BackgroundThe rapid evolution of technology has triggered profound cultural, social, and psychological changes, along with a constant demand for human adaptation to new challenges. Digital wellbeing (DW) refers to the individual’s positive and healthy relationship with information and communication technology (ICT), characterized by feelings of comfort, support, safety, satisfaction, and low levels of stress during their interactions with ICT. However, DW can be threatened by ergonomic, organizational, and psychological issues, particularly in the workplace. Despite efforts to improve the objective conditions of user experience, the understanding of the role of psychological factors in HCI remains partially disregarded.AimsThis study aimed to validate a new multidimensional psychometric tool designed to assess the perceived quality of HCI in the workplace, the Work-Related Human Computer Interaction Questionnaire (wrHCI-Q).MethodsA sample of 1,198 employees of a large Italian banking group (52% females; age: 49.04 ± 8.7) underwent an online survey. Reliability, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were performed.ResultsThe wrHCI-Q consisted of 35 items and a four-factor structure (technostress, self-efficacy, positive attitude, and HCI aversion), supported by the CFA indices.ConclusionThe wrHCI-Q is a new, valid, and reliable scale to catch some crucial human factors affecting the quality of HCI. It is expected to foster the understanding of the determinants of individual DWE and to shed light on the factors that undermine a healthy employee’s interaction with ICT.

INTRODUCTION: Understanding how abstract and concrete words are represented in the brain requires disentangling the contribution of sensorimotor information from the organization of semantic knowledge. These dimensions, here referred to as abstractness and abstraction, respectively, are typically confounded, limiting our ability to identify their distinct neural correlates. OBJECTIVES: The present study aimed to dissociate the roles of abstractness and abstraction in word processing by introducing superordinate words as a critical comparison category. METHODS: Behavioral norming and feature production tasks were used to quantify sensory-related properties and semantic architecture, operationalized in terms of generalizability, feature relevance, and representational flexibility. These measures informed computational models capturing abstractness, abstraction, sensorimotor content, and distributional similarity. Neural data were acquired using electroencephalography and analyzed with representational similarity analysis to assess model–brain correspondence over time. RESULTS: Behaviorally, superordinate words patterned with concrete words on sensory properties but with abstract words on measures of semantic architecture. In the electrophysiological data, concrete words elicited stronger negativities than both abstract and superordinate words in the N400 and N700 time windows, whereas abstract and superordinate words did not differ. Representational similarity analysis revealed that neural response patterns were best explained by the abstraction model, outperforming models based on sensorimotor or distributional information. CONCLUSION: These results indicate that the neural dynamics of word processing are primarily shaped by semantic architecture rather than by sensorimotor grounding alone. Abstraction plays a central role in structuring conceptual representations, providing a unifying account that bridges embodied and formal theories of semantic representation.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpubh.2026.1778040.].

This study provides the first neurophysiological evidence of how cochlear implant (CI) input affects predictive processing during audiovisual language comprehension in deaf individuals. Using EEG, we compared 18 CI users with 18 normal-hearing (NH) controls during sentence comprehension where final word predictability was determined by high or low semantic constraint (HC vs. LC) of the preceding sentence frame. Between sentence frame and final word, a 800 ms silent gap was introduced. Mouth visibility was manipulated during sentence frames (visible or digitally occluded; V+ vs. V-), while the final words were always presented with the mouth visible. In NH participants, lower-beta power (12-15 Hz) in left frontal and central sensors decreased for HC vs. LC contexts during the pre-target silent gap, but only when the mouths was visible, suggesting active prediction generation. In CI users, this lower beta power decrease was absent. After final word presentation, both groups showed N400 predictability effects, indicating preserved prediction evaluation. However, CI users exhibited extended N400 effects in the V+ condition, suggesting additional processing demands. Across all participants, pre-target beta modulations correlated with language production abilities, supporting prediction-by-production frameworks. Within CI users, poorer audiometric thresholds correlated with larger N400 constraint effects, possibly indicating greater reliance on contextual prediction to compensate for degraded sensory input. These findings demonstrate that CI-mediated perception alters the neural mechanisms of prediction generation. The link between production skills and predictive mechanisms suggests that strengthening expressive language abilities may enhance predictive processing in CI users. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. Ministero dell'università e della ricerca, 20177894ZH Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Padova e Rovigo, CUP_C93C23003190005

While eye movements have been shown to track the speech envelope, it is unknown whether this reflects a hard-wired mechanism or one shaped by (lifetime) audiovisual experience. Further, questions remain about whether ocular tracking is modulated by speech intelligibility and which brain regions drive these synchronized eye movements. Here, we investigate ocular speech tracking in 47 (20 male), blindfolded early blind, late blind, and sighted individuals using magnetoencephalography and source-reconstructed oculomotor signals while participants listened to narrative speech of varying intelligibility. We find that oculomotor activity tracks acoustic speech features; however, while neural speech tracking is modulated by intelligibility, ocular tracking patterns remain ambiguous. Interestingly, we find effects reflected in two frequency-specific components: a low-frequency (∼1 Hz) effect present across all groups, indicating that visual experience is not required, and a high-frequency (∼6 Hz) effect reduced in early and late blind individuals. Moreover, this finding is not driven by cerebro-ocular connectivity, as late blind individuals exhibit stronger connectivity between the eyes and the left temporal cortices without a corresponding increase in ocular tracking. In conclusion, ocular speech tracking seems to respond selectively to acoustic features of speech, and does not require visual experience to develop. It may thus represent a hard-wired oculomotor mechanism within the oculo-cerebral network involved in speech processing.

Abstract The first year of life is considered a sensitive period for the acquisition of phonetic categories, a hallmark of successful native language specialization. The extent to which this process depends on early auditory experience and intrinsic biological constraints remains unresolved. We measured neural encoding of continuous natural speech in hearing children (HC) and cochlear implant (CI) users with congenital or acquired deafness, contrasting children with and without access to auditory input in the first year of life. Speech encoding was present across all groups, but its specificity depended on early input: auditory phonetic features were encoded only in children exposed to speech within the first year, whereas visually discriminable phonetic features were encoded regardless of auditory deprivation. These findings show that early sensory input gates phonetic attunement; this constraint is not limited to or grounded in audition but instead reveals a sensitive period that is modality-flexible in mechanism and experience-dependent in expression.

From early development, visual and sensorimotor representations of our hands are continually linked, allowing to develop a bodily self-representation. Here, we investigated the neural mechanisms of bodily self-identity discrimination, combining electroencephalography with fast periodic visual stimulation. In two experiments, participants' self-hand images appeared as oddball stimuli among others' hands. To control for statistical regularity and familiarity, oddball hand images could belong to a stranger (Exp1) or the partner (Exp2). In a third behavioral experiment, we verified participants could explicitly detect the presence of the self-hand in the sequence. Results revealed a neural marker for automatic hand identity discrimination, with greater responses in egocentric than allocentric perspective only for self-hand images. This interaction effect emerged over occipital, consistently with the visual nature of the task, and also over fronto-central regions, compatibly with the involvement of a sensorimotor network. These findings support that self-hand processing relies on associating visual and sensorimotor representations.

In recent years, neuroscience has increasingly leveraged naturalistic stimuli, like movies and narratives, to investigate cognitive processes underlying real-world human behavior. Here, we present a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) dataset featuring 50 participants, with and without congenital sensory loss (typical development, congenitally blind and deaf individuals), who were exposed to audiovisual, auditory, or visual versions of the live-action movie 101 Dalmatians. The dataset incorporates auditory and visual descriptors from established computational models (e.g., VGGish, VGG-19) and semantic embeddings generated by GPT-4, complemented by human-tagged annotations of movie events and content. All data are provided in a standardized BIDS format. fMRI data quality was evaluated through Inter-Subject Correlation (ISC), ensuring robust comparisons across participants and groups. The 101 Dalmatians dataset facilitates the exploration of the effects of congenital sensory deprivation on brain functional organization, neuroplasticity, and the interplay between sensory inputs and cognitive processes. It is a valuable resource for understanding how sensory experiences —or their absence— shape human brain development and functional adaptation.

Lip-reading, i.e., the ability to recognize speech using only visual cues, plays a fundamental role in audio-visual speech processing, intelligibility, and comprehension. This capacity is integral to language development and functioning; it emerges in early development, and it slowly evolves. By linking psycholinguistics, psychophysics, and neurophysiology, the present narrative review explores the development and significance of lip-reading across different stages of life, highlighting its role in human communication in both typical and atypical development, e.g., in the presence of hearing or language impairments. We examined how relying on lip-reading becomes crucial when communication occurs in noisy environments and, on the contrary, the impacts that visual barriers can have on speech perception. Finally, this review highlights individual differences and the role of cultural and social contexts for a better understanding of the visual counterpart of speech.

A centuries-old tradition encompassing philosophy, psychology, and artistic practice describes aesthetic experiences as characterized by a special state of heightened attention toward external stimuli (i.e. an "aesthetic attitude"). In recent years, this view has motivated wide-ranging claims about the nature of our aesthetic encounters and the cognitive benefits of exposure to art. Despite sustained efforts from a growing stream of interdisciplinary research, however, it is still unclear whether aesthetic experiences can be systematically linked to observable attentional enhancements. In this study, we address this long-standing question using electroencephalography (EEG) and advanced machine learning (ML) techniques. We performed a series of EEG experiments measuring brain activity elicited by synthetic and natural images during an aesthetic (beauty judgments) and a pragmatic (symmetry judgments) task. Visual evoked potentials and neural oscillations were used to assess whether the aesthetic task induces attentional enhancements. In line with our hypotheses, the power of alpha and beta prestimulus oscillations significantly decreased in the aesthetic vs. pragmatic task. Furthermore, larger late positive potentials and N170 responses (the latter for natural images only) were found in the aesthetic vs. pragmatic task. ML analyses further showed that prestimulus neural oscillations and N170 responses were systematically able to predict the type of task. Overall, our results highlight the presence of a perceptual processing enhancement and a heightened state of attention in aesthetic contexts. The upshot is a clearer understanding of the dynamics and neural underpinnings of our aesthetic experiences.

The role of early auditory experience in the development of neural speech tracking remains an open question. To address this issue, we measured neural speech tracking in children with or without functional hearing during their first year of life after their hearing was restored with cochlear implants (CIs), as well as in hearing controls (HC). Neural tracking in children with CIs is unaffected by the absence of perinatal auditory experience. CI users and HC exhibit a similar neural tracking magnitude at short timescales of brain activity. However, neural tracking is delayed in CI users, and its timing depends on the age of hearing restoration. Conversely, at longer timescales, speech tracking is dampened in participants using CIs, thereby accounting for their speech comprehension deficits. These findings highlight the resilience of sensory processing in speech tracking while also demonstrating the vulnerability of higher-level processing to the lack of early auditory experience.

The processing of stationary sounds relies on both local features and compact representations. As local information is compressed into summary statistics, abstract representations emerge. Whether the brain is endowed with distinct neural architectures predisposed to such computations is unknown. In this magnetoencephalography (MEG) study, we employed a validated protocol to localize cortical correlates of local and summary auditory representations, exposing participants to sequences embedding triplets of synthetic sound textures systematically varying for either local details or summary statistics. Sounds varied for their duration and could be short (40ms) or long (478ms) to favor change detections based on local or summary statistics, respectively. Results clearly revealed distinct activation patterns for local features and summary auditory statistics. Neural activations diverged in magnitude, spatiotemporal distribution, and hemispheric lateralization. The right auditory cortex, comprising both primary and neighboring temporal and frontal regions were engaged to detect sound changes in both local features (for short sounds) and summary statistics (for long sounds). Conversely, the left auditory cortex was not selective to these auditory changes. However, the ventro-lateral portion of left frontal lobe, a region associated with sound recognition, was engaged in processing changes in summary statistics at a long sound duration. These findings highlight the involvement of distinct cortical pathways and hemispheric lateralization for the computation of local and summary acoustic information occurring at different temporal resolutions. Significant Statement We revealed hemispheric specializations for auditory computations at high (local) and low (summary statistics) temporal resolutions. The right hemisphere was engaged for both computations, while the left hemisphere responded more to summary statistics changes. These findings highlight the multifaceted functions of the right hemisphere in capturing acoustic properties of stationary sounds and the left hemisphere's involvement in processing abstract representations.

Sleep is characterized by relative disconnection from the external environment and prompt reversibility in response to salient stimuli. During non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, reactive electroencephalographic (EEG) slow waves (K-complexes, KC) are thought to both suppress the processing of external stimuli and open 'sentinel' windows during which further relevant inputs may be tracked. However, the extent to which a stimulus's relevance modulates the KC-related response remains unclear. Here, we investigated the impact of emotional information in human vocal bursts on KC and post-KC activity. Twenty-five young adults were presented with vocal bursts conveying negative, neutral, and positive emotions. We found that affective content influenced the rate, amplitude, and cortical distribution of KCs, as well as post-KC high-frequency activity. These results indicate that KCs are not all-or-none responses and that salient information is not entirely 'quenched' by KCs. These insights offer new perspectives on how sleep continuity and reversibility are regulated.

The evidence on job conditions for disabled individuals in the workplace hampers understanding of their needs and the implementation of effective interventions to support their adjustment and integration. The current study contributed to this aim by examining previously unexplored aspects of the adjustment of people with sensory disabilities (PwSD) in bank work settings in Italy. In particular, it investigated for the first time three specific job strains: technostress (TS), cognitive overload (COL), and aging (AG) in PwSD as compared with typical development (PwTD), along with job satisfaction and accessibility. A multidimensional web survey was administered across the Italian national territory to a sample of PwSD (n = 202) and a sample of PwTD (n = 2283). Descriptive statistics were used to highlight perceived satisfaction with accessibility and accommodations in the workplace. A series of linear regression models aimed to measure the association between participants’ age and final scores of the TS, COL, and AG questionnaires. A series of non-parametric tests (Mann-Whitney U-tests) were performed to compare the final COL, TS, and AG scores of PwSD and PwTD. At a descriptive level, results highlighted that PwSD’s job satisfaction was fairly positive. However, various concerns were brought to light, revealing notable differences between the hearing-impaired and visually impaired cohorts. Moreover, while PwSD displayed reduced scores in the TS questionnaire compared to PwTD, the opposite occurred for the AG questionnaire. Increasing age was related to TS and AG in the PwTD, but only to AG in PwSD. Our study investigated for the first time specific job strains in PwSD, thus contributing to a deeper understanding of adjustment to work in a bank worker population. Older adults tend to show higher levels of technostress and a reduced sense of self-efficacy, and these subjective experiences bring together PwTD and PwSD. Moreover, inclusivity and job satisfaction for PwSD, although moderately satisfying, still show several criticisms. Our data can stimulate future research aimed at deepening the work adjustment in PwSD.

Emotion and perception are tightly intertwined, as affective experiences often arise from the appraisal of sensory information. Nonetheless, whether the brain encodes emotional instances using a sensory-specific code or in a more abstract manner is unclear. Here, we answer this question by measuring the association between emotion ratings collected during a unisensory or multisensory presentation of a full-length movie and brain activity recorded in typically developed, congenitally blind and congenitally deaf participants. Emotional instances are encoded in a vast network encompassing sensory, prefrontal, and temporal cortices. Within this network, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex stores a categorical representation of emotion independent of modality and previous sensory experience, and the posterior superior temporal cortex maps the valence dimension using an abstract code. Sensory experience more than modality affects how the brain organizes emotional information outside supramodal regions, suggesting the existence of a scaffold for the representation of emotional states where sensory inputs during development shape its functioning.

Reporting discomfort when noise affects listening experience suggests that listeners may be aware, at least to some extent, of adverse environmental conditions and their impact on listening experience. This involves monitoring internal states (effort and confidence). Here we quantified continuous self-report indices that track one's own internal states and investigated age-related differences in this ability. We instructed two groups of young and older adults to continuously report their confidence and effort while listening to stories in fluctuating noise. Using cross-correlation analyses between the time series of fluctuating noise and those of perceived effort or confidence, we showed that (1) participants modified their assessment of effort and confidence based on variations in the noise, with a 4 s lag; (2) there were no differences between the groups. These findings imply extending this method to other areas, expanding the definition of metacognition, and highlighting the value of this ability for older adults.

Studies employing EEG to measure somatosensory responses have been typically optimized to compute event-related potentials in response to discrete events. However, tactile interactions involve continuous processing of nonstationary inputs that change in location, duration, and intensity. To fill this gap, this study aims to demonstrate the possibility of measuring the neural tracking of continuous and unpredictable tactile information. Twenty-seven young adults (females, 15) were continuously and passively stimulated with a random series of gentle brushes on single fingers of each hand, which were covered from view. Thus, tactile stimulations were unique for each participant and stimulated fingers. An encoding model measured the degree of synchronization between brain activity and continuous tactile input, generating a temporal response function (TRF). Brain topographies associated with the encoding of each finger stimulation showed a contralateral response at central sensors starting at 50 ms and peaking at 140 ms of lag, followed by a bilateral response at 240 ms. A series of analyses highlighted that reliable tactile TRF emerged after just 3 min of stimulation. Strikingly, topographical patterns of the TRF allowed discriminating digit lateralization across hands and digit representation within each hand. Our results demonstrated for the first time the possibility of using EEG to measure the neural tracking of a naturalistic, continuous, and unpredictable stimulation in the somatosensory domain. Crucially, this approach allows the study of brain activity following individualized, idiosyncratic tactile events to the fingers.

Neuroscientific research has consistently shown more extensive non-visual activity in the visual cortex of congenitally blind humans compared to sighted controls; a phenomenon known as crossmodal plasticity. Whether or not crossmodal activation of the visual cortex retracts if sight can be restored is still unknown. The present study, involving a rare group of sight-recovery individuals who were born pattern vision blind, employed visual event-related potentials to investigate persisting crossmodal modulation of the initial visual cortical processing stages. Here we report that the earliest, stimulus-driven retinotopic visual cortical activity (<100 ms) was suppressed in a spatially specific manner in sight-recovery individuals when concomitant sounds accompanied visual stimulation. In contrast, sounds did not modulate the earliest visual cortical response in two groups of typically sighted controls, nor in a third control group of sight-recovery individuals who had suffered a transient phase of later (rather than congenital) visual impairment. These results provide strong evidence for persisting crossmodal activity in the visual cortex after sight recovery following a period of congenital visual deprivation. Based on the time course of this modulation, we speculate on a role of exuberant crossmodal thalamic input which may arise during a sensitive phase of brain development.