main
interest
investigation of the relationship between language and gestures using behavioral and neurophysiological (ERPs and TMS) methods
illusions and motor cognitive processes in the visual system (see my phd project)
when I was an undergraduate I worked on amodal completion and motion.
you can see a nice animation of the breathing
square illusion
curriculum
vitae
.pdf
my phd project
visually guided planning and control of pointing actions
according to a recent
theory, visual illusions affect conscious perceptual judgments but
not action responses. for instance, if you have to judge the size of
a surface, you might be influenced by size contrast with neighbouring
surfaces. however, if you have to grasp the surface, your action is
not affected by size contrast. according to this theory, such perception
and action dissociations occur because we are not equipped with a single
visual system but with two, independent streams of processing for visual
information: one for conscious perception and recognition, and another
for planning and controlling actions. the perception stream tends to
use an object-realtive frame of reference for coding spatial information
(hence the sensitivity to contrast effects). the action stream tends
to use an effector-relative frame of reference (and is therefore immune
to illusions). we have been looking at different types of pointing actions
using an illusion that has been much studied in trieste, kanizsa's
compression illusion. our research demonstrates that some kinds
of actions are indeed immune to the compression effect, but others are
not. therefore, the distinction proposed by the theory is probably too
rigid