News and updates
March 2024
A new paper is available with open access in iScience: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2024.109475
Excellent work on the visual memory of body posture from Qiu Han :)
January 2024
A new paper is available with open access in Current Biology: Converging evidence that left extrastriate body area supports visual sensitivity to social interactions See also the nice dispatch about the paper from Emel Küçük & David Pitcher - Visual neuroscience: A brain area tuned for processing social interactions - ScienceDirect
Particularly proud of this massive collaboration and set of studies that overtook pandemic - related cross-istitutional lab closures!!
October 2023
I enjoyed a visit to Justus Liebig University Giessen, was nice to give a talk there and to meet so many cool vision scientists - thanks to Dr. Lu-chun Ye and Prof. Dr. Daniel Kaiser for welcoming me there! :)
September 2023
My R resources are now available together in a github repository - hopefully is a bit easier to use them and access them in this way!
https://github.com/marco2gandolfo/rcourse
June 2023
Was nice to give a virtual talk to the ProAction Lab at the University of Cohimbra, Portugal!
May 2023
New preprint: Converging evidence that left extrastriate body area supports visual sensitivity to social interactions
This is the result of a stellar collaboration with Etienne Abassi, Eva Balgova, Paul Downing, Liuba Papeo & Kami Koldewyn
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Honoured to receive the abstract award at the CAOs 2023 meeting at CIMEC, Rovereto, Italy.
Was great to give a talk titled "Object-selective cortex incorporates real-world object size inferred from viewing distance". This is a multi-method project and a collaborative effort with Surya Gayet, Mariska Peeters, and Marius Peelen.
February 2023
New section in resources - gathering several R functions that I use:
New ultrabasic R tutorial - meant for absolute R beginners and programming beginners. This is a prequel of my other tutorial "R for psychologists"
January 2023
New paper out in Psychological Science:
Predictive processing of scene layout depends on naturalistic depth of field.
December 2022
New preprint with Qiu Han and Marius Peelen:
Prior knowledge biases the perception of body postures
October 2022
New paper out in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review with Paul Downing:
Asymmetric visual representation of sex from facial appearance
This work follows our previously published results on sex representation from body appearance published in Cognition
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Was fun to be part of the Radboud Open day demonstrating the basics of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation to the general public with Thom Oostendorp and Eleftherios Papadopoulos .
September 2022
It was really fun and interesting to be at ECVP22 - here at home, in Nijmegen. Very well organised conference where several of my projects were presented:
Boundary extension depends on prior visual experience - Marco Gandolfo and Marius Peelen (talk)
Biased representation of body postures - Qiu Han, Marco Gandolfo, Marius Peelen (poster)
Real-world object size inferred from scene context sharpens object representations in visual cortex - Surya Gayet, Mariska Peeters, Marco Gandolfo and Marius Peelen (talk)
January 2022
New Preprint!! With Paul Downing - Asymmetric visual representation of sex from facial appearance
In this paper we show that observers encode face sex asymmetrically - That is, female faces are coded as an extension of a male default face. In three experiments we show a search asymmetry. Search for female among male faces is more efficient than the converse. We think that this effects originates from expertise - higher exposure during early development to female faces. This leads to a sharper and narrower tuning curve for female faces vs male faces.
Twitter post below!!
November 2021
New preprint out with Hendrik Naegele and Marius Peelen - Boundary Extension is constrained by naturalistic image properties
Click here for online materials related to this project
August/September 2021
I enjoyed presenting a project on Boundary extension and depth of field at ECVP 2021. Very nice and well organised conference. To look at the project poster and video walkthrough click here ! ! :)
February 2021
I am pleased to announce that I have been awarded with a MSCA individual fellowship!! Excited for all the research to come with Marius Peelen and his lab! I feel privileged and honoured for this opportunity.
MSCA IF: €328 million researchers' grants awarded | Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (europa.eu)
October 2020
New paper accepted for publication in Cognition "Asymmetric visual representation of Sex from human body shape".
Link (free access for 50 days!) : https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1bj9d2Hx2jD-V
This work is a chunky project of my PhD which includes 10 different experiments using visual search tasks! Really happy to have this out. Thanks to my former PhD supervisor Paul Downing for his great guidance and the fun we had (but also challenges!) in designing the experiments and interpreting the results, from Treisman's pooled response models to early development visual experience with faces and bodies.
Stimuli and Data are available in the OSF repository: https://osf.io/cjvqd/
Preregistration of sample size and the experimental procedures of Experiment 1 is here: https://aspredicted.org/8st4x.pdf
See below for figures and summary of results:
Example of Stimuli from all experiments
Search set sizes included 1, 2, 4, or 8 items, except Experiments 9 and 10 which comprised 1, 2, 4, or 6 items. A) silhouetted side views of bodies; B) frontal silhouettes; C) and D) as A and B, with use of GIST matching and other measures to better equate male and female bodies on physical properties; E) body icons; F) inverted body icons; G) isolated trapezia (the “torsos” from body icons); H) upright body photographs; I) inverted body photographs.
Results on Search Slopes
Summary of response time slopes from Experiments 1-10. The efficiency of visual search for male targets amongst female distractors, and vice versa, is shown in terms of ms/item derived by fitting a linear function to search times in accurate, target-present trials. Error bars represent +/- 1 SEM, *p < 0.05. Search for females is more efficient across side and frontal views (Experiments 1-4) and also in iconic figures that lack curvature (Experiment 5). In contrast, search for the inverted iconic figures (Experiment 6) does not show a significant difference in efficiency. Search for the individual shape elements that distinguished male from female in Experiment 5 showed the opposite pattern (Experiment 7). Search efficiency measured by slopes did not differ in an odd-one-out version of the icon search task (Experiment 8). Finally, female targets were detected more efficiently than male targets for normalised photographic body images presented either upright (Experiment 9) or inverted (Experiment 10).
March 2020
I now moved in the Netherlands to start a PostDoc at the Donders Institute in Marius Peelen's Lab ( www.peelenlab.nl ) to investigate Naturalistic Vision!
Very excited for this new adventure :)!
My PhD Thesis is publicly available online: PDF below!
Towards a model of human body perception
February 2020
I passed my PhD viva with a thesis titled: Towards a model of human body perception.
It was really nice to celebrate with all the people that have been bearing me for the last 3 years. I am really lucky for that! For the records here a picture with my Primary supervisor Prof. Paul Downing, some big letters behind and one of the many Aperol spritz that have been spilled in my hand!
November 2019
Invited lecture at the masters' module "Cognition and Brain" here at Bangor University. Title:
Teaching assistant with my supervisor Paul Downing, having fun with students and the rubber hand illusion!!
October 2019
25/10 Presentation at Bangor for the School of Psychology seminar series.
https://www.bangor.ac.uk/psychology/research/seminars19-20.php.en
Interesting to bring all the work of the PhD into a single talk!
New paper accepted for publication in Cortex with Ilaria Minio Paluello, Giusi Porciello, Sarah Boukarras and Salvatore Maria Aglioti:
Enfacement illusion boosts facial mimicry.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2019.10.001
Poster Presentation at SfN19: Causal Evidence of Perceptual Predictions in category selective extrastiate regions. Cool and massive conference!
September 2019
New section in resources with some code bits to generate hundreds of characters in MakeHuman
Hope this is useful!!!
July 2019
New Paper out in Current Biology!!!
Causal evidence for expression of perceptual expectations in category-selective extrastriate regions.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.06.024
June 2019
I will be giving a talk on Data wranging and visualisation using R at Bangor University Lunchtime Session
Here is the link to the presentation:
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New Paper out in Cognition and Emotion
Perceiving Emotion and Sex from the body: Evidence from the Garner task for independent processes. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699931.2019.1634003
May 2019
Me and my supervisor Paul Downing attended Vision Science Society meeting 2019.
We presented two posters :
Representation of Sex from body shape is asymmetrical.
Causal evidence for expression of perceptual predictions in category selective extrastriate regions.
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Paper out with Vanessa Era, Gaetano Tieri, Lucia Sacheli and Matteo Candidi in Acta Psychologica
Interactor's body shape does not affect visuo-motor interference effects during motor coordination. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2019.04.003
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Nice news! I was awarded a Guarantors of Brain Travel Grant to attend VSS19, very exciting !
March - April 2019
Thanks to the BPS study visit scheme I was able to visit Cosimo Urgesi and his lab in Udine. It has been a great and productive experience with great people! :) There was also great wine and food.
December 2018
I presented data and findings of my PhD project at the AgliotiLab meeting in Rome. Was nice to receive feedback and meet everybody there ! :)