About.
Faculty of the Department of Psychology at Columbia University in the city of New York.
My research focuses on the psychological and neural mechanisms of Attention, Perception, and Mental Imagery.
In the Department, I Teach Neuroscience courses (both introductory and advanced seminars) and serve as the Director of the Neuroscience and Behavior Major.
How did I get here? After completing my Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychology and Psychophysiology at the Department of Cognitive Psychology, Sapienza, University of Rome, I became increasingly interested in the neural basis of attention and cognitive control. As part of my training, under Dr. Jin Fan’s mentorship, the Director of the Neuroimaging Laboratory at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and with a dual-appointment at the Department of Psychology, Queens College, CUNY, I have developed unimodal and crossmodal paradigms with the conceptualization of attention as an organ system consisting of specialized functions and networks in the brain.
What am I working on now? Compared to other modalities, the investigation of visual attentional functions has attracted to a greater interest in the past years, possibly due to the existence of a so called “modality dominance”, a bias towards the processing of visual stimuli to counteract the low altering effect of visual stimulation. A great extent of discoveries resulted from such focus on the visual modality but whether similar neural and behavioural mechanisms characterize also the other sensory modalities (e.g., auditory) is less clear.
My effort is currently devoted in understanding what distinguishes human imagination from perception.
Publications.
(article, 2022) The cost of attentional reorienting on conscious visual perception: an MEG study
Spagna, A., …; Bartolomeo, P. (2022).
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(book chapter, 2022) Visual mental imagery: Inside the mind’s eyes.
Alfredo Spagna
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(article, 2021) Visual mental imagery engages the left fusiform gyrus, but not the early visual cortex: a meta-analysis of neuroimaging evidence
Alfredo Spagna, Dounia Hajhajate, Jianghao Liu, Paolo Bartolomeo
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(article, 2022) Cognitive Considerations in Major Depression: Evaluating the Effects of Pharmacotherapy and ECT on Mood and Executive Control Deficits
Alfredo Spagna,…, Yanghua Tian
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The Living Lab.
The Living Lab is an initiative created by Alfredo Spagna that seek to draw connections across work in various disciplines to tell societally relevant stories. Lab members fosters interdisciplinary collaborations to engage research topics in new ways. Broadly, we have done this by recruiting creative individuals belonging to contrasting areas of study (psychology, journalism, neuroscience, theater, and philosophy, just to name a few). Below, you will find a list of projects we are currently working on: