Gerardo Salvato is a Cognitive Neuroscientist (PhD) and Psychologist – Neuropsychologist (MSc). He is currently a post-doctoral research fellow of the Department of Brain and Behavioral Sciences of University of Pavia. He is also a teaching assistant of Psychobiology and Psychophysiology (M/PSI02) at the University of Pavia.

Current Research Interests

His main research topic is Attention. Attention could be disrupted following right-brain damages, and patients may show Unilateral Spatial Neglect (USN). He is interested in investigating representational and perceptual USN with its associated symptoms, such as somatoparaphrenia and anosognosia for hemiplegia. Attention may also be guided by rich memory representations of previous experience, which can exert robust influence on perception in a prospective and proactive manner. The memory-based orienting of attention represents one of his research interests. He is currently investigating this mechanism in healthy individuals and its breakdown in brain damaged patients. He is often involved in the interplay between Neuroscience and Law, and its application in legal trials

Brief Bio

Gerardo grew up in the South of Italy. After high school, he moved to the University of Chieti where he graduated summa cum laude in Cognitive Psychology, under the supervision of Giorgia Committeri. In his research project, he explored the neural basis of representational neglect using a voxel-based approach. Later, he joined the Cognitive Neuropsychology Centre at the Niguarda Ca’ Granda Hospital in Milan for his training in clinical neuropsychology. From 2012 to 2015, he has been enrolled on the PhD program in “Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience” at the University of Pavia supervised by Gabriella Bottini. During this period he has spent one year of his PhD program at the Brain and Cognition Lab at the University of Oxford, under the supervision of Kia Nobre.

Awards and Prizes

In the 2012 he was awarded the PhD student Grant “Cariplo Foundation Project” number 2010.1432 .

In the 2013 he was awarded the PhD student Grant “Cariplo Foundation Project” as Principal Investigator for the project titled “Unilateral Spatial Neglect (USN) and its related symptoms:  a tDCS study”.

In the 2016 he was awarded the Horizon 2020 Grant ‘Modelling the PRocesses leading to Organized crime and TerrOrist Networks — PROTON’, as part of WP1: Emotional and cognitive determinants of Organized Crime involvement.

Other Interests

When not in the lab, Gerardo is usually running somewhere. He loves cooking and eating Italian food.