Predictive Processing - un insight attraverso lo studio dei correlati elettrofisiologici della cognizione sociale e delle emozioni

The thesis project investigates the electrophysiological correlates of emotions and social cognition in healthy participants, based on the theoretical framework of Predictive Processing. The participants were recruited for HD-EEG acquisition both at rest and during the performance of a Visual Mismatch Negativity task, an event-related potential elicited by the appearance of deviant stimuli among standard stimuli. In particular, faces with a neutral emotional condition represent the standard stimuli, while the deviant ones are made up of faces expressing emotions (happiness or fear) and faces of the opposite gender of the standard stimuli. This allows to investigate the modulation of vMMN dictated by the different valence of the stimuli. The duration of the experiment is 35 minutes (5 minutes of resting state and 30 of vMMN). The aim is to investigate the role that prediction processes play in social cognition skills, particularly in the emotion processing, also investigating how the neural signal responds to the violation of expected patterns and which networks are recruited in order to update the predictions violated. The results obtained will also be used to study social cognition in neurological patients, who often show deficits in this ability in everyday life.