Tiziano Agostini

Tiziano Agostini
University of Trieste | UNITS · Department of Life Sciences

Ph.D.

About

189
Publications
35,423
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2,864
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Introduction
The main research lines are: 1) Achromatic color perception; 2) Effects of visual and auditory stimuli in the perception and execution of sports movements; 3) Rhythmic-acustic stimulation and Parkinson disease; 4) Spatial representation in sighted and visually impaired subjects; 5) Representation of quantities and SNARC effect; 6) Sound perception.

Publications

Publications (189)
Article
Full-text available
Recent evidence suggested the existence of a spatial associations for music tempo with faster left-hand responses to relatively slow tempos and faster right-hand responses to relatively fast tempos. We refer to a study that systematically explored these spatial associations across different tempo ranges, revealed a clear effect only in the fast tem...
Article
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This study aimed to investigate the effects of auditory stimulation with different frequency variations (increasing, decreasing, and constant) on performance, physiological parameters and perceived exertion in the shuttle run test. Twenty-four healthy sports science students participated in this experimental study and performed the shuttle run test...
Article
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Visual hallucinations are prevalent, potentially disabling symptoms of Parkinson’s Disease. Multiple impairments in bottom-up sensory processing and top-down perceptual modulation are implicated in the pathophysiology of these phenomena. In healthy individuals, visual illusions are elicited by illusory figures through parametric manipulations of ge...
Article
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The Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC) effect is evidence of an association between number magnitude and response position, with faster left-key responses to small numbers and faster right-key responses to large numbers. Similarly, recent studies revealed a SNARC-like effect for tempo, defined as the speed of an auditory sequen...
Article
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The Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC) effect consists in faster left-/right-key responses to small/large numbers. (Bächtold et al., Neuropsychologia 36:731–735, 1998) reported the reversal of this effect after eliciting the context of a clockface—where small numbers are represented on the right and large numbers on the left. T...
Article
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Aims The present study aims to investigate the occurrence of the serial position effect in the recall of items verbally presented in three different contexts. Background The serial position effect has been studied with both verbal ( e.g ., words) and visuospatial ( e.g ., locations) stimuli but not with verbal-spatial stimuli ( i.e ., spatial desc...
Chapter
This chapter presents the second research phase on the story of Adam and Eve, aimed at verifying the study’s hypotheses through the analysis of the perceptual–compositional arrangement of the 100 artworks of art in this thematic repertoire. The data collected from the perceptual analysis of these works – based on four categories, i.e. segmentation...
Chapter
This chapter outlines some theoretical aspects concerning continuous pictorial narrative, as dealt with in the domains of art history, psychology and its neighbouring fields and psychology of art, focusing on selected studies useful for framing issues relevant to the study presented in the following chapters. The study was specifically designed to...
Chapter
This chapter goes into the substance of our study project on continuous pictorial narrative by describing the aims, hypotheses, method and the phases of the study itself. Furthermore, in this chapter a general repertoire of 1000 artworks realised in this narrative mode is analysed, considering author, date, technique, type of artefact, dimension, l...
Chapter
This chapter provides the study materials referred to the thematic repertoire of artworks of pictorial continuous narrative on the story of Adam and Eve used mainly in the first research phase on this story and discussed in particular in Chap. 3. It presents the images of the artworks reproduced in Chap. 6 on which the codes used to classify the bi...
Chapter
This chapter contains the study materials referred to the thematic repertoire of artworks of pictorial continuous narrative on the story of Adam and Eve used in the research on this story and discussed in Chaps. 2, 3 and 4. It provides the 100 reference colour images and the data useful for their identification: author, title of artwork, date, tech...
Chapter
This chapter comprises the study materials referred to the general repertoire of artworks of pictorial continuous narrative, which is discussed mainly in Chap. 2. It contains the list of the 1000 collected artworks, which are subdivided by theme and provided with data for their identification: author, title of artwork, date, technique, dimension an...
Chapter
This chapter is devoted to presenting the first phase of the specific research on the story of Adam and Eve and the results obtained. The 100 artworks of continuous narrative constituting this thematic repertoire are preliminarily examined in order to identify the episodes and events narrated in each work on the basis of the biblical text and the r...
Article
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Both symbolic (digits) and non-symbolic (dots) numerals are spatially coded, with relatively small numbers being responded faster with a left key and large numbers being responded faster with a right key (spatial–numerical association of response codes [SNARC]). The idea of format independent SNARC seems to support the existence of a common system...
Article
The home advantage and the subconscious referee bias regularly occur in professional sports, particularly in association football. The matches played behind closed doors in spring and summer 2020 highlighted that the crowd support is one of the main factors contributing to both phenomena in domestic leagues. The aim of the present study was to inve...
Article
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Background: To evaluate and compare the visual function and the quality of life (QoL) in glaucomatous patients treated with topical medical therapy (TMT) alone, canaloplasty (CP), or trabeculectomy (TB). Methods: A total of 291 eyes of 167 patients with primary open-angle glaucoma or secondary pseudoexfoliative glaucoma in TMT or surgically trea...
Article
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The Spatial–TEmporal Association of Response Codes (STEARC) effect (Ishihara et al. in Cortex 44:454–461, 2008) is evidence that time is spatially coded along the horizontal axis. It consists in faster left-hand responses to early onset timing and faster right-hand responses to late onset timing. This effect has only been established using tasks th...
Article
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We ran a pilot experiment to explore, using a new psychophysical method, the hypothesis proposed by Zietz and Werner in the ’30s, that a sound presented simultaneously with an afterimage can change its phenomenal appearance in non-synaesthetes. The method we adopted is able to directly collect and visualise the apparent changes in intensity of the...
Article
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In 1993, Agostini and Proffitt showed that perceptual belongingness (the subsumption of some sets of elements into a perceived whole) causes simultaneous lightness contrast to be seen in configurations in which the inducing elements are not adjacent to the target. The aim of the present research was to measure the strength of belongingness in deter...
Article
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Background Due to the unfortunate pandemic situation, the phenomena of home advantage and referee bias in sports have recently received a particular research attention, especially in association football. In this regard, several studies were conducted on the last portion of the 2019–20 season: the majority of them suggests a reduction—but not the e...
Article
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Recent findings on emotion comparison show a typical pattern of motor reactivity rising from attentional capture. When pairs of emotional faces are presented simultaneously, the most intense emotional face is recognized faster (Emotional Semantic Congruency—ESC effect). Furthermore, a global response speed advantage for emotional pairs with positiv...
Preprint
Both symbolic (digits) and non-symbolic (dots) numerals are spatially represented, with relatively small numbers being responded faster with a left key press and large numbers being responded faster with a right key press (Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes). The idea of a format independent SNARC seems to support the existence of a co...
Article
Full-text available
Previous literature on the spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect examined which factors modulate spatial-numerical associations. Recently, the role of order in the SNARC effect has been debated, and further research is necessary to better understand its contribution. The present study investigated how the order elicited by...
Article
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In a recent paper by Casasanto and Pitt (2019), the authors addressed a debate regarding the role of order and magnitude in SNARC and SNARC‐like effects. Their position is that all these effects can be explained by order, while magnitude could only account for a subset of evidence. Although we agree that order can probably explain the majority of t...
Article
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Previous work on the direct speed–intensity association (SIA) on comparative judgement tasks involved spatially distributed responses over spatially distributed stimuli with high motivational significance like facial expressions of emotions. This raises the possibility that the inferred stimulus-driven regulation of lateralized motor reactivity des...
Article
The Impact of Event Scale–Revised (IES‐R) is a widely used self‐report questionnaire used to assess symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although the IES‐R has been translated and validated in multiple languages, no previous version has employed the Arabic dialect commonly spoken in Syria. The present work aimed to assess the psychomet...
Article
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Reverspectives are paintings created by the English artist Patrick Hughes. They are 3D structures, for example, pyramids or prisms, which elicit an illusory depth perception that corresponds to the reverse of the physical depth layout. Rogers and Gyani state that “the perspective information provided by a simple grid of vertical and horizontal line...
Article
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Recent studies explored the contribution of auditory information in ecological contexts to biological motion perception and its influence on movement execution. This work provides an overview of the most influential scientific contributions in this domain and analyzes the most recent findings, both in sport and motor rehabilitation. Overall, the li...
Article
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The reverse contrast is a perceptual phenomenon in which the effect of the classical simultaneous lightness contrast is reversed. In classic simultaneous lightness contrast configurations, a gray surrounded by black is perceived lighter than an identical gray surrounded by white, but in the reverse contrast configurations, the perceptual outcome is...
Article
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Home advantage and referee bias are two well-documented phenomena in professional sports, especially in association football. Among the various factors determining them, the crowd noise is considered as one of the most relevant; yet, the majority of previous studies could not isolate its contribution. The possibility to study the effects of crowd n...
Article
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University students are the most employed category of participants in cognitive research. However, researchers cannot fully control what their participants do the night before the experiments (e.g., consumption of alcohol) and, unless the experiment specifically concerns the effects of alcohol consumption, they often do not ask about it. Despite pr...
Article
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Both numerical and non-numerical magnitudes elicit similar Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC) effects, with small magnitudes associated with left hand responses and large magnitudes associated with right hand responses (Dehaene et al., J Exp Psychol Gen 122(3), 371, 1993). In the present study, we investigated whether the pheno...
Article
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Despite the numerous benefits associated with sport practice, many children and adolescents end up quitting it year after year, with a stable dropout rate between 10 and 19 years of age. Among the causes of sport abandonment, the scientific literature highlights the presence of burnout as a fundamental factor. In this regard, the aim of the present...
Article
People usually rely on sight to encode spatial information, becoming aware of other sensory cues when deprived of vision. In the absence of vision, it has been demonstrated that physical movements and spatial descriptions can effectively provide the spatial information that is necessary for the construction of an adequate spatial mental model. Howe...
Article
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Executive functions (EFs)’ development is critically affected by childhood adversity exposure. Although recent studies underlined the deleterious effects of early life stresses on working memory (WM) and inhibitory control, they were scarcely investigated in war context especially in relation with learning abilities. In order to fill this gap, we d...
Book
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9:20 Introduce e modera Giorgio SCLIP Curatore della collana "SicurezzAccessibile", membro del network nazionale Focal Point Italia per l'Agenzia europea per la sicurezza e la salute sul lavoro Università degli Studi di Trieste La sicurezza sul lavoro dei ricercatori in zone a rischio geopolitico: l'esperienza dell'Università degli Studi di Trieste...
Article
The verbal descriptions of an environment elicit a spatial mental model, in which the linear disposition of the described objects might be related to the properties of the description. In particular the direction from which the environment is encoded might shape the spatial mental model, as a consequence of a cultural bias in reading and writing di...
Article
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Murgia et al. Perceptual Information in Complex Movements AUDITORY INFORMATION IN SPORT, EXERCISE AND REHABILITATION The first contribution of this section is a review by Schaffert et al., describing the mutual influences between complex movement and sound. The authors critically analyze the studies on ecological sounds and movement sonification in...
Article
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The decision-making processes of referees in sports are affected by many factors, including the pressure of spectators. While the home/visitor bias has been previously investigated, the role of crowd noise has been less studied. In the present study, we investigated how the crowd noise (calm vs. pressing) influence the decisions of basketball refer...
Article
A common cognitive process in everyday life consists in the comparative judgements of emotions given a pair of facial expressions and the choice of the most positive/negative among them. Results from three experiments on complete-facial expressions (happy/angry) and mixed-facial expressions (neutral/happy-or-angry) pairs viewed with (Experiment 1 a...
Article
Executive Functions (EFs) development is critically affected by stress and trauma, as well as the socio‐economic context in which children grow up (Welsh, Nix, Blair, Bierman, & Nelson, 2010). Research in this field is surprisingly lacking in relation to war contexts. This study represents a first attempt at addressing this topic by evaluating EFs...
Article
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In light of the growing body of research that is revealing the significant role of the auditory domain in sport, the present study aims to investigate the contribution of early auditory and visual information to the prediction of volleyball serves’ length. To this purpose, three within-subjects experiments were run, which differed among them in ter...
Article
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Background The use of rhythmic auditory stimulation (RAS) has been proven useful in the management of gait disturbances associated with Parkinson’s disease (PD). Typically, the RAS consists of metronome or music-based sounds (artificial RAS), while ecological footstep sounds (ecological RAS) have never been used for rehabilitation programs. Object...
Article
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Objective: The aim of the present study was to investigate how ecological sport sounds (i.e., foot-ball impacts of soccer penalty kicks) affect simple reaction times. Design: Three within-subjects, simple reaction time experiments were carried out; they differed among each other for the manipulations performed on the stimuli. Method: In Experiment...
Article
Previous studies demonstrated that physical movement enhanced spatial updating in described environments. However, those movements were executed only after the encoding of the environment, minimally affecting the development of the spatial representation. Thus, we investigated whether and how participants could benefit from the execution of physica...
Article
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Accurate temporal information processing is critically important in many motor activities within disciplines such as dance, music, and sport. However, it is still unclear how temporal information related to biological motion is processed by expert and non-expert performers. It is well-known that the auditory modality dominates the visual modality i...
Article
Objective: It is well-established that early visual information has an important role in human ability to play ball sports, as its correct interpretation promotes accurate predictions concerning the ball motion. Other research highlights that auditory information provides relevant cues in various sport situations. The present study combines these t...
Chapter
Visual illusions cut across academic divides and popular interests: on the one hand, illusions provide entertainment as curious tricks of the eye; on the other hand, scientific research related to illusory phenomena has given generations of scientists and artists deep insights into the brain and principles of mind and consciousness. Numerous thinke...
Article
Spatial updating allows people to keep track of the self-to-object relations during movement. Previous studies demonstrated that physical movement enhanced spatial updating in remote environments, but failed to find the same effect in described environments. However, these studies mainly considered rotation as a physical movement, without examining...
Article
Full-text available
Movement rehabilitation by means of physical therapy represents an essential tool in the management of gait disturbances induced by Parkinson’s disease (PD). In this context, the use of rhythmic auditory stimulation (RAS) has been proven useful in improving several spatio-temporal parameters, but concerning its effect on gait patterns, scarce infor...
Article
We investigated whether angle magnitude, similarly to numerical quantities (i.e., the spatial-numerical association of response codes effect), is associated to the side of response execution. In addition, we investigated whether this association has the properties of a spatially oriented mental line, since angles are taught in a right-to-left progr...
Article
Pitch height and pitch class are different, but strictly related, percepts of music tones. To investigate the influence of pitch height in a pitch class identification task, we systematically analyzed the errors—in terms of direction and amount—committed by a group of musicians. The aim of our study was to verify the existence of constant errors in...
Article
Contrast and assimilation are two opposite perceptual phenomena deriving from the relationships among perceptual elements in a visual field. In contrast, perceptual differences are enhanced; while, in assimilation, they are decreased. Indeed, if contrast or assimilation occurs depends on various factors. Interestingly, Gestalt scientists explained...
Article
ABSTRACT. Performance errors drive motor learning for many tasks. The authors’ aim was to determine which of two strategies, method of amplification of error (MAE) or direct instruction (DI), would be more beneficial for error correction during a full golfing swing with a driver. Thirty-four golfers were randomly assigned to one of three training c...
Article
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Improving motor skills represents one of the major issues in motor control and motor learning literature. The aim of this study was to investigate which of two strategies, method of amplification of error (MAE) or direct instruction (DI), would be more beneficial for error correction of the snatch technique. Thirty well-trained male weightlifters w...
Article
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Our purposes were to investigate: (a) differences in mood states between high and low performers at the beginning and end of the Girobio 2012 cycling race, and in respect to both actual and perceived performance; and (b) whether the participants' mood states predicted actual and perceived performance. Profile of Mood States (POMS) of 72 elite cycli...
Article
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The spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect is considered an evidence of the association between numbers and space, with faster left key-press responses to small numbers and faster right key-press responses to large numbers. We examined whether visually presented note values produce a SNARC-like effect. Differently from numbe...
Article
Previous research has demonstrated that auditory rhythms affect both movement and physiological functions. We hypothesized that the ecological sounds of human breathing can affect breathing more than artificial sounds of breathing, varying in tones for inspiration and expiration. To address this question, we monitored the breath duration of partici...
Article
A growing body of research concerns the influence of auditory stimuli on motor action. The present review recalls the relevance of two theoretical frameworks (referring to the mirror neurons system and the Theory of Event Coding, respectively) for rehabilitation and sport. Then, it describes the laboratory studies showing the effectiveness of acous...
Article
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In common practice, sports-perceptual interventions are mainly based on vision. However, research demonstrates that sporting performance can also be improved through the use of sounds, showing the relevance of the auditory channel to convey sports-related information, which can positively affect athletes’ motor outcomes. This review examines the po...
Article
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Previous studies have demonstrated that physical therapy accompanied by Rhythmic Auditory Stimulation (RAS) can improve the motor skills of patients with Parkinson’s disease and, in particular, their gait disturbances. In the present work we describe the neurological bases and perceptual-motor deficits generally associated with Parkinson’s disease,...
Conference Paper
Both numerical and non-numerical magnitudes showed to produce reliable spatial association effects (i.e., the SNARC effect), with small/large magnitudes associated with left/right side responses, respectively. Indeed, Ren, Nicholls, Ma, Chen [1] showed that the physical size of a series of disks with different diameters produces the same spatial re...
Article
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It is well known that visible luminance gradients may generate contrast effects. In this work we present a new paradoxical illusion in which the luminance range of gradual transitions has been reduced to make them invisible. By adopting the phenomenological method proposed by Kanizsa, we have found that unnoticeable luminance gradients still genera...
Article
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Introduction. Several studies showed that motivation and performance are strongly influenced by the beliefs of self-efficacy. The aim of this research is to investigate the correlations between motivation to sport, prevalent motivational orientation, perceived self-efficacy, and performance in basketball. Method: 60 basketball athletes (41 men and...
Article
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We sought to examine whether the relationship between recovery–stress factors and performance would differ at the beginning (Stage 1) and the end (Final Stage) of a multi-stage cycling competition. Sixty-seven cyclists with a mean age of 21.90 years (SD = 1.60) and extensive international experience participated in the study. The cyclists responded...
Article
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The ability to detect the perceptual cues related to cardiac activity is an important aspect related to the onset and maintenance of some psychopathological disorders, such as panic disorder. We tested two groups – panic disorder (PD) patients and healthy participants – in order to examine the ability to estimate participants' own heart frequency....