Carlo Semenza
Università degli Studi di Padova, Neuroscience, Faculty Member
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Neuroscience, Biology, Social Psychology, Cognitive Science, Educational Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and 17 moreReading, Neuropsychology, Moral Psychology, Humor, Social Neuroscience, Neurology, Neurological Rehabilitation, Humor Studies, Laughter, Moral Education, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Linguistics, Cognitive Neuroscience, Event-Related Potentials, Word Frequency, Philosophy, and Psychology edit
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Psychology and Aphasia
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Despite decades of studies, it is still an open question on how and where simple multiplication is solved by the brain. This fragmented picture is mostly related to the different tasks employed. Although in neuropsychological studies... more
Despite decades of studies, it is still an open question on how and where simple multiplication is solved by the brain. This fragmented picture is mostly related to the different tasks employed. Although in neuropsychological studies patients are asked to perform and report simple oral calculations, neuroimaging and neurophysiological studies often use verification tasks, in which the result is shown, and the participant must verify the correctness. This MEG study aims to unify the sources of evidence, investigating how brain activation unfolds in time using a single-digit multiplication production task. We compared the participants’ brain activity – focusing on the parietal lobes - based on response efficiency, dividing their responses in fast and slow. Results showed a higher activation for fast, as compared to slow, responses in the left angular gyrus starting after the first operand, and in the right supramarginal gyrus only after the second operand. A whole-brain analysis showe...
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Cognitive reserve (CR) refers to acquired experience that modulates resistance to physiological aging or brain damage. A relatively neglected issue is whether or not CR affects cognitive abilities equally. One relevant component of CR... more
Cognitive reserve (CR) refers to acquired experience that modulates resistance to physiological aging or brain damage. A relatively neglected issue is whether or not CR affects cognitive abilities equally. One relevant component of CR seems to be the richness of connections in semantic knowledge. We examined, in N=66 healthy older adults, the potential influence of CR and semantic knowledge on the ability to retrieve proper names and common nouns. These two name categories have different semantic organizations, whereby proper names are characterized by a weaker semantic link to the information they refer to. Controlling for age, CR and semantic knowledge were linearly and positively associated with common noun retrieval. On the other hand, CR assisted proper name retrieval in older adults with a weaker semantic profile, while semantic knowledge assisted proper name retrieval in older adults with lower CR.This study contributes to define the cognitive underpinnings of CR.
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In the aphasic production, the verb-noun (V-N) dissociation (a condition whereby brain damage selectively affects one of the two categories, while sparing the other) may have a different nature in different cases, reflecting semantic,... more
In the aphasic production, the verb-noun (V-N) dissociation (a condition whereby brain damage selectively affects one of the two categories, while sparing the other) may have a different nature in different cases, reflecting semantic, syntactic or grammatical class effects. The observation that the V-N dissociations have a different nature goes in hand with the fact that in Linguistics it is hard to spot out the differences between nouns and verbs in a clear-cut way. In this regard, the nominalization phenomenon is explicative since nominalizations share both nominal and verbal properties. In the literature on aphasia, only few have studies tested how verbal and nominal selective deficits impact on closely related pairs involving verbs and the corresponding nominalizations. The present study aims at verifying whether the aphasic production of nominalizations can be affected by class selective impairments or by semantic/syntactic deficits. It will be showed that the aphasic speakers’...
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"Cross-linguistically, diminutive formation is the first morphological rule that children acquire. The exceptional status of diminutives makes them suitable for being acquired very early (Dressler, Savickiene, 2007). Diminutives are... more
"Cross-linguistically, diminutive formation is the first morphological rule that children acquire. The exceptional status of diminutives makes them suitable for being acquired very early (Dressler, Savickiene, 2007). Diminutives are derivational and not inflectional, even if they are not prototypical representatives of derivational morphology, because they do not change the category of the base. For this reason, diminutive suffixes are not heads (Scalise, 1994), but still have some head properties because they can change both the inflectional class and the gender of the base (Dressler, Merlini, 1994). The representation of morphologically complex words in the mental lexicon and their neurocognitive processing have been debated topics in psycholinguistics, in cognitive neuroscience of language and in neurolinguistics. Despite the fact that the category of diminutives has a wide distribution across languages and has been largely investigated, except for Luzzatti, Mondini, Semenza (2001) nothing relevant has been reported on diminutives from a neuropsychological perspective. An aphasiological study, however can help in answering the following questions. How are diminutives represented in the mental lexicon? Which processes are involved in their production? A comparison was thus made between selected cases of people with aphasia, healthy young and elderly adults, and preschool children. The relation between potentiality and illegality and the regression hypothesis were also investigated."
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Patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) might experience difficulties in numerical and financial abilities of daily living that compromise their autonomy. The aim of the present work was to examine whether specific tests of the... more
Patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) might experience difficulties in numerical and financial abilities of daily living that compromise their autonomy. The aim of the present work was to examine whether specific tests of the standard neuropsychological assessment could be used to predict these deficits in the clinical practice. Thirty-four MCI patients underwent a comprehensive clinical and neuropsychological examination including (1) a complete assessment of financial abilities and (2) a traditional neuropsychological assessment including measures of language, memory, executive functioning, reasoning, attention, and visuospatial abilities. The neuropsychological tests were used as predictors of the performance in everyday financial tasks using logistic regression analysis. Deficits in financial tasks including calculating percentages, using financial concepts and applying financial judgments were significantly predicted by tests of executive functions, language and short-term memory, while deficits in frequently encountered financial tasks activities such as item purchase and reading numbers could not be predicted by standard neuropsychological evaluations. Contingency tables on performance above/below clinical cut-offs evidenced some cases of financial deficits in the absence of cognitive deficits and, vice versa, some patients with cognitive decline did not show financial impairments. These results suggest that while some cognitive functions might be crucial for taking financial decisions, an ad hoc test of financial capacity is essential to make overall inferences about the everyday financial autonomy of MCI patients. This has potential implications for clinical and legal decisions that directly impact the individuals and their families.
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Objective:In the present study, we explored numerical problems in individuals with aphasia. We investigate whether numerical deficits, usually accompanying aphasia, can be observed on number comprehension tasks that do not necessarily... more
Objective:In the present study, we explored numerical problems in individuals with aphasia. We investigate whether numerical deficits, usually accompanying aphasia, can be observed on number comprehension tasks that do not necessarily require an oral response.Method:Individuals with aphasia were classified into anterior, posterior, and global subgroups according to the lesion type. To investigate numerical cognition, we used a relatively recent tool, the Numerical Activities of Daily Living (NADL).Results:The results showed that individuals with aphasia have problems with tasks of basic number comprehension as well as in most NADL. In the formal part of the NADL, anterior aphasic patients made comparatively more errors than the posterior aphasic patients. Global aphasic patients presented an invariably poor performance on almost all tasks.Conclusion:The results provide insight into how numerical deficits may impair an individual with aphasia in activities of daily living. This study...
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Background. Previous studies have argued that two types of linguistic gender exist: grammatical gender, which is arbitrarily assigned to nouns, and semantic gender, which depends on the gender of the referent. Aim. We explore the... more
Background. Previous studies have argued that two types of linguistic gender exist: grammatical gender, which is arbitrarily assigned to nouns, and semantic gender, which depends on the gender of the referent. Aim. We explore the hypothesis that these two types of gender entail distinct cognitive processes by investigating the performance of people with aphasia at the level of sentence comprehension.Methods and Procedure. Eleven people with aphasia and a control group of 13 age-matched healthy participants took part in a constrained completion choice task. The participants had to complete sentences in a way that made the last word gender congruent. The subjects of the sentences had either Semantic gender (“enfermera”, nurse; indicating the sex of the referent), Grammatical gender (“silla”, chair), or Opaque-Grammatical gender (“tomate”, tomato).Results. People with aphasia performed more poorly in all gender conditions than healthy controls. They also were less accurate in both the ...
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This study explores the retrieval of proper names and the sensitivity of this lexical category to the modulatory effect of cognitive reserve in an aging population. Thirty-two elderly patients, undergoing their first neuropsychological... more
This study explores the retrieval of proper names and the sensitivity of this lexical category to the modulatory effect of cognitive reserve in an aging population. Thirty-two elderly patients, undergoing their first neuropsychological evaluation were matched for age and education to thirty-two healthy controls. All participants were administered the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) to measure their global cognitive performance, the Famous Face Naming test to assess proper name retrieval, and the Cognitive Reserve Index (CRI) questionnaire to obtain an index of cognitive reserve. The two groups had comparable CRI total scores, but patients’ performance was worse in both MoCA and Famous Face naming test, compared to healthy controls. Results showed that cognitive reserve predicted global cognitive performance (i.e., MoCA score) in the patients, but not in the healthy participants. Naming proper names was independent from cognitive reserve. This might be due to their lexical natur...
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Psychology, Cognitive Science, Linguistics, Medicine, Cortex, and 5 moreNoun Phrase, Noun, Plural, P, and Neurosciences
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Psychology, Aphasia, Linguistics, Mood, Aphasiology, and 4 moreAgreement, Verb, Clinical Sciences, and Neurosciences
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Psychology, Aphasia, Linguistics, Mood, Negation, and 4 moreAgreement, Verb, Agrammatism, and Frontiers in Psychology
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Psychology, Phonetics, Mental Representation, Cognition, Linguistics, and 15 moreAdolescent, Medicine, Italy, Handwriting, Lexicalization, Humans, Noun, Lexical access, Middle Aged, Agrammatism, Adult, Prepositional Phrase, Neuropsychological Tests, Psychology and Cognitive Sciences, and Medical and Health Sciences
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Psychology and Aphasia
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This volume is the outcome of the first two editions of the European Workshops on Cognitive Neuropsychology held in 1983 and 1984. The aim of the workshops was to promote a discussion in which opposite views or mutually integrating... more
This volume is the outcome of the first two editions of the European Workshops on Cognitive Neuropsychology held in 1983 and 1984. The aim of the workshops was to promote a discussion in which opposite views or mutually integrating positions could be clearly spelled out and debated. Each of the contributions collected here was given its final form after the meeting had taken place profiting, therefore, from the lively discussion that followed the presentation. The first part of the book is devoted to attempts to define and clarify basic issues and to the confrontation of alternative views.
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BackgroundSleep has been identified as a modifiable factor involved in both the development and progression of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Previous findings have suggested that poor sleep may be associated with increased risk of AD.... more
BackgroundSleep has been identified as a modifiable factor involved in both the development and progression of Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Previous findings have suggested that poor sleep may be associated with increased risk of AD. Conversely, higher quality of sleep may slow progression of pathophysiological mechanisms in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) through functional connectivity reorganization of neural networks underlying higher cognitive functions.MethodIn clinic, 38 MCI patients and 38 age‐matched controls completed structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), resting‐state functional MRI (rs‐fMRI), and a cognitive test battery, covering memory, executive functions, and language. The Sleep Continuity in Alzheimer’s Disease Scale (SCADS) was used to assess sleep quality. Patients were stratified into “good” (n=20) and “poor” (n=18) sleepers, using the median SCADS score as a cut‐point. Default mode (DMN) and left and right frontoparietal (FPN) networks were reconstructed thr...
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BackgroundSleep quality might influence the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients, driving alterations in brain morphology and functional connectivity. However, the relationship between... more
BackgroundSleep quality might influence the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients, driving alterations in brain morphology and functional connectivity. However, the relationship between sleep, gray matter atrophy, and functional connectivity is poorly understood. The present study aims to compare levels of these brain alterations associated with sleep habits in MCI patients.MethodStructural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and resting‐state functional MRI (rs‐fMRI) data from 38 MCI and 38 age‐matched controls were analyzed to investigate atrophy and connectivity, respectively. MCI were stratified into “good” (n=20) and “poor” (n=18) sleepers, stratified at the 50th percentile of the Sleep Continuity in Alzheimer’s Disease Scale, a self‐report questionnaire assessing sleeping quality. Independent component analysis was used to identify the default mode (DMN) and frontoparietal (FPN) networks. For each patient and modality (i.e., struc...
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It has been proposed that at least two distinct processes are engaged during task-switching: reconfiguration of the currently relevant task-set and interference resolution arising from the competing task-set. Whereas in healthy... more
It has been proposed that at least two distinct processes are engaged during task-switching: reconfiguration of the currently relevant task-set and interference resolution arising from the competing task-set. Whereas in healthy individuals the two are difficult to disentangle, their disruption is thought to cause different impairments in brain-damaged patients. Yet, the observed deficits are inconsistent across studies and do not allow drawing conclusions regarding their independence. Forty-one brain tumor patients were tested on a task-switching paradigm. We compared their performance between switch and repeat trials (switch cost) to assess rule reconfiguration, and between trials requiring the same response (congruent) and a different response for the two tasks (incongruent) to assess interference control. In line with previous studies, we found the greatest proportion of errors on incongruent trials, suggesting an interference control impairment. However, a closer look at the dis...