CogSci Lab

Sustained dynamics of saccadic inhibition and adaptive oculomotor responses during continuous exploration In natural environments, stimuli often recur across time and space, requiring the visual system to remain sensitive to novelty while managing predictability. A central question in systems neuroscience...

When flashes interrupt vision, the eyes pause before moving again. That pause stays stable, but recovery weakens with repetition — the oculomotor system stays alert to novelty while cutting unnecessary eye movements to irrelevant events. 👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
@celestecafaro.bsky.social

Lab authors ✍️
@antimobuonocore.bsky.social @celestecafaro.bsky.social

Sustained dynamics of saccadic inhibition and adaptive oculomotor responses during continuous exploration In natural environments, stimuli often recur across time and space, requiring the visual system to remain sensitive to novelty while managing predictability. A central question in systems neuroscience...

New implication for sensorimotor adaptability 👀 A new study from our laboratory shows that during visual exploration, saccadic inhibition remains stable, while oculomotor rebound weakens with repetition, demonstrating motor habituation.

Read for more👇🏻

AIP Sperimentale 2025, 31° Congresso annuale AIP Sperimentale 2025Benvenute e benvenuti nella pagina ufficiale del XXXI Congresso dell'Associazione Italiana di Psicologia - Sezione Sperimentale, che si terrà a Torino presso il Campus Luigi Einau...

It was a pleasure to present at #AIP2025 in Turin! 🏛️ Our latest data on the inevitability of visual interruption show that visuomotor capture may look strong, but inhibition dictated the rhythm! 👁️✨
indico.sissa.it/event/159/co...
journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10....

🥼✍️ Lab author:

@cirorilardi.bsky.social

Journal of Neuropsychology | Wiley Online Library Neuropsychology's place in diagnosing dementia is still up for debate. With the advent of disease-modifying therapies, the optimisation of diagnostic pathways is increasingly urgent, particularly in ....

📑 A new position paper calls for a "clinimetric" approach in dementia neuropsychology: cognitive tests calibrated on real clinical populations to improve early diagnosis accuracy.

Read the new paper below! 👇

🥼✍️ Lab authors:

@neurogiovanni.bsky.social
@cirorilardi.bsky.social

An integrated account for technological cognition Understanding how the human brain generates, utilizes, and adapts to technology is one of our most urgent scientific questions today. Recent advances in cognitive neuroscience reveal a complex neur...

🔬How is the human brain able to generate, utilise, and adapt to technology?

🧠 Here, we propose that a strict interplay of causal reasoning, semantic cognition, visuospatial skills,
sensorimotor knowledge, and social learning can shape our technological cognition.

Read below our new paper! 👇

✍️🥼Lab authors:

@cirorilardi.bsky.social
@neurogiovanni.bsky.social

Error Monitoring Failure in Metamemory Appraisal: A Visuospatial-Driven Feature of Mild Cognitive Impairment due to Alzheimer’s Disease - Ciro Rosario Ilardi, Paola Marangolo, Sergio Chieffi, Mario Na... Objective Anosognosia for memory deficits is frequently observed in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Despite its relevance, this phenomenon is understudi...

🧠 A new neuropsychological study shows that patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment due to Alzheimer’s disease may overestimate their visuospatial memory, not verbal memory. This suggests a metacognitive failure specific to spatial information.

📄 A new paper from the lab! 👇

Left Area PF as a Neural Marker of Technical Reasoning Humans possess a unique capacity for technical reasoning - the ability to infer and manipulate the causal structure of the physical world. Although this faculty is central to technological innovation,...

🛠️🧠 How do we reshape the material world? Not by general intelligence alone, but through a specialized neural system: the left area PF fuels our capacity to reason about physical causality—core to tool use, invention, and cumulative culture.

🧬 A new work from @neurogiovanni.bsky.social

Read more 👇

Rethinking causal understanding and reverse engineering through the lens of cultural ecology

🌍🧠 What drives cultural invention? Not just imitation, but ecological reasoning: humans adapt, repurpose, and sometimes unknowingly reinvent—guided by environments shaped by others, not always by minds we understand.

🥼 A new paper from @neurogiovanni.bsky.social

Take a look 👇

The visual encoding of familiar and unfamiliar tools https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.05.24.655951v1

The visual encoding of familiar and unfamiliar tools How do we extract meaning and understand the action potential of everyday objects? In this eye-tracking study, we show that familiarity with tools modulates the temporal dynamics of their visual explo...

👀🛠️ How do we look at tools? Familiarity reshapes visual attention: we search for meaning first, action later—unless prior knowledge shortcuts the process.

🥼 A new preprint from @luigivalio.bsky.social & @neurogiovanni.bsky.social

Check it out! 👇

How does the oculomotor system keep up with visual interference? 👁️

🚩 Discover how repeated flashes fatigue eye movements—without breaking inhibition. A look into oculomotor habituation: a poster by
@antimobuonocore.bsky.social, @celestecafaro.bsky.social, and Alessio Fracasso at #VSS2025! 👇

Cover of the American Journal of Psychology, Volume 137, Issue 3, Fall 2024 Red background with abstract wavy lines crossing the middle of the cover and list of editors in the bottom left corner.

One way to pass on our own causal understanding about how a physical system works is to provide a verbal explanation about it. Read in American Journal of Psychology Vol. 137, Iss. 3. @neurogiovanni.bsky.social @blubludoesscience.bsky.social scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/ajp/arti...

✍️ Lab authors:

@antimobuonocore.bsky.social (first)
@celestecafaro.bsky.social

Lack of pre-movement facilitation as neurophysiological hallmark of fatigue in patients with Parkinson's disease: A single pulse TMS study Fatigue is a debilitating symptom in Parkinson's disease (PD), significantly affecting quality of life. Despite its prevalence, the underlying neuroph…

In Parkinson’s disease, fatigue may reflect impaired motor preparation. 🔍

This TMS study shows absent pre-movement facilitation (PMF) in the most affected hemisphere of fatigued patients — a potential neurophysiological marker ⚡🧠

#Parkinsons #Neurophysiology #Fatigue #TMS

The Influence of Spatial Frequencies, Orientation and Familiarity on Face Stimuli Integration When we observe an object, our visual system identifies its shape and integrates it with specific details to form a coherent representation. This coarse-to-fine approach involves rapid processing of low spatial frequency (LSF) content to generate a basic template, which aids the integration of the more detailed high spatial frequency (HSF) information. Here we explore with two experiments how the contribution of LSF and HSF integration extends to face processing. To do so, we leveraged the face inversion effect, whereby inverted faces are more difficult to recognize than upright ones. In Experiment 1, ten participants matched two familiar faces displayed in rapid succession (template and probe face, respectively). The template and the probe shared either the same SF (congruent) or had complementary SF (incongruent). In congruent conditions, HSF templates yielded better matching accuracy than LSF templates. However, in incongruent conditions, mapping LSF probes onto HSF templates was more effective, but only for upright faces. We propose that, depending on the task, holistic processing may be facilitated by detailed information. In Experiment 2, twelve participants performed the same task with both familiar and unfamiliar faces. While for familiar faces the effects were the same as Experiment 1, for unfamiliar faces the overall accuracy was better for congruent than incongruent conditions, and, crucially, it was independent of the template SF. Our results challenge the view that LSF content provides a foundational template for integrating HSF information, and instead suggest a flexible encoding of SF information, that depends on image contingencies. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

A new paper from the lab! 📑

🔍 Our brain processes faces using both coarse and fine details—but does LSF always guide perception? This study suggests a more flexible integration

search.app/GL9ar3USKn2F...

YouTube video by Giovanni Federico RAI 3 - TGR Leonardo del 29/01/2025 - Federico et al. 2025 (NeuroImage)

Do mechanical and digital tools engage our brain differently? 🔨💻

@neurogiovanni.bsky.social ‘s research featured in a national TV report!

Check it out 👇

www.youtube.com/watch?v=04ft...

Announcing Our New Logo: A Bold Identity for a Dynamic Laboratory

Check out our brand new logo!

www.cogsci.it/blog/announc...

We discovered and published in NeuroImage two distinct neural pathways for mechanical and digital technology, highlighting the different ways our brain processes tools and devices we use every day.

doi.org/10.1016/j.ne...

Check out the latest work of @antimobuonocore.bsky.social on how visual masks can distort our sense of time!

SOBU XPCN Lab Latest news

Hi Bluesky! 🦋 This is the CogSci Lab.

We are a laboratory of experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience studying neural mechanisms and behavioral patterns using Eye-Tracking, EEG, fMRI. Based in Naples, the world’s most astonishing city 🌋☀️

For more information: www.cogsci.it