Massimiliano Zampini

Massimiliano Zampini is professor at the Faculty of Cognitive Science and researcher at the Experimental Psycholgy Labs (EPL).

Main interests

My research focus on perception adopting a multisensory perspective. The world in which we live is filled with many objects and events whose presence is signaled by information available to several sensory modalities simultaneously. For example, we both hear the voice and see the lips of the person speaking to us at a noisy cocktail party. There is now a rapid growth of evidence showing that the senses are designed to function in concert and that the brain is organized to coordinate the information arriving from the different sensory modalities to improve the probability that objects and events will be detected and recognized rapidly and responded to appropriately. My research purport to understand the underlying processes involved in multisensory perception with particular interest to the following research field:

Multisensory temporal perception

Research suggests that temporal synchrony is one of the key factors determining whether multisensory integration will take place to give us the rich multisensory perceptual objects of everyday life Introspectively, it appears that we are of simultaneity very sensitive to any asynchrony in the onset of multisensory stimuli. For example, we have all had the experience of being disconcerted by a badly-dubbed foreign movie. However, sensory signals from the different sensory modalities rarely reach the brain at the same time In my studies, I try to understand how the brain is able to bind multisensory cues that may arrive in the brain at slightly different times.

Multisensory perception in blind and low-vision individuals

Do those who have lost one sense to feel (such as the blind and the deaf) make better use of the remaining functioning senses? Can the rules driving the multisensory integration integration be modified by the reduction or absence of any visual information? These are some of the questions I am trying to address by investigating multisensory perception in blind and low-vision individuals.

Food Perception

The perception and evaluation of food and drink is an inherently multisensory experience. We study how gustatory, olfactory, visual, oral-somatosensory, auditory, and even nociceptive cues can all play a role in determining our perception of what we eat and drink. For instance, our perception of the pleasantness of a food is influenced not only by its look, smell, and taste, but also by its oral texture and by the sound that it makes in the mouth when we eat it. Flavor perception is also influenced by interactions between oral texture and both olfactory and gustatory cues. Finally, the visual appearance of food and drink can also provide another important determinant of flavor perception.

Body perception in healthy individuals and patients with eating disorders

We study the contributions of different sensory modalities to body perception. We are interested in understanding how multisensory inputs can contribute to a coherent body representation in healthy individuals. In addition, we take a multisensory/perceptual approach to the distortions of body image/body schema observed in eating disorders syndromes.

Collaborations

Bettina Forster, City University London, UK
Brigitte Röder, Hamburg Univerity, UK
Charles Spence, Oxford University, UK
Daniel Sanabria, University of Granada, Spain
David I. Shore, McMaster University, Canada
Flavia Gasperi – Fondazione Edmund Mach - Istituto Agrario di San Michele all'Adige, Italy
Dr. Gian Luigi Mansi, IRCCS “Eugenio Medea”
Jordi Navarra, University of Barcelona, Spain
Nicola Bruno, University of Trieste, Italy
Norimichi Kitagawa, ITT, Japan
Roberta Zumiani, Unione Italiana Ciechi (Italian association for blind) Italy

Publications

For the complete list of publications, visit U-Gov catalogue, here.

2010

Occelli, V., Spence, C., & Zampini, M. (2010, in press). Audiotactile interactions in front and rear space. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2010.07.004

Occelli, V., Hartcher O’Brien, J., Spence, C., & Zampini, M. (2010). Assessing the Colavita effect in near and rear space. Experimental Brain Research, 203, 517-532.

Spence, C., Levitan, C., Shankar, M. U., & Zampini, M. (2010). Does food color influence taste and flavor perception in humans. Chemosensory Perception, 3, 68-84.

Zampini, M., & Spence, C. (2010). Assessing the role of sound in the perception of food and drink. Chemosensory Perception, 3, 57-67.

2009

Mahon, B.Z, Anzellotti S., Schwarzbach, J , Zampini, M., Caramazza, A. (2009). Category-specific organization in the human brain does not require visual experience. Neuron, 63, 397-405

Occelli, V., Spence, C., & Zampini, M. (2009). Assessing the effect of sound complexity on the audiotactile crossmodal dynamic capture task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 8, 1-11.

Occelli, V., Spence, C., & Zampini, M. (2009). Compatibility effects between sound frequency and tactile elevation. Neuroreport, 20, 793-797.

Tajadura-Jiménez, A., Kitagawa, N., Väljamäe, A., Zampini, M., Murray, M.M., Spence, C. (2009). Auditory-somatosensory multisensory interactions are spatially modulated by stimulated body surface and acoustic spectra. Neuropsychologia, 47, 195-203.

Occelli, V., Spence, C., & Zampini, M. (2009). The effect of sound intensity on the audiotactile crossmodal dynamic capture effect. Experimental Brain Resesearch, 193, 409-419.

2008

Nava, E., Bottari, D., Zampini, M., & Pavani, F. (2008). Visual temporal order judgment in profoundly deaf individuals. Experimental Brain Research, 190, 179-88.

Occelli, V., Spence, C., & Zampini, M. (2008). Audiotactile temporal order judgments in sighted and blind individuals. Neuropsychologia, 46, 2845-2850.

Levitan, C.A., Zampini, M., Li, R., & Spence, C. (2008). Assessing the role of color cues and people's beliefs about color-flavor associations on the discrimination of the flavor of sugar-coated chocolates. Chemical Senses, 33, 415-423.

Zampini, M., Wantling, E., Phillips, N. & Spence, C. (2008). Multisensory flavor perception: Assessing the influence of fruit acids and color cues on the perception of fruit-flavored beverages. Food Quality & Preference, 18, 335-343.