Postdoctoral ESPRIT Fellow
Department of Behavioural & Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna
My research focuses on the cognitive and perceptual mechanisms that underlie animal behaviour, with the aim of understanding of how cognition and perception evolved across species addressing whether species’ similarities and differences are determined by their phylogeny and nervous system complexity, or if they are determined by social or ecological factors unique to the habitat in which they evolved.
In particular, I am interested in contributing to a deeper understanding of the relation between seeing and perceiving through the study of visual illusions in animals. In fact, studies investigating non-human animals’ perception of visual illusions have become a useful tool to compare visual perception of human and non-human animals. Such investigations allow us to assess whether animals are like humans, interpreting and altering visual inputs (and if so, whether their rules are the same of humans), or if they are more like machines, detecting visual inputs with little or no variability. Investigation of illusion susceptibility may also shed light on the impact of environmental and evolutionary pressures on visual perception.
During my research experiences, one of the main objectives is to assess how visual illusions naturally occur in real-life context and might be exploited by different animal species through the manipulation of the environment or an individual’s morphological traits. In my current work as an Esprit Fellow, I study whether visual illusions impact the perceived quality of a mate or a rival manipulating visual information or social context in ring-doves (Streptopelia risorii).
Project: Do visual illusions influence social decisions in animals?
Funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF Esprit Project ESP 433-B)
fusanilab 