Raffaella Nori

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• PhD Psychology
• Professor (Associate) at University of Bologna

Research in museum studies, heritage science, and cultural tourism highlights the “care theory” as a key framework for understanding the relationship between citizens and cultural heritage. Assessing the “sense of care” toward cultural objects and sites can provide valuable insights for museums, education, and public policy. However, visitor studie...

Background/Objectives: This study aimed to (i) evaluate the effectiveness of the Familiarity and Spatial Cognitive Style Scale (FSCS) and the short Computerized Ecological Navigational Battery (LBS) in predicting navigational performance by comparing self-reported scores with actual results; (ii) investigate the FSCS’s potential as a screening tool...

Background The classic Dual Process model posits that decision-making is determined by the interplay of an intuitive System 1 and a logical System 2. In contrast, the revised model suggests that intuition can also be logical. The Cognitive load paradigm has been used to distinguish underlying rational and intuitive processes, as it tends to lead to...

Background/Objectives: Life expectancies have increased in most countries, leading to a higher accident rate among older drivers than their younger counterparts. While numerous studies have analyzed the decline in cognitive abilities and physical limitations as contributing factors, there are other considerations. For instance, younger male drivers...

The increasing role of Virtual Reality in psychology introduces new methods for replicable experiments and enhances techniques for analysing human behaviours. Despite the technological advancements, a flexible and user-friendly approach for researchers and psychologists is still lacking, making it challenging to meet their specific needs and requir...

The study explored the impact of reasoning capabilities and five personality dimensions, measured by the 16PF-5 (extraversion, anxiety, self-control, tough-mindedness, independence), on counterfactuals and responsibility attribution in judicial cases. The authors hypothesised that individual differences in these personality traits predicted the dir...

Clarifying the mechanisms underlying individual differences in creativity is essential to understand the complex nature of this phenomenon. The current research, drawing on the Investment Theory of Creativity and the AMORAL model, investigated the mediating role of ethics positions (idealism and relativism) in the association between openness to ex...

Background: Drivers consider external and hypothetical behaviours of other drivers, but internal factors also impact road safety. Objectives: This study aims to examine the connection between Cognitive and Affective Theory of Mind (ToM) and Driving Style in road safety. It hypothesizes that a higher level of ToM corresponds to a greater ability to...

The editorial "The Contribution of Internal and External Factors to Human Spatial Navigation" by Laura Piccardi, Raffaella Nori, Jose Manuel Cimadevilla, and Maria Kozhevnikov in Brain Sciences is now available online. Spatial navigation involves various cognitive processes such as memory, attention, spatial updating, mental planning, and problem-...

Background: Gambling Disorder (GD) is a bio-psycho-social disorder resulting from the interaction of clinical, cognitive, and affective factors. Impulsivity is a crucial factor in addiction studies, as it is closely linked to cognitive distortions in GD by encompassing impulsive choices, motor responses, decision-making, and cognitive biases. Also,...

It is widely agreed upon that both natural and man-made sounds, including music, profoundly impact our emotions and cognitive abilities, such as our attention, memory, problem-solving, decision-making, and creativity [...]

This Editorial sums up the articles included in the Special Issue “Application of Virtual Reality in Spatial Memory" which is devoted to gathering studies on VR and spatial memory. The Special Issue includes eight contributions covering the application of VR for both children and adults. Six studies investigate which factors affect spatial navigati...

People often make inefficient decisions for themselves and the community (e.g. they underuse medical screenings or vaccines and they do not vote) also because of their individual characteristics, such as their level of avoidance or anxiety. In recent years, governments have successfully applied strategies, called “nudges”, to help people maximizing...

Visual illusions have long been used to study visual perception and contextual integration. Neuroimaging studies employ illusions to identify the brain regions involved in visual perception and how they interact. We conducted an Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) meta-analysis and meta-analytic connectivity modeling on fMRI studies using static...

The study of the relationships between mood and creativity is long-standing. In this study, the effects of mood states on artistic creativity were investigated in ninety non-artist participants. Mood states were induced by instructing participants to listen to self-selected happy, sad, or neutral music for ten minutes. Then, all participants were a...

The Developmental Topographical Disorientation (DTD) is a pathological condition that impairs an individual’s ability to orient in space, even in the most familiar environments. It is a lifelong selective condition in individuals without brain damage or without impaired general cognitive functions. Here, we aimed at characterizing 54 individuals wi...

The last decade has seen an increase in compulsive behaviours among young adults worldwide, particularly in 2020, during restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Importantly, even if shopping is an ordinary activity in everyday life, it can become a compulsive behaviour for certain individuals. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of...

Divergent thinking is widely recognised as an individual creative potential and an essential factor in fostering creativity since the early stages of life. Albeit previous research revealed that creativity could be pursued through controlled mental processes (e.g. reasoning), the debate about the impact of children's reasoning on divergent thinking...

In the last decade, several cases affected by Developmental Topographical Disorientation (DTD) have been described. DTD consists of a neurodevelopmental disorder affecting the ability to orient in the environment despite well-preserved cognitive functions, and in the absence of a brain lesion or other neurological or psychiatric conditions. Describ...

Studies that have shown a distinction between object and spatial imagery suggest more than one type of aphantasia and hyperphantasia, yet this has not been systematically investigated in studies on imagery ability extremes. Also, if the involuntary imagery is preserved in aphantasia and how this condition affects other skills is not fully clear. W...

Many automotive industries are developing technologies to assist human drivers in suggesting wiser choices to improve drivers’ behaviour. The technology that makes use of this modality is defined as a “digital nudge”. An example of a digital nudge is the GPS that is installed on smartphones. Some studies have demonstrated that the use of GPS negati...

This study investigates the role of default options in the relationship between trait anxiety, and decision-making styles and financial decisions. One hundred and ninety-four participants were divided into three groups and subjected to three different conditions. Under each experimental condition, they had to decide whether to accept or reject inve...

Background: Military pilots show advanced visuospatial skills. Previous studies demonstrate that they are better at mentally rotating a target, taking different perspectives, estimating distances and planning travel and have a topographic memory. Here, we compared navigational cognitive styles between military pilots and people without flight exper...

Individuals with agoraphobia exhibit impaired exploratory activity when navigating unfamiliar environments. However, no studies have investigated the contribution of visuospatial working memory (VSWM) in these individuals’ ability to acquire and process spatial information while considering the use of egocentric and allocentric coordinates or envir...

Individual factors like gender and familiarity can affect the kind of environmental representation that a person acquires during spatial navigation. Men seem to prefer relying on map-like survey representations, while women prefer using sequential route representations. Moreover, a good familiarity with the environment allows more complete environm...

Field independence (FI) is the extent to which a person perceives part of a field as discrete from the surrounding field rather than embedded in the field. Several studies proposed that it represents a cognitive style that is a relatively stable individuals' predisposition towards information processing. This study investigated the effects of Field...

Background: Military pilots show high visuo-spatial skills. Previous studies demonstrate that they are better in mental rotating a target, in taking different perspectives, in estimating distances, in travel planning and in topographic memory. Here, we compared navigational cognitive styles between military pilots and people without flight experien...

Bondi, Danilo, Vittore Verratti, Raffaella Nori, Laura Piccardi, Giulia Prete, Tiziana Pietrangelo, and Luca Tommasi. Spatial abilities at high altitude: Exploring the role of cultural strategies and hypoxia. High Alt Med Biol. 00:000-000, 2020. Background: Over the past couple of decades, the number of people of different cultures traveling to pl...

This study explores the features that characterize the rational or experiential thinking styles. Specifically, we examined whether these styles are linked to different response times, degrees of accuracy, and confidence in the solution of Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) problems, controlling for gender differences. Participants (N = 120) performed...

Dual process theories of decision making distinguish between type 1 processes, which are commonly assumed to be fast and autonomous and related to intuitive thinking, and type 2 processes, which require the involvement of working memory and are closely linked to analytical reasoning. The purpose of this work was to study the role of external inform...

In the present study, we employed the dual task technique to explore the role of language in topographical working memory when landmarks are present along the path. We performed three experiments to mainly test the effects of language but also motor, spatial motor and spatial environment interferences on topographical working memory. We aimed to cl...

Divergent thinking involves the ability to find many different and new responses or solutions to open-ended problems. The ability to think divergently has been associated with different cognitive processes, including intuitive and rational thinking styles. However, research has not specifically addressed the extent to which divergent thinking is as...

The present study focused on both the MMPI‐2 scales and the 16PF‐5 primary and global factors, involving 213 individuals who were court‐ordered to undergo a personality assessment in neglect and/or abuse cases. Results showed a defensive approach to the assessment and specific psychological characteristics indicated by moderate range elevations in...

How people acquire environmental information brings out individual differences that are extremely large and robust. We assume that different spatial strategies used to represent, explore and move through the environment may predict risky driving behaviour. Here, we investigated spatial strategies and driving behaviour in 167 college students (86 wo...

The role of emotional landmarks in navigation has been scarcely studied. Previous findings showed that valence and arousal of landmarks increase landmark’s salience and improve performance in navigational memory tasks. However, no study has directly explored the interplay between valence and arousal of emotionally laden landmarks in embodied and no...

In this paper we studied the effect of engineering expertise in providing directional judgments. We asked two groups of people, engineers and non-engineers, to observe and memorize five maps, each including a four-point path, for 30 sec. The path was then removed and the participants had to provide two directional judgments: aligned (the imagined p...

In using the Internet to solve everyday problems, older adults tend to find fewer correct answers compared to younger adults. Some authors have argued that these differences could be explained by age‐related decline. The present study aimed to analyze the relationship between web‐searching navigation and usersʼ age, considering the Intelligence Quo...

The psychological assessment of parents involved in proceedings about their parental rights is often ordered by the Court in order to determine personality traits linked to potential problems in parental competences. We compared the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)-2 scores of this specific sample with a comparison group of parent...

People orient themselves in the environment using three different, hierarchically organized, spatial cognitive styles: landmark, route, and survey. Landmark style is based on a representation encompassing only visual information (terrain features); route style is based on a representation that connects landmarks and routes using an egocentric (body...

Frontiers in Psychology

The issue of the format of mental imagery is still an open debate. The classical analogue (depictive)–propositional (descriptive) debate has not provided definitive conclusions. Over the years, the debate has shifted within the frame of the embodied cognition approach, which focuses on the interdependence of perception, cognition and action. Althou...

Cognitive style refers to the preference in perceiving, organizing and remembering information. Different cognitive styles have been identified across the years. Amongst others, field-dependence/independence cognitive style is the extent to which the person perceives part of a field as discrete from the surrounding environment as a whole, rather th...

Psychometric and emotional intelligence are considered as two separate theoretical constructs, although each one has been found to correlate to a certain degree with measures of creativity. The aim of the present study was to analyze whether individual differences such as age and gender, together with psychometric intelligence and emotional compete...

The present study investigated the association between autistic personality traits and cognitive and affective Theory of Mind abilities, as well as whether intentionality attribution was atypical in individuals with autistic personality traits, such as in individuals with autism spectrum disorder, who tend to over-attribute intentions when facing a...

BACKGROUND: Reading a map requires the ability to judge one ’ s position in a large-scale space from information presented in a small-scale representation. Individuals are more accurate and faster in making judgments when the “up” direction on the map is the same as the “forward” direction of the environment, which is when a map is aligned with the...

The Enhanced Cognitive Interview (ECI) is one of the most useful witness interviews, consisting of 5 techniques (context reinstatement: CR; report everything: RE, mental imagery: MI, change order: CO and change of perspectives: CP) aimed at increasing both the quantity and the quality of elements recalled. All the techniques require mental imagery...

The present study has two-fold aims: to investigate whether gender differences persist even when more time is given to acquire spatial information; to assess the gender effect when the retrieval phase requires recalling the pathway from the same or a different reference perspective (egocentric or allocentric). Specifically, we analyse the performan...

Mental imagery plays a crucial role in several cognitive processes, including human navigation. According to the Kosslyn's Model, mental imagery is subserved by three components: generation, inspection and transformation. The role of transformation, where by individuals recognise, from a different perspective, a place they have already visited, is...

To successfully navigate within an environment, individuals have to organize the spatial information in terms of salient landmarks, paths and general layout of the navigational environment. They may differ in the strategy they adopt to orientate themselves, with some individuals preferring to use salient landmarks (landmark spatial style, L-SS), ot...

In this paper, we investigated the presence of trauma-induced sequelae in a sample of 41 young individuals exposed to the L’Aquila earthquake who did not seek mental help in the aftermath of the disaster or in the ensuing months. We compared this group with 43 individuals, matched for age and education, who had not experienced an earthquake but had...

According to the peak and decline model divergent thinking declines at a specific age (in or after middle age). However, if divergent thinking declines steadily in aging still has to be clarified. In order to explore the age-related changes in verbal and visual divergent thinking, in the present study a sample of 159 participants was divided in fiv...

The present study contributes to the discussion on the different components which constitute the intentionality concept about an undesired side effect, focusing on the morality and the skill. Two hundred and forty participants were asked to read a brief story about a car accident, in which it was explained the motivation of the high speed and objec...

Deciding about people’s responsibility, intentions and need for punishment is particularly hard and it may be often associated with counterfactual thinking, which refers to the creation of mental alternatives to actual events. Ninety-three participants were asked to generate downward or upward counterfactuals regarding a given criminal event and, t...

Creativity appears to be a multifaceted phenomenon involving both cognitive (e.g., mental imagery, attention, memory, etc.) and extra-cognitive components (emotions, unconscious processes). Recently creativity has also been considered as an alternative approach to foster active ageing. In this study the relationships between visual creativity and v...

Considering the pivotal role that creative ideas play in human societies, and creativity's contribution to multiple aspects of human life, understanding the cognitive components underlying creativity has become increasingly fundamental. Since the Five-Stages Model of the creative process proposed by Wallas (1926), creativity has become associated w...

Sex differences in visuospatial abilities are long debated. Men generally outperform women, especially in wayfinding or learning a route or a sequence of places. These differences might depend on women's disadvantage in underlying spatial competences, such as mental rotation, and on the strategies used, as well as on emotions and on self-belief abo...

The present study examined the influence of specific evidence and testimonies on a juror’s decision to make a verdict of intentional or negligent homicide in a Civil law country. Italian students (N = 280; M age = 25.0 years, SD = 2.9) read different affidavits characterized by the presence or absence of three elements against the defendant: motive...

In the present study the effect of a perceptual distortion provoked by prismatic lenses, which induces a 10° shift of the visual field, was investigated. The prism adaptation procedure has been largely used both in clinical practice to produce a recalibration of a disturbed representation of the space, and in experimental setting on healthy individ...

During navigation people may adopt three different spatial styles (i.e., Landmark, Route, and Survey). Landmark style (LS) people are able to recall familiar landmarks but cannot combine them with directional information; Route style (RS) people connect landmarks to each other using egocentric information about direction; Survey style (SS) people u...

During navigation people may adopt three different spatial styles (i.e., Landmark, Route, and Survey). Landmark style (LS) people are able to recall familiar landmarks but cannot combine them with directional information; Route style (RS) people connect landmarks to each other using egocentric information about direction; Survey style (SS) people u...

Introduction: Human navigation is a very complex ability that encompasses all four stages of human information processing (sensory input, perception/cognition, selection, and execution of an action), involving both cognitive and physical requirements. During flight, the pilot uses all of these stages and one of the most critical aspect is interfer...

In this study we aim to evaluate the impact of ageing and gender on different visual mental imagery processes. Two hundred and fifty-one participants (130 women and 121 men; age range = 18–77 years) were given an extensive neuropsychological battery including tasks probing the generation, maintenance, inspection, and transformation of visual mental...

In the last two decades, interest towards creativity has increased significantly since it was recognized as a skill and as a cognitive reserve and is now always more frequently used in ageing training. Here, the relationships between visual creativity and Visualization-Verbalization cognitive style were investigated. Fifty college students were adm...

Creativity refers to the capability to catch original and valuable ideas and solutions. It involves different processes. In this study the extent to which visual creativity is related to cognitive processes underlying visual mental imagery was investigated. Fifty college students (25 women) carried out: the Creative Synthesis Task, which measures t...

Many studies have assessed the neural underpinnings of creativity, failing to find a clear anatomical localization. We aimed to provide evidence for a multi-componential neural system for creativity. We applied a general activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis to 45 fMRI studies. Three individual ALE analyses were performed to assess c...

Many studies have assessed the neural underpinnings of creativity, failing to find a clear anatomical localization. We aimed to provide evidence for a multi-componential neural system for creativity. We applied a general activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis to 45 fMRI studies. Three individual ALE analyses were performed to assess c...

The perspective of situated cognition assumes that cognition is not separated from the context. In the present study, the issue if visuospatial memory and navigational working memory are situated was explored by manipulating participants’ mood (positive, negative and neutral) while performing two different tasks. College students were randomly assi...

In the present study, we used single- and dual-task conditions to investigate the nature of topographical working memory to better understand what type of task can hamper performance during navigation. During dual-task conditions, we considered four different sources of interference: motor (M), spatial motor (SM), verbal (i.e. articulatory suppress...

The present study aimed to analyse beliefs that men and women have with respect to their sense of direction (SOD) and whether they correlate with spatial environmental task performance. Eighty-four students filled in the short version of the Familiarity and Spatial Cognitive Style Scale to evaluate beliefs on their SOD, knowledge of the city (TK),...

The aim was to explore the role of imagery in the Enhanced Cognitive Interview (ECI). The use of imagery was specifically introduced in the ECI and it is reasonable that some mixed results on specific mnemonics could be due to individual differences in the use of imagery ability. Eighty participants performed a questionnaire (Verbalizer–Visualizer...

Spatial information processing is influenced by the space in which an individual acts and the nature of the stimulus. This distinction is also present in spatial memory, where stimuli are processed differently because of their nature and the space in which they are released. The aim of the present study was to compare college students' performance...

The hypothesis that visual perception and mental imagery are equivalent has never been explored in individuals with vision defects not preventing the visual perception of the world, such as refractive errors. Refractive error (i.e., myopia, hyperopia or astigmatism) is a condition where the refracting system of the eye fails to focus objects sharpl...

In the course of a trial, the main task that every judge or juror has to face concerns the evaluation of various pieces of evidence from a variety of different sources, with the aim of integrating such data into a single, final verdict. Algebraic models have tried to explain and predict decisional paths by identifying formal, mathematical combinato...

Categorical spatial information is considered more useful for recognizing objects, and coordinate spatial information for guiding actions-for example, during navigation or grasping. In contrast with this assumption, we hypothesized that buildings, unlike other categories of objects, require both categorical and coordinate spatial information in ord...

The present study investigates the self-report sense of direction (SOD) considering the different role of some internal factors (gender, cognitive style and familiarity with the environment) by means of a new self-report questionnaire. Instruments used until now have considered just gender and cognitive styles but never familiarity. Here, following...

The complex relationship between perceptual neglect and imagery neglect is still not completely understand because, at least in part, these disorders depend on are associated with, different neural systems and can be dissociated even in the same patient (Beschin, Basso, & Della Sala, 2000). Recent studies show that imagery neglect affects specific...

Findings concerning gender differences in solving imagery tasks are controversial: sometimes they show that men outperform women and sometimes they show no difference between them. These findings have been interpreted by considering personality factors and evolutionary theories about the use of different strategies to solve imagery tasks. To interp...

The trauma symptom inventory (TSI; Briere, 1995) is a useful instrument for the assessment of post-traumatic and common trauma-related mental health symptoms. The purpose of the study was to validate the Italian version of the original TSI. Participants from non-clinical (n = 285), clinical (n = 110) and post-traumatic (n = 30) samples completed th...

"Sense of direction" is usually assessed by self-report. Several internal factors contribute to proficiency in navigation: spatial cognitive style, respondent's sex, and familiarity with the environment; however, questionnaires assessing sense of direction do not include all these factors. In a recent study, Nori and Piccardi reported that environm...

The superiority of the Enhanced Cognitive Interview (ECI) over standard police interview protocols has been strongly supported. Recently, some authors have underlined the need to develop shorter versions of the ECI appealing for time-critical situations. There is some evidence that disregarding change order and change perspectives techniques could...

In the present study, we investigated the ability of 106 (55 males, 51 females) college students to recall an 8-step path from different viewpoints (0°; 90°; 180° and 270°) after primary and secondary learning without a time limit. For each participant, we computed the time and number of repetitions necessary to learn the path as well as his/her sp...

The present review analyse the relationship between visuo-spatial working memory (VSWM) in wayfinding, which is the ability to move successfully through the environment. As the results of research on individual differences in wayfinding are mixed, various explanation have to be considered. In this chapter, we will analyze these findings in light of...

The aim of this study was to shed light on the nature of the imagery deficits in two patients with representational neglect and to determine whether representational neglect is affected by the content of the mental images the patients have to generate, inspect and manipulate. In particular, we submitted two patients with different types of represen...

To give new insight about the relationship between imagery processes and different types of hemispatial neglect, we assessed different mental imagery abilities in a sample of right- and left-brain-damaged patients. Furthermore, because of reports of a mental representation disorder for environments in patients affected by representational neglect w...

How we acquire and represent spatial information is one of the most important unsolved issues in spatial cognition. Siegel and White (1975) affirmed that different forms of environmental knowledge are acquired and represented depending on the type of information selected: landmark, characterized by environmental patterns that are perceptually salie...

Research on the relationship between personality and social factors in spatial cognitive style is sparse. The present research was conducted to help fill the gap in this domain. We investigated the influence of specific personality traits (masculine/feminine, spatial and trait anxiety), state anxiety, and sex on spatial cognitive style. One hundred...

Personality can play a crucial role in how people reason and decide. Identifying individual differences related to how we actively gather information and use evidence could lead to a better comprehension and predictability of human reasoning. Recent findings have shown that some personality traits are related to similar decision-making patterns sho...