“How does the shape of architecture affect emotions?”

Prof. Giacomo Rizzolatti is Emeritus Professor of Human Physiology at the Università degli studi di Parma, and fellow of the Institute of Neuroscience of the National Research Council of Italy. He has been visiting professor at the Department of Anatomy of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and a ‘Sage professor’ at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He started his career as a visual neurophysiologist investigating the neuronal properties of the lateral geniculate body and superior colliculus of the cat. Subsequently, he became interested in visuomotor integration and in the organization of motor areas in monkeys and humans. During these studies he discovered ‘mirror neurons’, whose mechanism is fundamental in social interaction. He has received honorary degrees from the University Claude Bernard of Lyon, University of St. Petersburg, and Catholic University of Leuven. He is a member of Accademia dei Lincei, of Academia Europaea, of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Foreign Member National Academy of Sciences. His major awards are the Golgi Prize for Physiology, the Herlitzka Prize for Physiology awarded by the Accademia delle Scienze di Torino, the Brain Prize from the Lundbeck Foundation.

Dr. Giovanni Vecchiato is Senior Post Doc Researcher at the Institute of Neuroscience of the National Research Council of Italy in Parma. His current activity is to investigate the role that the motor system has in cognitive tasks by means of recording and analysis of high density electroencephalographic (EEG) data during the execution and the observation of tasks in real and virtual settings. Dr. Vecchiato has been awarded by national and international committee such as the Neuroaesthetic Award received from the Italian Society of Psychophysiology for his work titled “Electroencephalographic signatures of aesthetic experience during the perception of interior designs in a virtual reality CAVE system”. He was invited speaker at national and international conferences, such as “Festa dell’Architetto 2019” and “Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture 2018”. As Principal Investigator (PI), Dr. Vecchiato received grants from Province of Rome (Italy) and Sapienza University of Rome. Moreover, he is PI of the NuArch project co-funded by Lombardini22 (Milan, Italy). Dr. Vecchiato is Associate Editor of Frontiers in Neuroergonomics and member of the faculty board of the Master Course Neuroscience Applied to Architectural Design (NAAD) at the IUAV University, Venice.

Dr. Paolo Presti holds a Master’s degree in Biomedical Engineering achieved at Sapienza University of Rome. His Master thesis was carried out in collaboration with the Department of Data Analysis at the faculty of Psychological and Educational Science at the University of Ghent, place in which he has spent 5 months. The main goal of the thesis was to study how inverse approaches for extracting cortical waveforms from EEG scalp data and functional connectivity measures can be exploited to investigate the human brain circuits. During that period, he increased his knowledge related to EEG data processing, thus acquiring data analysis skills. To date, Dr. Presti is PhD student in Neuroscience at University of Parma. His scientific interests are related to the cerebral processes underlying action recognition within virtual reality environments. His expertise concerns the modelling of virtual scenarios and virtual avatars animated with real human bodily expressions.

Dr. Fausto Caruana is Research Scientist at the Institute of Neuroscience of the Italian National Research Council (IN-CNR), in Parma. He is specialized in social, cognitive and affective neuroscience. He authored more than 60 papers on the neural and psychological mechanisms underlying emotions, empathy, mirror neurons and motor cognition. His research is conducted using a multidisciplinary approach, mainly centered on intracranial recordings and electrical stimulations. Trained as an electrophysiologist in non-human primates, he is now working in the field of human electrophysiology thanks to a collaboration established with the Claudio Munari Epilepsy Surgery Center at the Niguarda Hospital, Milan. Beside his neuroscientific interests, he is pursuing theoretical research concerning the relationship between neuroscience and humanities and, in particular, embodied and 4E cognition. He has been awarded with national awards and he has given invited talks at prestigious national and international institutes and meetings, on both neuroscientific and philosophical topics. He is the author of “Habits. Pragmatist Approaches from Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Social Theory” (2020, with I. Testa, CUP), “Come Funzionano Le Emozioni. Da Darwin Alle Neuroscienze” (2018, with M. Viola, Il Mulino), “Il Cervello In Azione” (2016, with A. Borghi, Il Mulino) and “Il Cervello Empatico. Dalla Teoria della Mente al Meccanismo Mirror” (2019, Hachette).

Dr. Pietro Avanzini is a Researcher at the National Research Council of Italy, Institute of Neuroscience. His scientific studies are mainly related to the field of System and Computational Neuroscience, focusing on the characterization of cortical areas endowed with the human mirror mechanism. He acquired knowledge about neural signal recording and processing, especially with electroencephalography (EEG). He contributed papers relative to cortical motor rhythms’ reactivity and to motor system activation during action observation tasks. He is currently investigating how action observation can become an efficient tool in neurorehabilitation, conducting studies on clinical populations like people with cerebral palsy, perinatal stroke survivors and traumatological patients. Recently, thanks to a collaboration with the Epilepsy Surgery Center “Claudio Munari” in Milan, he started to face the characterization of the human mirror mechanism and the assessment of cortical rhythms’ generators by studying intracerebral EEG data. In particular, he currently aims at achieving an online functional characterization of the cortical regions explored in patients, and at identifying scalp EEG biomarkers that can reliably index the activity of specific cortical networks. To this aim, he contributed to establish a long-term collaboration with international companies to develop software based on machine learning and big data treatment.