new multidisciplinary approach to images and film. The main aim of the book is to answer the following questions: Why do people go to the movies? What does it mean to watch a movie? To which extent the perceived fictional nature of movies is different from our daily perception of the real world?
The book proposes that film art, based on the interaction between the viewer and the world on the screen, and often described in terms of immersion, impression of reality, simulation and involvement of the viewer’s body in the fictitious world she inhabits, can be reconsidered from a neuroscientific perspective which looks at the brain and to its tight relation to the body. We propose a new model of perception – embodied simulation – elaborated on the basis of three decades of neuroscientific investigations demonstrating the role played in cognition by sensorimotor and affect-related brain circuits. The book uses Embodied simulation theory to approach and discuss key issues on the relation between spectators, images and films, like film style, camera movements, montage, close-ups, real and fictional worlds, new technologies and media and their impact on our mind and behavior. Scenes from famous films, like Notorius, The Shining, Full Metal Jacket, Persona, The Silence of the Lambs, Toy Story, etc. are described and analyzed from our multidisciplinary approach and used as case studies to discuss our proposal.
The approach is radically new. It addresses a large audience made of film and media studies scholars, cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychologists, philosophers, students and lay people who love cinema.

Outline – The book is made of an Introduction, six chapters, a Glossary explaining to the general reader some of the notions and concepts of film theory and neuroscience employed throughout the text, an index of names and a bibliography. The book contains 49 B/W figures.

The Introduction presents our main hypothesis and outlines how it will be addressed in the following chapters. It clarifies why neuroscience is important for our understanding of why we like films and how films engage spectators, provided it adopts an embodied perspective, where the brain is not detached from the body and from its relation to the world.
The First chapter is entitled: ‘A new model of perception: Embodied simulation. It provides the key neuroscientific data enabling the reader to understand how neuroscience will be used in the next chapters to address images and film. Its subheadings are: a) Cinema, brain and empathy, where we discuss the reception of film and introduce the notion of empathy and its history; b) Body, brain, neuroscience, where we we provide a critical account of neuroscience and detail our specific approach; c) From classic cognitivism to embodied cognition, where we outline and criticize two mainstream approaches to social cognition, classic cognitivism and evolutionary psychology; d) Motor Cognition: Movements and motor outcomes, where we explain why and how we should reconceive the cognitive role of the motor system and its role in visual perception; e) Motor Cognition: Area F4 and peri-personal space, where we provide evidence on the role of the motor system in mapping space; f) Motor Cognition: Canonical neurons and objects ‘ready to hand’, where we discuss canonical neurons and their role in object perception; g) Motor Cognition: Mirror neurons and mirror mechanisms, where we introduce mirror neurons in macaques and mirror mechanisms in humans and outline their role in social perception; h) Emotions, sensations and embodied simulation, where we describe the role of embodied simulation in the perception of the emotions and sensations of others; i) The subject as corporeality between reality and imagination: Liberated embodied simulation, where we introduce the aesthetic specificity of our model of visual perception and explain how it could be applied to film viewing and more generally to fiction; j) Brain-body and the big screen, where we discuss how neuroscience has been applied so far to study film and cinema.
The Second chapter is entitled: False movements and impossible gazes. In this chapter we discuss how cinema is able to produce the sense of body immanence, allowing spectators to identify with the characters they see on the screen. Its subheadings are: a) Who did move?, where we analyze famous scenes for Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorius, Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake and Delmer Daves’s Dark Passage to discuss how cinema is able to create a subjective perspective; b) Resonating with movement, where we discuss the pertinence of neuroscience to the issues introduced in the preceding pages; c) Positions, where we address the mind-movie problem; d) Sherlock Jr., where the problem of spatial segregation between screen and spectators is addressed by discussing scenes from Buster Keaton’s film Sherlock Jr.
The Third chapter is entitled: Camera movements and motor cognition and addresses the role of camera movement in generating spectators’ immersion in the narrated film plot. Its subheadings are: a) Style, where we trace the bodily origins of the notion of style and discuss how film style has been addressed by film scholars; b) Moving the camera, where we address the stylistic role of camera movements in film history; c) Kubrick interlude, where we discuss from our perspective several films of this author, like Barry Lyndon, The Shining and Full Metal Jacket and introduce the steadycam; d) Moving mirrors, where we present our empirical results on the role of camera movements in generating spectators immersion, empathy and identification with film characters.
The Fourth chapter is entitled: The cut and harmony. It deals with montage. Its subheadings are: a) Calumet City, where we discuss from our perspective parallel montage in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs; Continuity, where continuity editing is addressed by relating to several film scholars and authors like Jospeh Anderson, Lev Kuleshov, Jean Epstein; c) Action, action, action!, where the role of action in montage is addressed by referring to early film theorists like Winthrop Sargent, Henry Albert Phillips, Vachel Lindsay, and the novel writer Paul Auster; d) A crack in the mirror, where we introduce and discuss our empirical neuroscientific results on montage.
The Fifth chapter is entitled: The face and the hands. It discusses close-ups of the face and body in relation to film and neuroscience. Its subheadings are: a) Self-touching in front of a mirror, where we introduce and discuss the opening scenes of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona; b) The somatosensory system and multimodality, where we address the notion of multimodality, and explain how the brain processes touch and pain; c) The social perception of touch, where we explain how the brain processes the vision of touch; The sensible film, where scenes from Jean Luc Godard’s Une Femme Marriée are analyzed and propose how the notion of ‘haptic vision’ discussed by film theorists can be approached from a neuroscientific perspective; d) Animations, where we propose that our model of embodied simulation can be used to explain the sense of presence generated by animation films, analyzing Jan Svankmejer’s films and Pixar’s Toy Story.
The Sixth Chapter is entitled: New mediations, new films, new experiments. It projects our proposal into the future by discussing new digital technologies and mediations and their impact on film and its reception. Its subheadings are: a) New positions, where we introduce the future of film and cinema in the light of new technologies and the few empirical studies addressing these issues; b) Digital presence, where we propose how our model can help formulating new theoretical and empirical approaches; d) Death on the chat line, where we introduce the film Unfriended and discuss how new mediations of filmic content reshape our relation to the film; e) A new filmic grammar, where we introduce action cams and their new impact on film viewing; f) End of the screen?, where we envision how the new filmic mediation may generate a new form of film reception.

Next is a Glossary of terms with 30 entries listed in alphabetical order, from Action cams to Zoom.
The book ends with a bibliography and a list of names.

Outstanding Features List – The book is ambitious as it proposes a radically new approach to cinema and film. It doesn’t ask ‘what is cinema’, but ‘why do we love films’ and ‘how do they work’. The use of neuroscience is novel as it showcases an integrated approach that can purchase a double gain: on the one hand, by applying neuroscience to film reception it allows to reformulate and redefine several aspects of film theory; on the other, by discussing brain function against the background of film theory, it helps our understanding of the brain-body contribution to the unique human capacity to constantly inhabit the real world and the parallel worlds of fiction. The book avoids scholar jargon and it offers the opportunity to a wide audience of readers to get deeper into the understanding of film and of the brain-body, combining clarity with intellectual depth.

M. Ammaniti & V. Gallese - The Birth of Intersubjectivity. Psychodynamics, Neurobiology and the Self. W. W. Norton & Company, 2014, pp. 236.

HOMO DUPLEX REVISITED. EMBODIED SIMULATION AND THE PARALLEL WORLDS.

Our ontology is not confined to what we can directly experience through our body. Technological d... more Our ontology is not confined to what we can directly experience through our body. Technological devices multiply our ‘province of meaning’, projecting it into multiple dimensions beyond the reach of our naked eye. Our present digitally-mediated reality moves our take on the world one step further, requiring a new definition of personal and social identity. Embodied simulation, a new model of perception and cognition, can provide a new take on these issues, fostering a newly based dialogue between neuroscience and the humanities.

ROOMS_ the scientific background of the research

by Vittorio Gallese and Davide Ruzzon

Why are architects so interested in neuroscience? The answer is simple, even seemingly trivial, n... more Why are architects so interested in neuroscience? The answer is simple, even seemingly trivial, nothing new. Answer: "Because the discoveries made in the last decades have shown that space affects our way of thinking, of behaving, in short of being alone or in groups. It has an impact on human society." What a revelation, one might say. We have always known it. Most would agree that raising children in an empty room or a squalid environment will lead them to behave differently from those raised in warm surroundings and stimulating environments. But all this is not enough, obviously, if we are here to discuss it. Indeed, things are not as they seem.

The Role that Mirror Mechanisms and Embodied Simulation Play in the Perception of the Built Environment" - Vittorio Gallese, interviewed by Sarah Robinson for the Driehaus Foundation Built Environment Symposium 2017

L'empathie d'une machine: Cinema and Neuroscience. Lyon, March 2017.

by Michele Guerra and Vittorio Gallese

The discovery of mirror neurons (MNs) has influenced the debate on action, gestures, motor and sp... more The discovery of mirror neurons (MNs) has influenced the debate on action, gestures, motor and spatial knowledge, emotions and empathy, all aspects that in recent years have been deeply reconsidered within film studies. In the last years, we have been focusing on the role embodied simulation (ES) – a theory triggered by the discovery of MNs – plays during film experience, referring mainly to film style and techniques. ES shows that people reuse their own mental states or processes represented with a bodily format in functionally attributing them to others. We map objects, space and the actions of others onto our own motor representations, as well as others’ emotions and sensations onto our own viscero-motor and sensory-motor representations.
Of course, both the mediated experience created by the screen and the re-invention of a realistic world within the virtual space of that “window” modulate in very interesting ways our reactions and behaviors when confronted with the diegetic world of film. The neuroscientific approach to film studies has to be thought of as the last emergence of a long tradition of study, which has been considering cinema as a machine capable of involving its viewers and shaping up experiences at a time new and familiar. In our talk, we start from Jean Epstein’s L’intelligence d’une machine to re-discuss the vital forms of cinema, considering cognitive neuroscience as the meta-field where some of the most insightful views of this theoretical approach could converge.
The potential relevance of ES to film experience and the empathic engagement it accompanies will be discussed by reviewing theoretical and empirical work from our lab on the experience of moving images, with particular emphasis on camera movements and montage. Our point is that ES can enrich our understanding of film expression and its reception, by studying their neural and bodily components. At the same time, it could contribute to a theoretical and philosophical re-consideration of a film anthropology which finds its forefather in figures like Eisenstein, Epstein, and Morin.

Finding the body in the mind . 14th JOSEPH SANDLER PSYCHOANALYTIC RESEARCH CONFERENCE 2013, Frankfurt, Germany

Narrazione, arte e convivenza. Festival di Filosofia di Modena, 2016.

The Body in Aesthetic Experience. Talk given at the University of California at Berkeley on February the 23rd 2012.

https://www.researchgate.net/deref/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DYorIXdQiNVU

The Body, the Brain, Symbolic Expression & Its Experience: An Experimental Aesthetics Perspective. Chandaria Lectures 1-2-3, School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK. London

https://www.researchgate.net/deref/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DYcqIrEvD0ik https... more

Interview on the brain, the body, cognition, aesthetics and Aby Warburg. With Pierre Magistretti and Francois Ansermet at Agalma Foundation, Geneva, Switzerland.

https://www.researchgate.net/deref/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D2cG3dorR9k4

Simulating drone and bodily gestures: a behavioral study

by Anna Kolesnikov, Michele Guerra, and Vittorio Gallese

Simulating musical rotation, contour and notes: the perception of (e)motion in nonmusicians

by Anna Kolesnikov, Michele Guerra, and Vittorio Gallese