Massimiliano Di Luca
Alumni of the Research Group Multisensory Perception and Action
Main Focus
News
- 04/05/2011: Personal website:
- 03/05/2011: From 01/08/2011 I will be lecturer at the University of Birmingham in the (center for Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Robotics). I will leave the Max Planck in Tüebingen during the summer.
Research
The goal of my research is to understand perceptual processing of multiple sources of sensory information. In particular, I investigate what are the temporal properties of multisensory perception.
Perceptual theories usually consider a steady-state situation, but in reality the information we pick up from the environment is continuously varying: objects move unpredictably, signals appear and disappear, sensory noise changes, and our sensory system adapts to the sensory stimuli. Nevertheless, the perceptual system can combine information even when the conditions of stimulation are not stable over time, but it is not clear whether this makes a difference for the theoretical accounts of perception. One can discover what are the characteristics of the perceptual system only by using stimuli that contain such natural-occurring changes.
Subjective timing is also an open window from which to investigate perception. Perceptual time is subject to distortion and seldom corresponds to objective time. For example, event timing is not perceived consistently across modalities, it is influenced by our actions, it changes depending on previous stimulation, and it is also affected by the status of the observer. These influences can be exploited to investigate how multimodal percepts are created and what are the temporal constraints in the integration mechanism.
-
2010 - 2011 7th FP IP 248587 THE ()
-
Apr-Jun 2010 HFSP grant RPG 2006/3 ()
-
2006 - 2010 6th FP IP 27141 ImmerSence ()
Curriculum Vitae
-
01/06/2006 - 31/09/2011 Postdoctoral fellow, MPI
-
01/09/2001 - 28/05/2006 PhD in Cognitive science, Brown Universtity
14/09/1994 - 11/12/2000 Laurea in psicologia, Universitá degli studi di Trieste
Training
-
Sheridan teaching certificate, Brown University
Electronics officer navy training
CAD-CAM course: 3D and electronic circuit design
Technical high school in telecommunication
Awards
-
2005 Corinna Borden Keen research fellowship
-
2001 Brown University fellowship
-
2000 Summa cum Laude, Universitá di Trieste
Courses taught
-
04/2009 Blockpraktikum (2-week behavioral laboratory course), MPI
-
Su 2005 CG044/PY044 Perception and Mind, Brown University
-
Su 2003 One-day course on simultaneous contrast, Summer@Brown
-
Su 1999 150 hours course on Windows NT and Office, Italian public administration
-
Sp 1999 150 hours course on Windows NT and Office, Italian public administration
Other teaching experience at Brown University
-
Sp 2005 Teaching Fellow: CG144 Visualizing Vision, Michael Tarr & Fulvio Domini
-
Fa 2004 TA: CG001 Approaches to the Mind, Sheila Blumstein
-
Sp 2004 TA: CG011 Perception, Illusion, and the Visual Arts, William Warren
-
Sp 2003 TA: CG011 Perception, Illusion, and the Visual Arts, William Warren
-
Fa 2002 Teaching Fellow: CG144 Visualizing Vision, Michael Tarr & Fulvio Domini
Mentoring
-
02/2009 - present Jessica Harcther-Obrian (University of Oxford), PhD project
-
06/2006 - present Tonja-Kathryn Machulla (MPI, Tübingen), PhD dissertation
-
09/2010 - 11/2010 Ellen Brölz (MPI, Tübingen), Internship, with Harcther-Obrian
-
02/2010 - 10/2010 Cesare Parise (University of Oxford), PhD project
-
12/2009 - 02/2010 Vera Mönter (MPI, Tübingen), Lab rotation
-
02/2009 - 09/2009 Devika Narain (LMU, Munich), Master dissertation
-
07/2008 - 08/2008 Lubov Zeifman (Penn State), Internship
-
06/2007 - 06/2008 Eva Frolich (University of Tübingen), Internship, with Machulla
-
08/2008 - 10/2008 Devika Narain (LMU, Munich), Internship
-
04/2008 - 08/2008 Rachel Foster (Brown University), Internship
-
06/2007 - 08/2007 Dana Darmohray (Mercer College), Internship, with Machulla
-
02/2007 - 10/2007 Katja Martina Mayer (University of Tübingen), Master dissertation