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Introduction
I am into philosophy of science, especially philosophy of psychology and neuroscience. Favorite topics: emotion; face.
Also, a little bit of HPS/sociology of science.
Additional affiliations
December 2018 - February 2019
July 2018 - August 2018
December 2013 - January 2017
Publications
Publications (69)
We provide a quantitative analysis of the philosophy-neuroscience nexus using citation analysis. Combining bibliometric indicators of cross-field visibility with journal citation mapping techniques, we investigate four dimensions of the nexus: how the visibility of neuroscience in philosophy and of philosophy in neuroscience has changed over time,...
Existing research suggests that a psychotherapist's physical attractiveness can shape patients' initial evaluation. However, less is known about how facial attractiveness affects the decision to select one psychotherapist over another prior to therapy. In this study (N = 108), conducted with a Spanish-speaking sample, we examined whether facial att...
Emoticons and facial emojis are ubiquitous in contemporary digital communication, where it has been proposed that they make up for the lack of social information from real faces. In this paper, I construe them as cultural artifacts that exploit the neurocognitive mechanisms for face perception. Building on a step-by-step comparison of psychological...
We offer a scientometric perspective on the relationship between Philosophy and Neuroscience. More specifically, based on bibliometric analysis and on a survey shared among philosophers with an interest in neuroscience, we tackle the following three questions: (a) What is the impact of Philosophy on Neuroscience – and vice versa – as reflected in c...
Munch-Jurisic’s book thoroughly describes several cases of severe distresses reported and expressed by perpetrators of tremendous acts such as mass murders. Arguing against a simplistic reading according to which these signs of distress are straightforward manifestations of some innate moral nature, and against the optimistic reading according to w...
Despite technical progress, automatic systems aimed at “decoding” a subject’s affective states based on objective measures, such as patterns of facial movements or neural activity, are undermined by intricate epistemological and theoretical issues. Most of these systems rely on some principles from Paul Ekman’s research on emotion and his taxonomy...
As state-of-the-art technology can create artificial images that are indistinguishable from real ones, it is urgent to understand whether believing that a picture is real or not has some import over affective phenomena such as sexual arousal. Thus, in two pre-registered online studies, we tested whether 60 images depicting models in underwear elici...
This original and interdisciplinary volume explores the contemporary semiotic dimensions of the face from both scientific and sociocultural perspectives, putting forward several traditions, aspects, and signs of the human utopia of creating a hybrid face.
The book semiotically delves into the multifaceted realm of the digital face, exploring its bi...
As state-of-art technology can create artificial images that are indistinguishable from real ones, it is urgent to understand whether believing that a picture is real or not has some import over affective phenomena such as sexual arousal. Thus, in two pre-registered online studies, we tested whether 60 images depicting models in underwear elicited...
Quante volte ci siamo imbattuti in dichiarazioni quali “l’emisfero cerebrale sinistro è quello logico, quello destro è quello creativo”, o in sensazionalistici titoli di giornali sulla scoperta dell’area cerebrale dell’amore, del linguaggio, o di chissà quale altra funzione mentale?
Oggigiorno, la maggior parte dei neuroscienziati prenderebbe le di...
The illicit diffusion of intimate photographs or videos intended for private use is a troubling phenomenon known as the diffusion of Non-Consensual Intimate Images (NCII). Recently, it has been feared that the spread of deepfake technology, which allows users to fabricate fake intimate images or videos that are indistinguishable from genuine ones,...
Vocal bursts are non-linguistic affectively-laden sounds with a crucial function in human communication, yet their affective structure is still debated. Studies showed that ratings of valence and arousal follow a V-shaped relationship in several kinds of stimuli: high arousal ratings are more likely to go on a par with very negative or very positiv...
Debates on situated affectivity have mainly focused on tools that exert some positive influence on affective experience. Far less attention has been paid to artifacts that interact with the expression of affect, or to those that exert some negative influence. To shed light on that shadowy corner of our affec-tive social lives, I describe the workin...
In this introduction we offer an overview of the 15 articles of the special issue What’s so special about faces? Visages at the crossroad between philosophy, semiotics and cognition, sorting them into five broad topics, i.e. (i) the attempt at overcoming the notion that there is a one-to-one mapping between certain emotions and facial expressions,...
Fueled by the rapid development of neuroscientific tools and techniques, some scholars consider the shift from traditional cognitive psychology toward cognitive neuroscience to be a revolution (most notably Boone and Piccinini). However, the term "revolution" in philosophy of science can easily be construed as involving a paradigm shift in the sens...
The impression of trustworthiness based on someone’s facial appearance biases our subsequent behavior toward that subject in a variety of contexts. In this study, we investigated whether facial trustworthiness also biases the credibility of utterances associated with that face (H1). We explored whether this bias is mitigated by utterances eliciting...
(Despite an ENGLISH abstract, the main text is in ITALIAN)
Face masks have been a precious ally in preventing the spread of Covid-19. However, notwithstanding their primary function not being social, by covering part of the face, the most salient organ in social exchanges, face masks also inevitably alter our social interactions in relevant respec...
In their attempt to connect the workings of the human mind with their neural realizers, cognitive neuroscientists often bracket out individual differences to build a single, abstract model that purportedly represents (almost) every human being's brain. In this paper I first examine the rationale behind this model, which I call 'Platonic Brain Model...
Within the field of neuroscience, it is assumed that the central nervous system is divided into two functionally distinct components: the brain, which does the cognizing, and the spinal cord, which is a conduit of information enabling the brain to do its job. We dub this the “Cinderella view” of the spinal cord. Here, we suggest it should be abando...
Inspired by the literature on extended/scaffolded mind, a debate concerning the contribution of extra-bodily resources to our (extended) emotions is recently gaining traction. Within this debate, inspired by the literature on cognitive artifacts (e.g. Fasoli 2018; Heersmink 2013), Piredda (2019) introduces the notion of "affective artifacts", indic...
According to the influential psychologist Paul Ekman, emotions have a distinctive and universal facial expression, whose functioning is essentially grounded in biology, and is only marginally influenced by culture. But then, as I will discuss in the present essay, if we accept Eco’s construal of the boundaries of semiotics, (natural) facial express...
Covid-19 pandemics has fostered a pervasive use of facemasks all around the world. While they help in preventing infection, there are concerns related to the possible impact of facemasks on social communication. The present study investigates how emotion recognition, trust attribution and re-identification of faces differ when faces are seen withou...
The present volume consists of new papers by leading philosophers of neuroscience advancing debates concerning foundational, conceptual and methodological issues in cognitive and systems neuroscience, as well as neuroscientifically inspired philosophy of mind. This introductory chapter presents the aims of the volume and provides a short overview o...
According to several researchers, core affect lies at the foundation of our affective lives and may be characterized as a consciously accessible state combining arousal (activated-deactivated) and valence (pleasure-displeasure). The interaction between these two dimensions is still a matter of debate. In this paper we provide a novel hypothesis con...
The initial online publication contained several typesetting errors.
In this paper we discuss the so-called priority rule, an implicit norm that regulates the attribution of scientific prestige, described by Merton. It prescribes that the credit is only awarded to the first who makes a discovery. We discuss some theoretical arguments in favor of and against the rule. Then, we argue that the notion of ‘first discover...
Rivelatesi efficaci alleati nel contrasto alla pandemia di COVID-19, le mascherine chirurgiche sono diventate ubique, e addirittura obbligatorie in molti contesti, tra cui quello scolastico. Tuttavia, se da un lato la loro efficacia sul piano sanitario è fuori discussione, questa sicurezza è pagata al prezzo di compromettere la comunicazione social...
*Full text (in ITA) at OpenEdition: https://journals.openedition.org/qds/3706*
In this short essay, two books recently published in Italy are examined: Massimiano Bucchi’s Come vincere un premio Nobel. Il premio più famoso della scienza, and Emiliano Brancaccio and Giacomo Bracci’s Il discorso del potere. Il premio Nobel per l’Economia tra scienza,...
Following the taxonomy of four modes of cognition sketched by Roberto Casati (a syncretism of dual system theories of reasoning and distributed cognition), I describe four modes of addressing evolutionary salient tasks, i.e. those tasks like foraging and mating on which the survival of the species hinges upon. According to an influential tradition,...
(Abstract ITA): Lungi dall'essere monolitiche, le discipline scientifiche si frammentano sovente in scuole di pensiero rivali. Il reclutamento accademico è teatro privilegiato di questa competizione: infatti, è stato osservato che il giudizio delle e dei selezionatori è condizionato dalla scuola di appartenenza delle e dei candidati; e dato che le...
Le principali tematiche che oggi dominano il dibattito psicologico e neuroscientifico sulle emozioni hanno in realtà una storia che troppo spesso è stata dimenticata o semplicemente strumentalizzata ma che, adeguatamente conosciuta, può offrire elementi utili a fare chiarezza anche sugli aspetti più problematici e controversi delle teorie contempor...
*To appear in T. Bertolotti (ed.), Cognition in 3E: Emergent, Embodied, Extended, Springer, Chaim: 2020*
Is there any fruitful interplay between philosophy and neuroscience? In this paper, we provide four case studies showcasing that: (i) Philosophical questions can be tackled by recruiting neuroscientific evidence; (ii) the epistemological reflections of philosophers contribute to tackle some foundational issues of (cognitive) neuroscience. (i) will...
Il volume Medicina, filosofia e cognizione è dedicato ai rapporti che la medicina ha con la filosofia, le scienze cognitive e le tecnologie. I diversi saggi raccolti propongono delle analisi interdisciplinari che spaziano dalla filosofia della scienza alla linguistica clinica, dalla sociologia alle neuroscienze, dall’intelligenza artificiale alla p...
Versione semi-definitiva, accettata per la pubblicazione su Sistemi Intelligenti. Non citare.
Le emozioni tra umani ed altri animali. Problemi epistemologici nella generalizzazione dei concetti
Articolo vincitore del premio Best Paper AISC Vittorio Girotto 2017, in corso di pubblicazione su Sistemi Intelligenti. Versione provvisoria.
Nel presente articolo intendiamo ragionare sulle interazioni tra filosofia e neuroscienze. Per farlo, ci avvarremo di quattro studi di caso che riteniamo rappresentino altrettanti dibattiti dove l’interazion...
While some form of evaluation has always been employed in science (e.g. peer review, hiring), formal systems of evaluation of research and researchers have recently come to play a more prominent role in many countries because of the adoption of new models of governance. According to such models, the quality of the output of both researchers and the...
* accepted for publication on the European Journal of Analytic Philosophy - https://www.ffri.hr/phil/casopis/index.html * ///
ABSTRACT: While some form of evaluation has always been employed in science (e.g. peer review, hiring), formal systems of evaluation of research and researchers have recently come to play a more prominent role in many count...
Four contributions on the relationship between cognitive functions and neural structures
A commentary on Eliza Bliss-Moreau's "Constructing nonhuman animal emotion" (Current Opinion in Psychology, 17, 184-188). See the preprint on https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02070/full
The existence of so-called ‘basic emotions’ and their defining attributes represents a long lasting and yet unsettled issue in psychology. Recently, neuroimaging evidence, especially related to the advent of neuroimaging meta-analytic methods, has revitalized this debate in the endeavor of systems and human neuroscience. The core theme focuses on t...
Since neuroimaging methods allow researchers to study the human brain at work, the vexed mind-brain problem ceased to be just a metaphysical issue, and became a practical concern for Cognitive Neuroscientists: how could they carve mind and brain into distinct entities, and what is the relation between these two sets? In this paper, I discuss the cl...
Since cognitive neuroscience aims at giving an integrated account of mind and brain, its ontology should include both neural and cognitive entities and specify their relations. According to what we call the standard ontological framework of cognitive neuroscience (SOFCN), the aim of cognitive neuroscience should be to establish one-to-one mappings...
Twenty years ago, Paul Griffiths (1997) published his well renown book What Emotions Really Are?, in which he claimed that the phenomena designated by the vernacular word «emotion» does not belong to a single natural kind, and therefore no single theory of emotion can account for all of them. In this article we assess if his claim is still valid, b...
This talk has two goals. First, we are going to provide a rational reconstruction of the Standard Ontological Framework of Cognitive Neuroscience (SOFCN), describing its assumptions (i.e. the decomposability of mind and brain; a one-to-one mapping between mental and brain entities) and the ensuing heuristics (i.e. the search for brain correlates of...
Why (and how) Evaluation may compromise Epistemic Pluralism – and why (and how) we should care about it While some form of evaluation has ever been employed in science (e.g. peer review, hiring), evaluations of research and of researchers (ERRs) have recently assumed a more prominent roles in many countries as a consequence of the adoption of new m...
This article aims at providing a rational reconstruction of the ontology of Cognitive Neuroscience. That should satisfy three desiderata: (a) an ontology of cognitive functions describing any operation of the mind; (b) an ontology of neural structure describing any part of the brain; (c) a one-to-one correspondence between each cognitive function a...
NB: questo manoscritto altro non è che la versione pre-print di quest'altro: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307850013_L%27agenda_ontologica_della_neuroscienza_cognitiva_le_neuroscienze_come_arbitro_delle_categorie_psicologiche_e_viceversa?ev=prf_pub
Questo articolo ambisce a fornire una ricostruzione razionale dell’ontologia della neuros...
since the publication of Kitcher's influential paper The Division of Cognitive Labor, some philosophers wondered about these two related issues: (1) which is the optimal distribution of cognitive efforts among rival methods within a scientific community?, and (2) whether and how can a community achieve such an optimal distribution? Though not commi...
Questions
Questions (10)
More specifically, starting on August 2022, EasyChair only allows small conferences (max 20 submissions) for free.
Would you reccomend other similar services?
Not really much to add to the question itself.
It is quite established that neurotypical humans are particularly good at DETECTING* faces. Of course there are false positives, i.e. we sometimes see faces where there are none, in the so-called paraeidolieae. But these false positives (together with studies on infants) teach us something important, i.e. that the main heuristic for human face detection is finding sme T-shaped contrast.
As far as I know, many machine vision algorithms work in a similar fashion.
Based on this, I expect that sunglasses should NOT dampen face detection. If anything, they can even INCREASE it.
... but is it the case? Any data on that? I'll be glad if you could point me to some references!
Thank you
* * * *
* DETECTING is different from RECOGNISING or 'READING' faces. It's not about claiming "this face is X's face" or "this face suggests X's mental state (e.g. anger)", but simply "there is some face here"
Field: psychology, affective science
Scenario: Suppose you are collecting ratings of valence and arousal (and whatever measure you like), both after stimulus presentation (i.e. STIMULUS PRESENTATION / VALENCE RATING / AROUSAL RATING). Now, suppose that a serious reviewer points out that the best practice is to keep them apart in order to prevent sujects' answers to the former affecting their answers to the latter variable (e.g. STIMULUS a PRESENTATION / VALENCE RATING for a / STIMULUS b PRESENTATION / AROUSAL RATING for b / STIMULUS a PRESENTATION / AROUSAL RATING for a)
Q1: what are the pros and the cons of keeping them separate, as the reviewer urge? Is there any paper discussing this?
Q2: is this affected by stimulus modality?
Q3: if you cannot keep them apart for pragmatic reasons (e.g. you have a high number of stimuli which cannot be presented multiple times), what can you do to mitigate whatever issue results from the adoption of the sub-optimal collection style?
Thanks in advance!
As per title: I'm looking for a figure which represents the spinal cord, and that I can reuse in a paper of mine WITHOUT paying any fee -- although I'll be glad to pay in "researcher's currency", i.e. citation!
I mean, you can easily find out that Galen was the pioneer, correcting Aristotle; and a bunch of other intersting historical things. But WHO exactly decided to establish this partition, WHEN, and for WHAT reason the spinal cord was clustered in the same overarching category with the brain, whereas both were distinct from the Peripheral Nervous System?
To my knowledge, Lisa Feldman Barrett (LFB) calls her theory "Conceptual Act Theory" at least until her 2015 book with Russell.
However, to begin with her own 2017 book / her 2017 SCAN article she starts employing the name "Theory of Constructed Emotion".
Is that just a relabelling, or something substantal changed in her theory?
I am looking for papers that prove that arousal increases due to consumption of coffee. Preferably, I am looking for the bare effect of coffee, i.e. I would rather not dwell into literature that uses coffee as a placebo.
Even better, I would need papers that proves that coffee does not only increases wakeful arousal, but also affective arousal (for the distinction, see Satpute, A. B., Kragel, P. A., Barrett, L. F., Wager, T. D., & Bianciardi, M. (2018). Deconstructing arousal into wakeful, autonomic and affective varieties. Neuroscience letters).
Thanks!
If I've understood it correctly, a recent paper by
Aaron Winder
and colleagues ( ) shows that in mice altered cerebral blood volume in Resting State is poorly correlated with neural activity, and is more likely to refelct some neurovascular activity. If the findings get replicated, they might contradict the widespread belief that resting state networks might indicate some psychological process (although a yet-to-be-identitied one).
Wouldn't that downplay all the 'hype' with Resting State Network, at least as far as they're taken to reveal some 'essential function' of the brain? Which implications might there be from such a reframing?
Sometimes, cognitive neuroscientists talk about 'degenerate functions' in order to refer to a 'same' process implemented in multiple structures. I am aware of Noppeney, Price and Friston's attempts to operationalize the study of degenerate functions, but it dates back to 2004. Isn't there any recent theoretical reflection upon this topic? e.g. how do we ascertain that two functions are 'the same'? can someone provide some good example of degenerate function, and on how they have been / can be studied?
Sometimes I read that resting state networks may be the "building block" or the "pychological primitives" of the mind. However, I can't see the reason why - possibly due to my limited understanding of the brain (I'm a philosopher of neuroscience: I only deal with the brain in mediated ways). Could someone please just give me some argument in favour (or contrary) to such claims and/or hint e toward some relevant paper exploring the issue?