Research Topics

In our daily social interactions, the way we perform actions is crucial for communication and promoting relationships. This dynamicity of action has been termed by Daniel Stern “Vitality Forms” (VFs) by Daniel Stern and allows people to express their own state and understand that of others.

The study of VFs also finds application in the robotic field, where it is used to improve the kinematics of humanoid agents (such as iCub) by making them increasingly human-like, and to study human-robot interactions.

Several of our studies have investigated the role of VFs in autism spectrum condition (ASC), a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by challenges in social interaction and communication. Our findings indicate that individuals with ASC show impairments in both the perception (Di Cesare et al., 2017) and execution (Di Cesare et al., 2024) of VFs compared to neurotypical (NT) children. We are currently working to integrate these findings with robotics to develop improved clinical interventions.

The following actions were recorded in our kinematic study (Di Cesare et al., 2024). Specifically, the video illustrates the social condition where ASC and NT children were instructed to perform action rudely or gently towards a researcher. As clearly demonstrated, NT children modulated their movements, exhibiting distinct kinematics for rude versus gentle actions. In contrast, the actions of ASC children remained remarkably similar across both conditions, suggesting a difficulty in modulating VFs within a social context.