Marco Rizzo (1992) comes from Santa Domenica Talao, a village on the coast of Southern Italy. He received his Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology (2015) and Master’s Degree in Cognitive Neuroscience (2017) from La Sapienza University of Rome. For a year he worked in the ALTOIDA project, consisting of a digital assessment and monitoring and prediction of neurological diseases.

Marco’s project investigated the electroencephalographic (EEG) event-related (de)synchronization (ERD/ERS) of alpha rhythm in relation to sensory-motor tasks performed using a Mirror Visual Feedback illusion paradigm. The first part of the project demonstrated as the movements’ preparatory and execution processes occurring during the Mirror Illusion involve the same mechanism of an actual movement at cortical central, parietal, and occipital levels. Successively, the project aimed at investigating the brain structures involved in the illusory movements through the analysis of the EEG scalp sources, with a focus on the primary and supplementary motor cortices. In the second part of the project, electrical painful stimuli on the fingers have been introduced to examine the motor and somatosensory brain areas during illusory movements. The cortical interaction between actual painful stimuli and illusory movements of the same hand seem to reduce the alpha ERD amplitude, a phenomenon also known as sensorimotor cortical gating effect.

Moreover, dispositional psychological characteristics (e.g. body awareness, catastrophizing) will be analyzed to detect significant predictors of individual differences in pain perception and mirror box responsiveness.

The discoveries made in this framework could be crucial for future therapies based on mirror box, for patients with chronic conditions who cannot rely on the correct use of one limb.