Psicostat in Bologna

PSICOSTAT research group has been invited to present its activities in the field of Statistics applied to Psychology at the Department of Statistical Sciences in Bologna. Our undergraduates, doctoral students and post-docs presented their research to promote dissemination and exchange between the two disciplines.

Presentations

Claudio Zandonella Callegher

We present Expert Elicitation considering cognitive bias and main elicitation methods. Possible application in psychology are introduced ad discussed.

Margherita Andrao

The general purpose of the fMRI study presented was to observe which factors could modulate the neural correlates and behavioral responses of the aesthetic experience. Specifically, we hypothesized that the different levels of empathy in individuals could modulate the responses in the observation of dance movements with different kinematic and temporal features. We used videos, appositely created and validated by a behavioral pilot study (42 participants), which represented the complex whole-body movement of a professional contemporary dancer in a smooth (uniform speed and acceleration, lower motion energy) and a dynamic (greater speed and acceleration, and motion energy) version. In the main fMRI study (29 volunteers) participants were asked to evaluate how enjoyable it was to watch each video (likability) and how well they would have been able to reproduce it (feasibility). The Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) and the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS- 20) have been included in the experimental design to examine the extent of the differences in individual empathy scores when perceiving an action and how these empathy scores correlate with perceived likability and feasibility to dance actions.

Enrico Toffalini

Intra-individual variability is ubiquitous in our psychological functioning. Nonetheless, it has hitherto been surprisingly understudied. Circadian rhythms, a major source of this variability, impact our physiological and mental functioning, causing daily cycles of optimal and non-optimal times for cognitive testing. The proposed project aims to investigate circadian variations, in combination with cognitive chronotype, in the reading and cognitive performance of children with specific learning disorder (e.g., dyslexia). The idea is to provide both research and clinical assessment with tools to better understand and quantify variations in cognitive functioning from the point of view of individual differences.

Luca Menghini

Niccolò Polo

Gambling tv spots are a relative new field where Psychology can look at in order to understand how gambling suppliers tempt consumers to approach a risky behaviour. Text mining and Natural Language Processing tecniques are useful tools to investigate gambling marketing language. The research focus its attention on three different categories of tv spots: sport betting, casino’s type games and bingo/scratch cards. Text mining tools are used to explore and compare this three categories, and then exctract latent informations inside tv spot texts.

Alberto Arletti

In my Thesis I am engineering the best method to separate fNIRS data that contains information about brain activity from that signal which only contains noise. Methods include k-means clustering, support vector machine, gaussian estimation.