Welcome to my website! I’m Alfredo Spagna.
I am Associate Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology and Social Sciences at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy. My current research explores what distinguishes imagination from perception and how attentional mechanisms operate across the two.
Before joining John Cabot University, I spent eight years as a Lecturer in Discipline in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University in the City of New York, where I taught undergraduate and graduate courses and contributed to research and training in cognitive neuroscience.
I earned my Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology from Sapienza University of Rome. During my postdoctoral training with Dr. Jin Fan at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Queens College (CUNY), I developed experimental paradigms to investigate attention and cognitive control, conceptualizing attention as an integrated system supported by specialized brain networks.
Current Academic position
Associate Professor of Psychology
Department of Psychology and Social Sciences
John Cabot University, Rome, ItalyPrevious Academic positions:
Director of Undergraduate Studies in Neuroscience & Lecturer in Psychology
Department of Psychology
Columbia University, New York, NY, USA (2018–2026)
I study how the brain selects information from the external world and generates internal representations through mental imagery, combining behavioral and neuroimaging methods to understand the neural mechanisms of attention across sensory modalities.
Along this path
I have developed the Auditory Attentional Network Task, which allows the investigation of the efficiency and interactions of the three attentional networks (alerting, orienting, and executive control network) in the auditory modality and to compare with attention in the visual and tactile modality. This task has been already successfully used in neurotypical adults, and is currently being administered to individuals with schizophrenia and individuals within the autism spectrum.
Education and Training:
– Post Doctoral Fellow at the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, Queens College, CUNY, NY, USA
– Joint with Functional Neuroimaging Laboratory, Icahn School of
Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital, NYC, NY
– Ph. D. In Cognitive Psychology from Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
– M.A. and B.A. in Experimental Psychology from Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
Through my effort and international collaborations, I hope to advance current understanding of biological and behavioral aspects of attention in healthy individuals and clinical populations, giving way to work on new behavioral and pharmacological interventions.
“Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence.”
Research
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Teaching
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Publications
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