Massimo De Agrò

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Verified

Massimo verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD
• PostDoc Position at University of Trento

The term “animacy perception” describes the ability of animals to detect cues that indicate whether a particular object in the environment is alive or not. Such skill is crucial for survival, as it allows for the rapid identification of animated agents, being them potential social partners, or dangers to avoid. The literature on animacy perception...

By selectively focusing on a specific portion of the environment, animals can solve the problem of information overload, toning down irrelevant inputs and concentrating only on the relevant ones. This may be of particular relevance for animals such as the jumping spider, which possess a wide visual field of almost 360° and thus could benefit from a...

In the peripheral drift illusion, a static circular sawtooth pattern is perceived as if it were rotating. It is believed that this effect is a byproduct of how the neural substrate responsible for motion perception is organized. The structure of the motion perception circuitry is widespread across the animal kingdom, vertebrates and invertebrates a...

Quantifying feeding patterns provides valuable insights into animal behaviour. However, small invertebrates often consume incredibly small amounts of food. This renders traditional methods, such as weighing individuals before and after food acquisition, either inaccurate or prohibitively expensive. Here, we present a non-invasive method to quantify...

Jumping spiders display some of the richest visually mediated behaviours in nature. Vision is indeed the most important sensory modality in these spiders where motion detection and response to visual stimuli allow key behaviours such as hunting, escaping from predators and mating. These spiders have been used in various experiments demonstrating th...

‘Biological motion’ refers to the distinctive kinematics observed in many living organisms, where visually-observable points on the animal move at fixed distances from each other. Across the animal kingdom, many species have developed specialized visual circuitry to recognize such biological motion and to discriminate it from other patterns. Recent...

Argentine ants, Linepithema humile, are a particularly concerning invasive species. Control efforts often fall short likely due to a lack of sustained bait consumption. Using neuroactives, such as caffeine, to improve ant learning and navigation could increase recruitment and consumption of toxic baits. Here, we exposed L. humile to a range of caff...

Hidden colors are a widespread phenomenon in the animal kingdom, particularly in an-urans. In some cases, hidden colors are suddenly exposed during defensive displays to startle predators, others seemingly remain hidden-particularly from researchers. Amazonian species of Neotropical harlequin toads (genus Atelopus) show striking and consistent vent...

Invasive alien species are a major and growing problem, devastating ecosystems and costing billions of euros in damage and control efforts. Argentine ants, Linepithema humile, are particularly concerning, with control efforts often falling short likely due to a lack of sufficient bait consumption. Using neuroactives to manipulate ant navigation and...

The term biological motion refers to the peculiar kinematics of living organisms. Their interconnected joints move at a fixed distance from each other, a pattern that is common among all locomotive, rigid animals. Across the animal kingdom, many species have developed specialized circuitry to visually recognize biologically moving stimuli and discr...

Simple Summary Seemingly disconnected elements of the environment, like the two visible halves of an animal behind a tree, can be correctly interpreted as part of the same object. This process is referred to as “amodal completion” and seems to take place across profoundly different animal species. In a previous experiment, we tested the ability of...

Jumping spiders display some of the richest visually-mediated behaviors in nature. Vision is indeed the most important sensory modality in these spiders where motion detection and response to visual stimuli allow key behaviors such as hunting, escaping from predators, and mating. These spiders have been used in various experiments demonstrating the...

Jumping spiders possess a unique visual system, split into 8 different eyes and divided into two fully independent visual pathways. This peculiar organization begs the question of how visual information is processed, and whether the classically recognized gestalt rules of perception hold true. In a previous experiment, we tested the ability of jump...

By selectively focusing on a specific portion of the environment, animals can solve the problem of information overload, toning down irrelevant inputs and concentrate only on the relevant ones. This may be of particular relevance for animals such as the jumping spider, which possess a wide visual field of almost 360° and thus could benefit from a l...

Behavioural economists have identified many psychological manipulations which affect perceived value. A prominent example of this is bundling, in which several small gains (or costs) are experienced as more valuable (or costly) than if the same total amount is presented together. While extensively demonstrated in humans, to our knowledge this effec...

Sleep and sleep-like states are present across the animal kingdom, with recent studies convincingly demonstrating sleep-like states in arthropods, nematodes, and even cnidarians. However, the existence of different sleep phases across taxa is as yet unclear. In particular, the study of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep is still largely centered on ter...

Behavioural economists have identified many psychological manipulations which affect perceived value, although value in humans is not a unitary experience, with “liking” and “wanting” being neurologically separate processes. A prominent example of this is bundling, in which several small gains (or costs) are experienced as more valuable (or costly)...

Bees are perhaps the most important model for studying complex cognition in invertebrates, showing a variety of impressive abilities. Many experiments employ a training procedure in which the animal associates a characteristic of a “flower” (neutral stimulus) to sucrose solution (positive stimulus) over multiple foraging bouts. We hypothesized that...

Animals must often decide between exploiting safe options or risky options with a chance for large gains. Both proximate theories based on perceptual mechanisms, and evolutionary ones based on fitness benefits, have been proposed to explain decisions under risk. Eusocial insects represent a special case of risk sensitivity, as they must often make...

Visually detecting, recognizing and responding appropriately to predators increases survival. Failure to detect a predator or long decision time carries high and potentially fatal costs. Consequently, many animals show general anti‐predatory responses towards threatening stimuli, for example, looming objects. However, in the context of lurking or s...

Grouping sets of elements into smaller, equal-sized, subsets constitutes a perceptual strategy employed by humans and other animals to enhance cognitive performance. Here, we show that day-old chicks can solve extremely complex numerical discriminations (Exp.1), and that their performance can be enhanced by the presence of symmetrical/asymmetrical...

The body of most creatures is composed of interconnected joints. During motion, the spatial location of these joints changes, but they must maintain their distances to one another, effectively moving semirigidly. This pattern, termed “biological motion” in the literature, can be used as a visual cue, enabling many animals (including humans) to dist...

Declarative memory is an explicit, long-term memory system, used in generalization and categorization processes and to make inferences and to predict probable outcomes in novel situations. Animals have been proven to possess a similar declarative-like memory system. Here, we investigated declarative-like memory representations in young chicks, asse...

Background For diurnal animals that heavily rely on vision, a nocturnal resting strategy that offers protection when vision is compromised, is crucial. We found a population of a common European jumping spider ( Evarcha arcuata ) that rests at night by suspending themselves from a single silk thread attached overhead to the vegetation, a strategy c...

Grouping sets of elements into smaller, equal-sized, subsets constitutes a perceptual strategy employed by humans and other animals to enhance cognitive performance. We hypothesized that asymmetrical grouping, a characteristic of prime numbers, could provide visual cues enabling discrimination of prime from non-prime numerosities. Newborn chicks we...

Over the last 50 years, point-light displays have been successfully used to explore how animals respond to dynamic visual stimuli - specifically, differentiation of the biological from the non-biological. These stimuli are designed to preserve movement patterns while minimizing static detail, with single dots representing each of the main joints of...

In a constantly changing environment, it is advantageous for animals to encode a location (such as a food source) relying on more than one single cue. A certain position might, in fact, be signalled by the presence of information acquired through different sensory modalities which may be integrated into cohesive memories. Here, we aimed to investig...

Background: Skinner-box systems are fundamental in behavioural research. They are objective, reliable and can be used to carry out procedures otherwise impossible with manual methodologies. Recently, jumping spiders have caught the interest of scientists for their remarkable cognitive abilities. However, inquiries on their learning abilities are s...

We humans sort the world around us into conceptual groups, such as 'the same' or 'different', which facilitates many cognitive tasks. Applying such abstract concepts can improve problem-solving success and is therefore worth the cognitive investment. In this study, we investigated whether ants (Lasius niger) can learn the relational rule of 'the sa...

Animals must often decide between exploiting safe options or risky options with a chance for large gains. While traditional optimal foraging theories assume rational energy maximisation, they fail to fully describe animal behaviour. A logarithmic rather than linear perception of stimuli may shape preference, causing animals to make suboptimal choic...

Over the past decade, research in comparative psychology has increasingly focused on non-vertebrate models of cognition. Jumping spiders provide excellent models for the study of visually mediated behaviors, such as associative learning or the navigation of complex environments. Here, we tested visual and memory abilities of Phidippus regius to dis...