Dr Sara Spotorno joins the AVL

Biography:
My Ph.D., co-supervised by Prof. Sylvane Faure (University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, France) and Prof. Sergio Morra (University of Genoa, Italy), considered hemispheric asymmetry as well as the influence of perceptual and semantic properties in detecting visual changes. I then went on a 1 year postdoctoral project in Nice on multi-format (verbal and non-verbal) representations, studying the role of the cerebral hemispheres and the contribution of repetitive bilateral saccades to the memory of this type of information.

At the AVL I am now working as a postdoctoral researcher on a project examining how scene context and object information are used during a search task in real world images. In particular, we investigate whether both types of information can be processed simultaneously during the first fixation. We are also interested in analyzing what the functional goal of the visual system is when utilising each high-level information source over the course of viewing a scene.

I continue to collaborate with Sylvane Faure (Nice) and with Sergio Morra and Francesco Benso (Genoa) on hemispheric functional specialization and interaction in the processing of verbal and non-verbal information and in visual change detection.