Giorgio Vallortigara | |
|---|---|
| Born | 6 August 1959 |
| Nationality | Italian |
| Alma mater | University of Padua |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Neuroscience Animal Behaviour Physiology Ethology |
 | Scholia has an author profile for Giorgio Vallortigara . |
Giorgio Vallortigara is an Italian neuroscientist.
In 1983 he graduated in experimental psychology from the University of Padua, where he also obtained his research doctorate in 1990. In 1991 he moved to the University of Sussex, with a post-doctoral scholarship. found cerebral lateralization in lower vertebrates, such as fish and amphibians. Many of his articles have been published in Nature, Science, Current Biology, PNAS. [1]
He was scientific director of the Interdepartmental Center for Mind and Brain (CIMEC) in Trento, until the first half of 2015.
In 2013 he was awarded the Ferrari Soave Award with the following citation: "The main scientific interests of Prof. Giorgio Vallortigara concern the analysis of spatial cognition in birds and the mechanisms underlying their geometric representation. He is particularly interested in the numerical cognition and the biological predisposition to the recognition of animated agents in various animal models. In these fields he has made original and innovative contributions of great international relevance." [2]
In 2016 he received the award for ethology Prix Geoffroy Saint Hilaire of the French Society for the Study of Animal Behavior and an honorary degree from the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany. [3] [4]
Messina, A., Potrich, D., Schiona, I., Sovrano, V.A., Fraser, S.E., Brennan, C.H., Vallortigara, G. (2021). Neurons in the dorso-central division of zebrafish pallium respond to change in visual numerosity. Cerebral Cortex, bhab218, https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhab218
Lorenzi, E., Perrino, M., Vallortigara, G. (2021). Numerosities and other magnitudes in the brains: A comparative view. Frontiers in Psychology - Cognition, 12:641994. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.641994
Vallortigara, G. (2021). The rose and the fly. A conjecture on the origin of consciousness. Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, 564: 170-174. doi: 10.1016/j.bbrc.2020.11.005.
Bortot, M., Stancher, G., Vallortigara, G. (2020). Transfer from number to size reveals abstract coding of magnitude in honeybees. iScience, 23: 101122 https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.isci.2020.101122
Vallortigara, G., Rogers, L.J. (2020). A function for the bicameral mind. Cortex, 124: 274-285. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2019.11.018
Hebert, M., Versace, E., Vallortigara, G. (2019). Inexperienced preys know when to flee or to freeze in front of a threat. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA,116: 22918-22920.
Vallortigara, G. (2019). Q & A Giorgio Vallortigara. Current Biology, R606-R608, July 8 2019.
Buiatti, M., Di Giorgio, E., Piazza, M., Polloni, C., Menna, G., Taddei, F., Baldo, E., Vallortigara, G. (2019). A cortical route for face-like pattern processing in human newborns. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 116: 4625-4630.
Schnell, A.K., Bellanger, C., Vallortigara, G., Jozet-Alves, C. (2018). Visual asymmetries in cuttlefish during brightness matching for camouflage. Current Biology, 28: 925-926.
Versace, E., Martinho-Truswel, A., Kacelnik, A., Vallortigara, G. (2018). Priors in animal and artificial intelligence: Where does learning begin? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 22: 963-965.
Vallortigara, G. (2018). Comparative cognition of number and space: The case of geometry and of the mental number line. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2015.0615.
Rosa-Salva, O., Hernik, M., Broseghini, A., Vallortigara, G. (2018). Visually-naïve chicks prefer agents that move as if constrained by a bilateral body-plan. Cognition, 173: 106-114.
Rugani, R., Vallortigara, G., Priftis, K., Regolin, L. (2015). Number-space mapping in the newborn chick resembles humans’ mental number line. Science, 347: 534-536.
Fontanari, L., Gonzalez, M., Vallortigara, G., Girotto, V. (2014). Probabilistic cognition in two Maya indigenous groups. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 111: 17075-17080.
A brain is an organ that serves as the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals. It is located in the head, usually close to the sensory organs for senses such as vision. It is the most complex organ in a vertebrate's body. In a human, the cerebral cortex contains approximately 14–16 billion neurons, and the estimated number of neurons in the cerebellum is 55–70 billion. Each neuron is connected by synapses to several thousand other neurons. These neurons typically communicate with one another by means of long fibers called axons, which carry trains of signal pulses called action potentials to distant parts of the brain or body targeting specific recipient cells.
Ethology is the scientific study of animal behaviour, usually with a focus on behaviour under natural conditions, and viewing behaviour as an evolutionarily adaptive trait. Behaviourism as a term also describes the scientific and objective study of animal behaviour, usually referring to measured responses to stimuli or to trained behavioural responses in a laboratory context, without a particular emphasis on evolutionary adaptivity. Throughout history, different naturalists have studied aspects of animal behaviour. Ethology has its scientific roots in the work of Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and of American and German ornithologists of the late 19th and early 20th century, including Charles O. Whitman, Oskar Heinroth (1871–1945), and Wallace Craig. The modern discipline of ethology is generally considered to have begun during the 1930s with the work of Dutch biologist Nikolaas Tinbergen (1907–1988) and of Austrian biologists Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch (1886–1982), the three recipients of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Ethology combines laboratory and field science, with a strong relation to some other disciplines such as neuroanatomy, ecology, and evolutionary biology. Ethologists typically show interest in a behavioural process rather than in a particular animal group, and often study one type of behaviour, such as aggression, in a number of unrelated species.
Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific field that is concerned with the study of the biological processes and aspects that underlie cognition, with a specific focus on the neural connections in the brain which are involved in mental processes. It addresses the questions of how cognitive activities are affected or controlled by neural circuits in the brain. Cognitive neuroscience is a branch of both neuroscience and psychology, overlapping with disciplines such as behavioral neuroscience, cognitive psychology, physiological psychology and affective neuroscience. Cognitive neuroscience relies upon theories in cognitive science coupled with evidence from neurobiology, and computational modeling.
The neocortex, also called the neopallium, isocortex, or the six-layered cortex, is a set of layers of the mammalian cerebral cortex involved in higher-order brain functions such as sensory perception, cognition, generation of motor commands, spatial reasoning and language. The neocortex is further subdivided into the true isocortex and the proisocortex.
In psychology, theory of mind refers to the capacity to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them. These states may be different from one's own states and include beliefs, desires, intentions and emotions. Possessing a functional theory of mind is considered crucial for success in everyday human social interactions and is used when analyzing, judging, and inferring others' behaviors. Deficits can occur in people with autism spectrum disorders, genetic-based eating disorders, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, cocaine addiction, and brain damage suffered from alcohol's neurotoxicity; deficits associated with opiate addiction are reversed after prolonged abstinence. Having a theory of mind is very similar to but not identical with having the capacity for empathy.
A mental image or mental picture is an experience that, on most occasions, significantly resembles the experience of visually perceiving some object, event, or scene, but occurs when the relevant object, event, or scene is not actually present to the senses. There are sometimes episodes, particularly on falling asleep and waking up (hypnopompic), when the mental imagery, being of a rapid, phantasmagoric and involuntary character, defies perception, presenting a kaleidoscopic field, in which no distinct object can be discerned. Mental imagery can sometimes produce the same effects as would be produced by the behavior or experience imagined.
Encephalization quotient (EQ), encephalization level (EL), or just encephalization is a relative brain size measure that is defined as the ratio between observed to predicted brain mass for an animal of a given size, based on nonlinear regression on a range of reference species. It has been used as a proxy for intelligence and thus as a possible way of comparing the intelligences of different species. For this purpose it is a more refined measurement than the raw brain-to-body mass ratio, as it takes into account allometric effects. Expressed as a formula, the relationship has been developed for mammals and may not yield relevant results when applied outside this group.
Numerical cognition is a subdiscipline of cognitive science that studies the cognitive, developmental and neural bases of numbers and mathematics. As with many cognitive science endeavors, this is a highly interdisciplinary topic, and includes researchers in cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, neuroscience and cognitive linguistics. This discipline, although it may interact with questions in the philosophy of mathematics, is primarily concerned with empirical questions.
Cat intelligence is the capacity of the domesticated cat to solve problems and adapt to its environment. Researchers have shown feline intelligence to include the ability to acquire new behavior that applies knowledge to new situations, communicating needs and desires within a social group and responding to training cues.
Anecdotal cognitivism is a method of research using anecdotal, and anthropomorphic evidence through the observation of animal behaviour.
Neuroanthropology is the study of the relationship between culture and the brain.
Animal consciousness, or animal awareness, is the quality or state of self-awareness within a non-human animal, or of being aware of an external object or something within itself. In humans, consciousness has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, qualia, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind. Despite the difficulty in definition, many philosophers believe there is a broadly shared underlying intuition about what consciousness is.
Vittorio Gallese is professor of Psychobiology at the University of Parma, Italy, and was professor in Experimental Aesthetics at the University of London, UK (2016-2018). He is an expert in neurophysiology, cognitive neuroscience, social neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. Gallese is one of the discoverers of mirror neurons. His research attempts to elucidate the functional organization of brain mechanisms underlying social cognition, including action understanding, empathy, language, mindreading and aesthetic experience.
Charles Ransom Gallistel is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Rutgers University. He is an expert in the cognitive processes of learning and memory, using animal models to carry out research on these topics. Gallistel is married to fellow psychologist Rochel Gelman. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty he held positions at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was chair of the psychology department and Bernard L. & Ida E. Grossman Term Professor, and at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Neuropolitics is a science which investigates the interplay between the brain and politics. It combines work from a variety of scientific fields which includes neuroscience, political science, psychology, behavioral genetics, primatology, and ethology. Often, neuropolitics research borrow methods from cognitive neuroscience to investigate classic questions from political science such as how people make political decisions, form political / ideological attitudes, evaluate political candidates, and interact in political coalitions. However, another line of research considers the role that evolving political competition has had on the development of the brain in humans and other species. The research in neuropolitics often intersects with work in genopolitics, political psychology, political physiology, sociobiology, neuroeconomics, and neurolaw.
Cognitive biology is an emerging science that regards natural cognition as a biological function. It is based on the theoretical assumption that every organism—whether a single cell or multicellular—is continually engaged in systematic acts of cognition coupled with intentional behaviors, i.e., a sensory-motor coupling. That is to say, if an organism can sense stimuli in its environment and respond accordingly, it is cognitive. Any explanation of how natural cognition may manifest in an organism is constrained by the biological conditions in which its genes survive from one generation to the next. And since by Darwinian theory the species of every organism is evolving from a common root, three further elements of cognitive biology are required: (i) the study of cognition in one species of organism is useful, through contrast and comparison, to the study of another species’ cognitive abilities; (ii) it is useful to proceed from organisms with simpler to those with more complex cognitive systems, and (iii) the greater the number and variety of species studied in this regard, the more we understand the nature of cognition.
Lesley Joy Rogers is a neurobiologist and emeritus professor of neuroscience and animal behaviour at the University of New England.
Number sense in animals is the ability of creatures to represent and discriminate quantities of relative sizes by number sense. It has been observed in various species, from fish to primates. Animals are believed to have an approximate number system, the same system for number representation demonstrated by humans, which is more precise for smaller quantities and less so for larger values. An exact representation of numbers higher than 3 has not been attested in wild animals, but can be demonstrated after a period of training in captive animals.
Social cognitive neuroscience is the scientific study of the biological processes underpinning social cognition. Specifically, it uses the tools of neuroscience to study "the mental mechanisms that create, frame, regulate, and respond to our experience of the social world". Social cognitive neuroscience uses the epistemological foundations of cognitive neuroscience, and is closely related to social neuroscience. Social cognitive neuroscience employs human neuroimaging, typically using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Human brain stimulation techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct-current stimulation are also used. In nonhuman animals, direct electrophysiological recordings and electrical stimulation of single cells and neuronal populations are utilized for investigating lower-level social cognitive processes.
Mike Nicholls is an Australian researcher in experimental psychology.
| General | |
|---|---|
| National libraries | |
| Other | |
