Patrik Pluchino

• General and Experimental Psychology
• Assistant Professor (RTDB) at University of Padua

In the evolving landscape of retail environments after the Pandemic, the present study investigates the acceptance and safety perceptions of anti-COVID-19 Internet of Things (IoT) technologies among workers and customers within a retail setting. As businesses navigate the complexities of ensuring public health and maintaining economic viability, in...

Industry 5.0 marks a significant transition in the industrial sector, integrating human centricity with technological advancements. It redefines work dynamics, emphasizing social sustainability and sustainable development in shaping career paths. The necessity for equitable workforce training, prioritizing worker well-being alongside technological...

Introduction: As a result of Industry 5.0’s technological advancements, collaborative robots (cobots) have emerged as pivotal enablers for refining manufacturing processes while re-focusing on humans. However, the successful integration of these cutting-edge tools hinges on a better understanding of human factors when interacting with such new tech...

The increasingly aging workforce is bringing particular attention to senior individuals in production sectors. While the interest in Virtual Reality (VR) applications for industrial robotics grows, the question of whether and how senior workers can withstand VR-based repetitive tasks arises. We here aimed to answer such questions by systematically...

Floods are an increasingly frequent phenomenon with catastrophic consequences for citizens and cities. Virtual reality (VR) has become a valuable training tool, simulating inaccessible or hazardous situations like emergencies and risk environments. This study evaluates a designed virtual training simulating a riverbank flood scenario. Beyond impart...

The condition of forced isolation due to the Covid-19 Pandemic clearly highlighted the importance of social support. Indeed, the absence of interaction with families and friends in the presence can lead to feelings of loneliness, abandonment, psychological discomfort, anxiety, and depression, especially for the elderly. On this premise, adopting a...

Food choices are intimately related to individual health. Therefore, the food we buy should be carefully chosen. However, grocery shopping is typically done in noisy environments, and food products usually present cluttered labels with dense texts that make it hard to properly evaluate relevant nutritional data. Augmented reality (AR) allows a shop...

Urban green areas are of fundamental importance for the mental and physical well-being of citizens. However, these areas are often designed without considering the needs of all users, especially people with disabilities and the elderly. To fill this gap, the SHIP project aims at designing and developing urban furniture, rides, and tools for physica...

Collaborative robots are increasingly common in modern production systems, since they allow to merge the productivity of automated systems with the flexibility and dexterity of manual ones. The direct interaction between the human and the robot can be the greatest advantage and the greatest limit of collaborative systems at the same time, depending...

The outbreak of the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic has changed our perception of safety in shared and public living environments including healthcare facilities, shops, schools, and enterprises. The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a suitable solution for managing anti-pandemic smart devices (e.g., UV lights, smart cameras, etc.) and increasing citizens’ s...

A typical protocol for the psychological study of helping behavior features two core roles: a help seeker suffering from some personal or situational emergency (often called “victim”) and a potential helper. The setting of these studies is such that the victim and the helper often share the same space. We wondered whether this spatial arrangement m...

Millions of people with motor and cognitive disabilities face hardships in daily life due to the limited accessibility and inclusiveness of living spaces which limit their autonomy and independence. The DOMHO project deals with these fundamental issues by leveraging an innovative solution: a smart co-housing apartment. Besides, the project aims at...

The last few decades have seen the hospital environment become more and more technologically advanced with the development of advanced diagnostic and surgical tools. The beds have also undergone a radical transformation, thanks to the integration of electrical and electronic components, that have allowed the birth of the modern widespread electric...

In the last decade, there has been a rapid widespread of applications that support different types of patients in self-managing some aspects concerning their health (e.g., drugs assumption) and reporting specific relevant events (e.g., symptoms) daily. Furthermore, these apps turn out to be very important for patients in social isolation and lockdo...

Virtual Reality (VR) technologies are widely employed to investigate human behavior in dangerous situations that cannot be safely reproduced in the real world, allowing researchers to study in an ecological way complex scenarios such as training for risky jobs, safety procedures, emergencies and, more recently, moral dilemmas in driving contex...

In the past few years, collaborative robots (i.e., cobots) have been largely adopted within industrial manufacturing. Although robots can support companies and workers in carrying out complex activities and improving productivity, human factors related to cobot operators have not yet been thoroughly investigated. The present study aims to understan...

Recently, mobile and in-home Voice Actuated Control Systems (VACs) have become affordable and reliable, allowing the control of several IoT devices from a distance. Individuals with motor impairments could benefit from VACS installed in smart domestic environments to operate home appliances and other devices. The present paper explores the potentia...

Nowadays, in the context of Industry 4.0, advanced working environments aim at achieving a high degree of human–machine collaboration. This phenomenon occurs, on the one hand, through the correct interpretation of operators’ data by machines that can adapt their functioning to support workers, and on the other hand, by ensuring the transparency of...

This paper discusses the potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm in the context of assisted living for elderly and fragile people, in the light of the peculiar requirements of such users, both from a functional and a technological perspective. We stress some aspects that are often disregarded by the technical community, such as technolog...

BACKGROUND Voice assistants allow users to control appliances and functions of a domotic house by simply uttering a few words. Such systems hold the potential to significantly help users with motor and cognitive disabilities who currently depend on their caregiver even for basic needs, e.g., opening a door. The research on voice assistants is mainl...

Background: Voice assistants allow users to control appliances and functions of a smart home by simply uttering a few words. Such systems hold the potential to significantly help users with motor and cognitive disabilities who currently depend on their caregiver even for basic needs (eg, opening a door). The research on voice assistants is mainly...

Nowadays, Virtual Reality (VR) is widely used in the tourism industry, improving the tourist experience in several cultural heritage sites. However, little interest has been paid to naturalistic sites. This paper describes the project “This is (not) just a tree” that aims to develop a system offering an educational and engaging experience to allow...

The exploitation of Virtual and Augmented Reality in the context of cultural heritage and tourism is increasing. These new technologies enable to integrate the traditional cultural contents and innovative experience modalities. Several cultural sites provide visitors with such systems to create an immersive visiting experience. However, limited att...

We present a study that investigates whether the transparency of the data acquisition technique can work as a heuristic when making evaluations about data protection and sensitivity. The study (N = 40) compares an explicit data acquisition technique (questionnaires) with an implicit one (eye-tracker) and varies also the actual sensitivity of the da...

The current study was carried out to investigate users’ preferences for different input modalities (i.e., mouse or gaze) when involved in scientific information-seeking tasks. According to the task that they had to perform (i.e., abstract opening, gaze bookmarking, or keyword highlighting), participants were randomly assigned to three different con...

The use of implicit relevance feedback from neurophysiology could deliver effortless information retrieval. However, both computing neurophysiologic responses and retrieving documents are characterized by uncertainty because of noisy signals and incomplete or inconsistent representations of the data. We present the first‐of‐its‐kind, fully integrat...

Due to better living conditions and progress in medicine older adults today are the main group of population in terms of growing speed. Furthermore, together with disabled people, they represent the most frail category of individuals. Indeed, they are likely to present different constellations of impairments (both at physical and cognitive level)....

Due to better living conditions and progress in medicine older adults today are the main group of population in terms of growing speed. Furthermore, together with disabled people, they represent the most frail category of individuals. Indeed, they are likely to present different constellations of impairments (both at physical and cognitive level)....

In this paper we present the results of a preliminary study on the impact of educational robotics on students» self-concept beliefs. Some differences have emerged in students with low self-esteem and little faith in the possibility of improving their intelligence.

This paper describes an approach for improving the current systems supporting the exploration and research of scientific literature, which generally adopt a query-based information-seeking paradigm. Our approach is to use a symbiotic system paradigm, exploiting central and peripheral physiological data along with eye-tracking data to adapt to users...

With the emergence of interest in the human-computer symbiosis also rises the need to find input systems adequate to this paradigm. The present research aims to compare three different input systems during the interaction with virtual objects in a wide, immersive mixed-reality environment. The common interaction via keyboard and mouse is compared w...

Little is known about the relationship between attention allocation and dishonesty. The goal of the present work is address this issue using eye-tracking methodologies. We develop a novel task in which participants can honestly report seeing a particular card and lose money, or falsely report not seeing the card and not lose money. When participant...

Little is known about the relationship between attention allocation and dishonesty. The goal of the present work is address this issue using eye-tracking methodologies. We develop a novel task in which participants can honestly report seeing a particular card and lose money, or falsely report not seeing the card and not lose money. When participant...

Printed or digital textbooks contain texts accompanied by various kinds of visualisation. Successful comprehension of these materials requires integrating verbal and graphical information. This study investigates the time course of processing an illustrated text through eye-tracking methodology in the school context. The aims were to identify patte...

This study used an eye-movement modelling example (EMME) in the school context to corroborate and extend recent findings about the educational potential of eye-tracking technology for supporting strategic processing and learning from an illustrated text. Sixty-four seventh graders were randomly assigned to the modelling and non-modelling conditions...

Integrative processing of verbal and graphical information is crucial when students read an illustrated text to learn from it. This study examines the potential of a novel approach to support the processing of text and graphics. We used eye movement modeling example (EMME) in the school context to model students' integrative processes of verbal and...

Little is known about the physiological processes that precede an individual’s decision to cheat. The present study intends to fill this gap by examining the relationship between attention allocation and cheating behavior using eye-tracking methodologies. We develop a new task in which participants can honestly report seeing a particular card and l...

Students search the Web frequently for many purposes, one of which is to search information for academic assignments. Given the huge amount of easily accessible online information, they are required to develop new reading skills and become more able to effectively evaluate the reliability of web sources. This study investigates the distribution of...

This paper investigates the relationship between semantic processing of words and modifications in pupil size. Variations in pupil diameter reflect cognitive processing, as has been widely demonstrated in literature. We designed an experiment in which semantic association between words was manipulated in order to disclose potential differences in c...

This study investigated the online process of reading and the offline learning from an illustrated science text. The authors examined the effects of using a concrete or abstract picture to illustrate a text and adopted eye-tracking methodology to trace text and picture processing. They randomly assigned 59 eleventh-grade students to 3 reading condi...

This study investigated the effects of reading a science text illustrated by either a labeled or unlabeled picture. Both the online process of reading the text and the offline conceptual learning from the text were examined. Eye-tracking methodology was used to trace text and picture processing through indexes of first- and second-pass reading or i...

a b s t r a c t This study used eye-tracking methodology in the school setting to examine fourth graders' online pro-cessing of text and graphics while reading an illustrated science text. We were interested in identifying patterns of visual behavior, which was examined considering individual differences in reading comprehension, prior knowledge, a...

If object-substitution masking (OSM) arises from mask representations replacing target representations, OSM should impede the formation of representations in visual short-term memory (VSTM). We utilized event-related potentials to examine the effect of OSM on target processing. An N2pc was observed on trials with delayed-offset masks, indicating th...

Neuroimaging studies attempting to isolate the neural substrate of visual short-term memory in humans have concentrated on the behavior of neurons populating the posterior part of the parietal cortex as a possible source of visual short-term memory capacity limits. Using a standard change-detection task, fMRI studies have shown that maintenance of...

Despite increasing interest in the topic, the extent to which linguistic processing demands attentional resources remains poorly understood. We report an empirical re-examination of claims about lexical processing made on the basis of the picture–word interference task when merged in a dual-task psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm. Two e...

A number of researchers have emphasized the role of distractors intervening between successive targets as the primary determinant of the attentional blink (AB) phenomenon. They argued that the AB is abolished when 3 or more targets are displayed as temporally contiguous items in rapidly presented serial sequences. In 3 experiments, the authors embe...

A rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) technique was used to investigate the role of the nature of processing carried out on targets in the Lag-1 sparing phenomenon. Lag-1 sparing refers to a higher accuracy in the task associated with the 2nd target when the 2 targets are immediately successive in the RSVP stream relative to when there are 1 or...