​Department of Psychology

Raw data of the study

The stimulus set was used in the ERP paper "Decoding Motivational States and Craving through Electrical Markers for Neural 'Mind Reading’ by Proverbio AM & Zanetti A (2025). The aim of this study was to identify electrical neuromarkers of 12 different motivational and physiological states (such as visceral craves, affective and somatosensory states, and secondary needs) in LIS, coma, or minimally conscious state patients. Auditory stimuli were designed by combining a human expressive voice with a background sound to evoke a context related to the targeted needs. The stimuli included: primary or visceral needs (hunger, thirst, and sleep), homeostatic or somatosensory sensations (cold, heat, and pain), emotional or affective states (sadness, joy, and fear), and secondary needs (desire for music, movement, and play). 17 audio clips were recorded for each micro-category, each replicated twice: once with a male voice and once with a female voice, totaling 408 stimuli. Audacity software was used to combining the vocal track with a background context coherent with the verbal content. Human voices were recorded using Microphone 202 K38 by Hompower (SNR = 80 dB). The semantic content, the prosodic intonation and the emotional tone of all voices were coherent and appropriately matched. Some of the background sounds were recorded using the same microphone, while others were sourced from the publicly accessible BBC Sound Effects library for scientific purposes (https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search). Research was funded by ATE – Fondo di Ateneo No. 31159-2019-ATE-0064, University of Milano-Bicocca. The research project, entitled “Auditory imagery in BCI mental reconstruction” was preapproved by the Research Assessment Committee of the Department of Psychology (CRIP) for minimal risk projects, under the aegis of the Ethical committee of University of Milano-Bicocca, on February 9th, 2024, protocol n: RM-2024-775).

AttiFood Picture Database

An elite professional pianist executed a 30-minute, uninterrupted performance of seven pieces on a Yamaha P-225B digital piano in an anechoic chamber, employing the default soundbank. The repertoire featured Contrapunctus I (BWV 1080) by Bach and an excerpt from Chopin’s Ballade No. 1, Op. 23, performed from memory based on urtext editions. Key-press onset events were annotated per hand to quantify note and gesture counts, excluding legato transitions without discrete attacks. Both performances exhibited a convergent low-frequency periodicity in beat-level timing variability (tactus imprecision), oscillating at approximately 0.36 Hz. This slow temporal modulation aligns with the delta-band range of neural oscillations and may reflect a shared endogenous timing scaffold, plausibly motor in origin, underlying expressive control in skilled performance.

Database to

Complete individual evaluation in cm for hand and finger of sighted and blind participants.

A Nonverbal Signs Dataset for the Italian Population 1,522 Colorful Stimuli of Spontaneous Social Communication, for experimental settings, including EEG/ERP experiments. The provided stimuli are made available for use with the understanding that proper acknowledgment and citation of the source are required in any resulting work or publication. Proper attribution not only ensures academic integrity but also duly recognizes the effort involved in their development. Should further details regarding citation be needed, the relevant information can be provided upon request. SOURCE and VALIDATION studies: - Proverbio AM, Gabaro V, Orlandi A, Zani A. Semantic brain areas are involved in gesture comprehension: An electrical neuroimaging study. Brain Lang. 2015 Aug;147:30-40. doi: 10.1016/j.bandl.2015.05.002.  - Proverbio AM, Ornaghi L, Gabaro V. How face blurring affects body language processing of static gestures in women and men. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2018 Jun 1;13(6):590-603. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsy033.

Supplementary materials, neuroimaging data, and analysis code for the submitted manuscript: Unaware Processing of Words Activates Experience-Derived Information in Conceptual-Semantic Brain Networks Marta Ghio1,2,*, Barbara Cassone3,*, Marco Tettamanti2,3 1 Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany; 2 CIMeC - Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento, Italy; 3 Department of Psychology, University of Milan-Bicocca, Milano, Italy. * Equal contribution. Keywords: conceptual-semantic representations; experience; awareness; continuous flash suppression; manipulable objects; emotions.

This study investigates the neural mechanisms underlying word reading in professional musicians compared to musically naïve individuals (control group), focusing on the N170 component of ERPs dedicated to orthographic processing. The application of standardized weighted low-resolution electromagnetic tomography (swLORETA) to individual data contributes to the innovative nature of this project. The results showed that musicians showed a bilateral activation of the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA, BA37) in contrast to controls who showed a clearly left lateralized activation of the middle occipital gyrus (MOG, BA19). Musicians also showed enhanced reading skills compared to controls. It is thought that musicians develop this extra reading region to read the spatial and holistic aspects of musical notation. ERPs were recorded in 80 participants (men and women, musicians and non-musicians). The study involved the visual presentation of 300 Italian words of different length and complexity, presented randomly on a computer screen, as described in detail in the study by Proverbio et al. (2013). The words, written in upper case, ranged from 4 to 10 letters. A recognition task was performed in which participants had to press a key when they saw a specific target letter within a word, depending on the experimental condition, while ignoring non-target letters. Words lasted 1,600 ms, and the interstimulus interval (ISI) was randomly varied between 1,000 and 1,200 ms. ERPs were averaged from -100 to 1200 ms. The N170 component was quantified between 150-190 ms. swLORETA was applied to N170 responses during word reading in both groups. The full list of dipoles and neuroimaging data is presented here. The data are a compendium to the paper "Music Literacy shapes the Specialization of a Right-hemispheric Word Reading area" and include raw data collected from 2013 to 2023 at the Cognitive Lab ERP of UNIMIB for the "Neuroscience of Music" project. Related papers: Pantaleo MM, Arcuri G, Manfredi M, Proverbio AM. Music literacy improves reading skills via bilateral orthographic development. Sci Rep. 2024 Feb 12;14(1):3506. Proverbio AM, Manfredi M, Zani A, Adorni R. Musical expertise affects neural bases of letter recognition. Neuropsychologia. 2013 Feb;51(3):538-49.

Emotions are commonly associated with bodily sensations, e.g., boiling with anger when overwhelmed with rage. Studies have shown that emotions are related to specific body parts, suggesting that somatotopically organized cortical regions that commonly respond to somatosensory and motor experiences might be involved in the generation of emotions. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate whether the subjective feelings of emotion are accompanied by the activation of somatotopically defined sensorimotor brain regions, thus aiming to reconstruct an “emotional homunculus”. By defining the convergence of the brain activation patterns evoked by self-generated emotions during scanning onto a sensorimotor map created on participants’ tactile and motor brain activity, we showed that all the evoked emotions activated parts of this sensorimotor map, yet with considerable overlap among different emotions. Although we could not find a highly specific segmentation of discrete emotions over sensorimotor regions, our results support an embodied experience of emotions. Here, you will find the original code to digitise emBODY pen and paper silhouettes.