Phd in PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL NEUROSCIENCE

Research: The inhibitory processes in the Action Observation Network

I graduated from the University of Bologna with a bachelor's degree in psychology and a master’s degree in neuroscience. During my post-graduate internship, I improved my technical skills using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) on the motor system, collecting data on the premotor-motor connectivity's plasticity in young and older populations (Turrini, Bevacqua et al., 2023a; 2023b). I am currently completing my PhD in Psychology and Social Neuroscience at the University of Rome La Sapienza; I'm primarily investigating the role of the frontoparietal areas in mirror phenomena with different protocols of TMS. During my first year of PhD, I collected and published physiological and behavioural data on the functional connectivity between the supplementary motor area (SMA), ventral premotor cortex (PMv), and the primary motor cortex (M1). Using cortico-cortical paired associative stimulation (ccPAS), we highlight different physiological mechanisms and different roles in the automatic imitation of the dorsal and ventral premotor-motor pathways (Bevacqua et al., 2024; Turrini, Fiori, Bevacqua et al., 2024). Currently, I carried out an online event-related interfering TMS experiment to study the role of frontal (PMv and SMA) and parietal (IPL and SPL) areas in automatic and voluntary imitation. At the same time, I began to work on a systematic review of publications that employed stimulation approaches to investigate the imitation function. In a comprehensive review, we want to illustrate the distinct functions of the areas that are part of the Action Observation Network and show that stimulation techniques can be a powerful tool for cognitive neuroscience since they can provide causal evidence.