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Viola Oldrati

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6 papers
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6

YNIMG Journal 2025 Journal Article

Effects of EEG-guided transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) of the cerebellum on motor behavior and electrophysiological activity

  • Andrea Ciricugno
  • Maria Arioli
  • Viola Oldrati
  • Alessandra Finisguerra
  • Cosimo Urgesi
  • Renato Borgatti
  • Zaira Cattaneo

The cerebellum plays a key role in motor control, yet its oscillatory dynamics remain poorly understood due to anatomical and methodological constraints. Transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) has emerged as a promising tool to modulate cerebellar activity, particularly when tailored to individual neural oscillations. This study examined the effects of EEG-guided gamma-frequency cerebellar tACS-matched to each participant's individual gamma frequency (IGF)-on motor performance and neurophysiological markers in healthy adults. Forty-four male and female participants completed a visuomotor task while undergoing either real or sham tACS across two sessions. Critically, EEG activity was recorded before and immediately after the stimulation while participants performed the visuomotor task to assess electrophysiological changes in power spectrum density. Measures of corticospinal excitability and inhibition were collected via transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) protocols following each stimulation session. tACS at IGF enhanced motor precision during challenging task conditions and reduced corticospinal inhibition, without affecting corticospinal excitability. EEG analyses revealed IGF-dependent increases in theta-band power post-stimulation in motor regions, suggesting cross-frequency interactions. These findings highlight the potential of personalized cerebellar tACS to enhance motor performance and modulate inhibitory cortical dynamics, supporting its use as a precision neuromodulation tool in both research and clinical settings.

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YNIMG Journal 2025 Journal Article

Investigating the effects of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation on motor cortex excitability and inhibition through paired-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation

  • Sara Boscarol
  • Letizia Turchi
  • Viola Oldrati
  • Cosimo Urgesi
  • Alessandra Finisguerra

Transcutaneous Vagus Nerve stimulation (tVNS) has been proposed as a treatment for refining GABAergic transmission. While the effects of tVNS on behavioral performance in inhibitory control tasks have been already demonstrated, neurophysiological studies investigating its effects on GABA-mediated inhibition in the motor cortex provided contrasting findings. Concurrently, the influence of participants' sex and state conditions remains unexplored. Here we applied single- and paired-pulse TMS to the right or left primary motor cortex in two groups of participants. We measured corticospinal excitability (CSE), short and long intracortical inhibition (SICI and LICI), cortical silent period (cSP) and intracortical facilitation (ICF) indexes. These measures were taken, in a within-subject design, at a baseline session before tVNS and after delivering active or sham tVNS in the Cymba conchae of the left ear. To exploit state-dependent effects and assess the role of tVNS in motor learning, tVNS was applied during the execution of a computerized visuomotor task. In the left TMS group, we observed that the visuomotor performance improved across task blocks during active tVNS only, regardless of participant's sex. Interestingly, in both groups, we found a specific increase of SICI, a proxy of GABAa activity, after active versus sham-tVNS and baseline evaluations, which was specifically limited to female participants. No effects on CSE, ICF or GABAb-mediated intracortical inhibition indexes were observed. The results show specific effects of tVNS on motor learning and GABAa-mediated motor inhibition, providing supportive evidence for the application of tVNS as a coadjuvant treatment for disorders with altered inhibition mechanisms.

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YNIMG Journal 2025 Journal Article

Unveiling the alterations of action processing and mu rhythm in Williams Syndrome

  • Viola Oldrati
  • Niccolò Butti
  • Elisabetta Ferrari
  • Caterina Piazza
  • Romina Romaniello
  • Chiara Gagliardi
  • Alessandra Finisguerra
  • Cosimo Urgesi

Williams syndrome (WS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder marked by social difficulties, which may stem from atypical action processing. We investigated whether individuals with WS show impaired action processing as indexed by electroencephalographic (EEG) mu suppression, a biomarker of action processing. 17 individuals with WS, 17 healthy controls (HC) and 17 individuals with intellectual and developmental disability (IDD) participated in the study. During EEG recording, participants performed a task requiring to predict actions under perceptual ambiguity. In a preceding learning phase, the probability of actions co-occurring with contextual cues was manipulated to establish varying association strengths: high informativeness from very frequent or rare pairings, and moderate informativeness from intermediate ones. A control task required to use contextual cues for predicting moving shapes. HC and WS groups, but not the IDD group, utilized contextual cues to predict action/shape unfolding. EEG data revealed distinct patterns of mu event-related desynchronization (mu-ERD) across groups. In the HC group, mu-ERD was stronger during action than shape prediction and varied with the cue probability, with greater mu-ERD in low vs. high probability trials. In WS and IDD, mu-ERD was attenuated compared to HC. Notably, WS participants exhibited greater mu-ERD for low- than high-probability actions in moderately informative contexts; no modulation was observed in highly informative contexts in either task. In IDD, mu-ERD was not modulated by task or cues predictability. The attenuation and distinct contextual modulation of mu-ERD in WS may reflect anomalies in perception-action mechanisms, potentially linked to impaired simulation of observed actions.

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YNIMG Journal 2025 Journal Article

Visuo-spatial functions mediate the association between cortical thickness of fronto-parietal areas and social processing abilities in congenital atypical development

  • Viola Oldrati
  • Elisabetta Ferrari
  • Niccolò Butti
  • Chiara Gagliardi
  • Romina Romaniello
  • Renato Borgatti
  • Denis Peruzzo
  • Cosimo Urgesi

Different theoretical perspectives emphasize the significance of sensorimotor and visuospatial functions in shaping social perception, including theory of mind (ToM) and affect recognition (AR) abilities. This study aimed to investigate where in the brain cortical thickness (CT) predicts social perception, and which cognitive functions mediate such relationship. To these aims, we used a hierarchical analytical plan: Step 1 identified brain areas' CT that correlate with cognitive measures; Step 2 used stepwise regression to predict social perception outcomes (ToM and AR) from brain areas' CT; Step 3 assessed whether cognitive measures mediate the link between CT and social perception outcomes. The results showed that the CT of the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG; pars triangularis) predicted both ToM and AR, while the CT of the right superior parietal gyrus (SPL) and of the right anterior occipital sulcus (AOcs) predicted only AR. Mediation models unveiled that visuo-constructive abilities and visual attention mediated the relationship between CT in these areas and social perception outcomes. These findings align with the role of the IFG in mentalizing abilities and underscore the involvement of SPL in visuospatial functions, including mental object rotation and spatial perspective-taking, which are essential for advanced social skills; the role of the AOcs in face processing was also highlighted. Importantly, the findings suggest that fronto-parietal areas are indirectly involved in social perception thorough their involvement in visuo-constructive abilities and visual attention.

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YNICL Journal 2024 Journal Article

Neurorestorative effects of cerebellar transcranial direct current stimulation on social prediction of adolescents and young adults with congenital cerebellar malformations

  • Viola Oldrati
  • Niccolò Butti
  • Elisabetta Ferrari
  • Sandra Strazzer
  • Romina Romaniello
  • Renato Borgatti
  • Cosimo Urgesi
  • Alessandra Finisguerra

BACKGROUND: Converging evidence points to impairments of the predictive function exerted by the cerebellum as one of the causes of the social cognition deficits observed in patients with cerebellar disorders. OBJECTIVE: We tested the neurorestorative effects of cerebellar transcranial direct current stimulation (ctDCS) on the use of contextual expectations to interpret actions occurring in ambiguous sensory sceneries in a sample of adolescents and young adults with congenital, non-progressive cerebellar malformation (CM). METHODS: We administered an action prediction task in which, in an implicit-learning phase, the probability of co-occurrence between actions and contextual elements was manipulated to form either strongly or moderately informative expectations. Subsequently, in a testing phase, we probed the use of these contextual expectations for predicting ambiguous (i.e., temporally occluded) actions. In a sham-controlled, within-subject design, participants received anodic or sham ctDCS during the task. RESULTS: Anodic ctDCS, compared to sham, improved patients' ability to use contextual expectations to predict the unfolding of actions embedded in moderately, but not strongly, informative contexts. CONCLUSIONS: These findings corroborate the role of the cerebellum in using previously learned contextual associations to predict social events and document the efficacy of ctDCS to boost social prediction in patients with congenital cerebellar malformation. The study encourages the further exploration of ctDCS as a neurorestorative tool for the neurorehabilitation of social cognition abilities in neurological, neuropsychiatric, and neurodevelopmental disorders featured by macro- or micro-structural alterations of the cerebellum.

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YNIMG Journal 2018 Journal Article

The role of the cerebellum in explicit and incidental processing of facial emotional expressions: A study with transcranial magnetic stimulation

  • Chiara Ferrari
  • Viola Oldrati
  • Marcello Gallucci
  • Tomaso Vecchi
  • Zaira Cattaneo

Growing evidence suggests that the cerebellum plays a critical role in non-motor functions, contributing to cognitive and affective processing. In particular, the cerebellum might represent an important node of the “limbic” network, underlying not only emotion regulation but also emotion perception and recognition. Here, we used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to shed further light on the role of the cerebellum in emotional perception by specifically testing cerebellar contribution to explicit and incidental emotional processing. In particular, in three different experiments, we found that TMS over the (left) cerebellum impaired participants’ ability to categorize facial emotional expressions (explicit task) and to classify the gender of emotional faces (incidental emotional processing task), but not the gender of neutral faces. Overall, our results indicate that the cerebellum is involved in perceiving the emotional content of facial stimuli, even when this is task irrelevant.

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