BIOGRAPHY

I completed my BSc and MSc in Developmental and Educational Psychology at University of Padua, Italy. I then worked with Dr. Teresa Farroni at the Hospital of Monfalcone (Trieste), Italy, investigating face perception in newborns. I subsequently moved to London where I obtained a PhD at the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck College, supervised by Professor Mark Johnson. I then spent 3 years working as a postdoc at the Goldsmiths InfantLab, directed by Dr. Andy Bremner, investigating the development of the neural basis of tactile localisation. I joined the Department of Psychology at the University of Essex in Autumn 2013 as a lecturer.

RESEARCH OVERVIEW

My broad research interest is in the development of perceptual and cognitive abilities in infancy. In particular, my research focuses on:

1. 1)Face perception and processing in infancy. I am interested in the infants’ ability of integrating the information coming from the eye region and the emotional expression. There is growing evidence that infants, and even newborns, are expert in recognizing faces and processing their inner features. They show visual preferences and different brain activation according to specific gaze-expression combinations.
   

2. 2) The development of body representation and tactile localisation. As we move and act on the world, we need to continuously update the sense of our posture and the position of our limbs (“body schema”). This involves taking into account the visual and proprioceptive cues about our body, based on which a mental representation of the body is formed. While working at the Goldsmiths Infantlab, I have been investigating how infants develop the ability to locate a touch on their body while taking into account their own postural changes.
   

3. 3)The development of the neural basis of shared touch. When observing the experiences of others, we not only understand what they experience but often empathically share their states. One set of mechanisms that contribute to this ability are neural regions where seeing the states of others triggers representations of corresponding states in our brain. With colleagues from the Department of Psychology at Goldsmiths, I have recently started a project, funded by the British Academy, which investigates the development of vicarious tactile representations in infancy.
   

To investigate these intriguing infants’ abilities, my research employs event-related brain potentials (ERPs), but also behavioural methods and eye tracking.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Rigato, S., Bremner, A.J., Mason, L., Pickering, A., Davis, R. & van Velzen, J. (2013). The electrophysiological timecourse of somatosensory spatial remapping: Vision of the hands modulates effects of posture on somatosensory evoked potentials. European Journal of Neuroscience, 38, 2884-2892.

Rigato, S., Menon, E., Di Gangi, V., George, N. & Farroni, T. (2013). The role of facial expressions in attention orienting in adults and infants. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 37, 154-159.

Bremner, A.J., Hill, E.L., Pratt, M., Rigato, S. & Spence, C. (2013). Bodily illusions in young children: Developmental change in visual and proprioceptive contributions to perceived hand position. PLoS ONE, 8, e51887. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0051887.

Rigato, S. & Farroni, T. (2013). The role of gaze in the processing of emotional facial expressions. Emotion Review, 5, 36-40.

Rigato, S., Menon, E., Farroni, T., & Johnson, M.H. (2013). The shared signal hypothesis: effects of emotion-gaze congruency in infant and adult visual preferences. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 31, 15-29.

Rigato, S., Menon, E., Johnson, M.H., & Farroni, T. (2011). The interaction between gaze direction and facial expressions in newborns. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 8, 624-636.

Rigato, S., Menon, E., Johnson, M.H., Faraguna, D., & Farroni, T. (2011). Direct gaze may modulate face recognition in newborns. Infant and Child Development, 20, 20-34.

Rigato, S., Farroni, T., & Johnson, M.H. (2010). The shared signal hypothesis and neural responses to expressions and gaze in infants and adults. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 5, 88-97.

Farroni, T., Menon, E. & Rigato, S., Johnson, M.H. (2007). The perception of facial expressions in newborns. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 4, 2-13.