Foto del docente

Raffaella Nori

Associate Professor

Department of Psychology "Renzo Canestrari"

Academic discipline: M-PSI/01 General Psychology

Curriculum vitae

Curriculum studiorum

1996: Degree in Psychology cum laude at the Faculty of Psychology, University of Bologna. Thesis Title : “The statistical reasoning in expert and not expert people”.

1999: Research assistant. Project research title: “Monitoring, diagnosis, prognosis, elaboration of protocols of rehabilitation of the cognitive deficits you in elderly people”. Empirical research that directly contribute to analyse the difficulty experienced by elders in everyday life; at Faculty of Psychology, University of Naples , Naples , Italy.

2000-2003: Ph-D students. Thesis Title: “The sense of direction: a test to assess it”. Empirical research that directly contribute to create a objective measure of the sense of direction at the Department of Psychology, University of Bologna , Bologna , Italy.

2004: Research assistant. Project research title: “The assessment in the juridical field”. Bibliographical research about the different tests used to make a valuation at the Faculty of Psychology, University of Bologna , Bologna , Italy.

2005: Post-doctoral research. Project research title: “Alignment effect: cognitive style and environment learning”. Empirical research that directly contribute to debates on spatial memory at the Department of Psychology, University of Bologna , Bologna , Italy

2006 to now: resercher at the Faculty of Psychology, University of Bologna.

Research

A particular field of cognitive psychology is the spatial memory, that is, the way people acquire and represent the relation between the person and the environment. One of the topic of this area concerns the study of environmental characteristics and their influence in the spatial representation of the environment.

Our line of research is examining the use of immersive virtual environments for studying sense of direction and spatial memory. Our research area concern with:

1. investigating similarities and differences between spatial memories acquired in desktop, immersive VE and real world;

2. explaining  the alignment effect (i.e. when people have to perform an imaginative judging direction task, after having acquired a map, they are more accurate and faster when their imagined perspective is the same as their learned one) taking into account individual differences, that is the special ways through which people represent spatial information (i.e. spatial cognitive style: landmark, route and survey);

3. determining whether there are some personality characteristics associate to spatial cognitive style and how these influence navigation;

4. exploring which spatial frames of reference are used when we have to locate objects either in relation to us (i.e. subject-to-object localization) or to other objects (i.e. object-to-object localization). In particular, we wanted to know if people use the same or different frames of reference in these two different kinds of localization ;

5. determining the relative contributions of the  characteristics of the person (i.e. spatial cognitive style, gender, familiarity with the environment, trait of personality) and of the physical environment (i.e. the degree of landmark differentiation, the degree of visual access to the environment, the complexity of spatial layout) in wayfinding (or spatial knowledge);

6. investigating whether Web navigation strategies are correlated with real world navigation strategies.

Publications

1. Giusberti F. e Nori R. (1999). Il senso dell'orientamento e l'abilità immaginativa. Ricerche di Psicologia, 23 (3), 71-96.

2. Giusberti F. e Nori R. (2000). Il pensiero quasi-magico. Psicologia Contemporanea, 160, 50-55.

3. Nori R. e Giusberti F. (2002). Differenze individuali nell'effetto allineamento. Giornale Italiano di Psicologia, 29 (1), 129-149.

4. Nori R. (2002). Ambiente e memoria. In: A.M. Borghi e T. Iachini, Scienze della mente, Bologna, Il Mulino, pp. 185-202.

5. Nori R., Giusberti F. e Nigro G. (2002). Il senso dell'orientamento secondo una prospettiva life-span. Ciclo Evolutivo e Disabilità: Aspetti psicologici, sociali, educativi, riabilitativi/abilitativi, 5 (1), 115-140.

6. Bensi L., Nori R. e Giusberti F. (2002). Illusione di controllo: effetto delle istruzioni. Ricerche di Psicologia, 25 (2), 155-176.

7. Nori R. e Giusberti F. (2003). Cognitive styles: errors in the directional judgments. Perception, 32 (3), 307-320.

8. Bensi L., Nori R., Strazzari E. e Giusberti F. (2003). Vividness in judgments of guilt. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 97, 1133-1136.

9. Nori R., Iachini T. e Giusberti F. (2004). Object localisation and frames of reference. Cognitive Processing, 5, 45-53.

10.  Giusberti F., Strazzari E., Bensi L., Nori R., Pesaresi D. e Varani S. (2004). L'esame del testimone: intervista cognitiva a confronto con diverse forme di interrogatorio. Bollettino di Psicologia Applicata, 242, 37-46.

11. Strazzari E., Nori R., Bensi L. e Giusberti F. (2005). Adapting to the Euro: Strategies of Conversion between-currency. Current Psychology Letters. Behaviour, Brain & Cognition, 15 (1), http://cpl.revues.org/document438.html 

12.  Nori R. e Giusberti F. (2006). Predicting cognitive styles from spatial abilities. American Journal of Psychology, 119 (1), 67-86.

13.  Nori R., Grandicelli S. e Giusberti F. (2006). Alignment effect: Primary-Secondary Learning and Cognitive Styles. Perception, 35 (9), 1233 – 1249.

14.  Gambetti E., Nori R., Bensi L., Strazzari E e Giusberti F. (2007). Ragionamento e giustizia: Analisi di un procedimento penale. Psychofenia, vol X, n.16, 15-33.

15. Nori R., Grandicelli S. e Giusberti F. (2009). Individual differences in visuo-spatial working memory and real-world wayfinding. Swiss Journal of Psychology, 68 (1), 7-16.

16. Giusberti F., Nori R., & Mercuri N. (2009). Vivere e orientarsi nella città di Cesena: la mappa mentale della città, fra differenze cross-culturali e generazionali. In A. Martelli, F. Giusberti & E. Cicognani, Cesena oggi. Vivere, condividere e orientarsi tra genere, genti e generazioni. Cesena, Il Ponte Vecchio, pp. 49-76.

17. Nori R., Mercuri N., Giusberti F., Bensi  L., & Gambetti E. (2009). Influences of gender role socialization and anxiety on spatial cognitive style. American Journal of Psychology, 122 (4), 497-505.

18. Nori R. e Piccardi L. (2009). Familiarity and spatial cognitive style: How important are they for spatial representation? In Spatial Memory: Visuospatial Processes, Cognitive Performance and Developmental Effects. New York: Nova Publisher. pp. 123-144.

19. Palermo L., Nori R., Piccardi L., Giusberti F., e Guariglia C. (2010). Environment and object mental images in patients with representational neglect: Two case reports. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 16, 1-12.

20. Giusberti F., Nori R., Gambetti E., e Bensi, L. (2010). Emettere una sentenza. Aspetti del processo decisionale. In: G. Gulotta e A. Curci, Mente, società e diritto. Milano: Giuffrè Editore (pp.355-374)

21. Bensi L., Giusberti F., Nori R., e Gambetti E. (2010). Individual differences and reasoning: a study on personality traits. British Journal of Psychology, 101, 545-562.

22. Palermo L., Piccardi L., Nori R., Giusberti F., e Guariglia C. (2010). Does hemineglect affect visual mental imagery? Imagery deficits in representational and perceptual neglect. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 27(2), 115-133.

23. Piccardi, L., Risetti, M., Nori R., Tanzilli, A., Bernardi, L., e Guariglia, C. (2011). Perspective changing in primary and secondary learning: A gender difference study. Learning and Individual Differences, 21, 114-118.

24. Bensi L., Nori R., Gambetti E., e Giusberti F. (2011). The Enhanced C ognitive Interview: A study on the efficacy of shortened variants and single techniques. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 23 (3), 311-321.

25.Piccardi L. e Nori R. (2011). Effects of Visuo-Spatial Working Memory on Wayfinding Ability. In: Erden S. Levin (Ed.) Working Memory: Capability, Developments and Improvement Techniques. New York: Nova Publisher. (pp. 81-108).

26. Piccardi L., Risetti M., e Nori R. (2011). Familiarity and environmental representations of a city: a self-report study. Psychological Reports, 109 (1), 309-326.

27.  Gambetti E., Bensi L., Nori R., e Giusberti F. (2011). The trauma symptom inventory: Italian validation of an instrument for the assessment of post-traumatic symptoms. Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences, 20, 345–355.

28. Piccardi L., Palermo L., Nori R., Giusberti F., e Guariglia C. (2012). Landmark Recognition and Mental Route Navigation Disorders in Patients with Imagery Neglect and Perceptual Neglect. In Ylenia Spiteri & Elizabeth M. Galea (Eds.) Psychology of Neglect. New York: Nova Publisher (pp. 81-104).

29.   Nori R. , Bensi L., Gambetti E., e Giusberti F. (2012). Integration information in the judicial field: adding versus averaging models. Psychology Crime & Law, 18(10), 877-895.

30. Nori R. e Piccardi L. (2012). Il senso dell'orientamento: Quanto conta la familiarità con l'ambiente? Giornale Italiano di Psicologia, 39 (2), 343-368.

31. Palermo L., Piccardi L., Nori R., Giusberti F., e Guariglia C. (2012). The roles of categorical and coordinate spatial relations in recognizing buildings. Attention, perception & psychophysics, 74, 1732-1741. DOI 10.3758/s13414-012-0353-5

32.   Nori R. , Piccardi L.,  Palermo L., Guariglia C. e Giusberti F. (2012). Working memory load elicits gender differences in mental imagery. In Sarah P. McGeown (Ed.) Psychology of Gender Differences. New York: Nova Publisher. (pp. 161-173).

33.          Giusberti F., Bensi L., e Nori R. (2013). Oltre ogni ragionevole dubbio. Decidere in tribunale. Roma, Laterza Editore.

34.   Palermo L., Nori R., Piccardi L., Zeri F., Babino A., Giusberti F., e Guariglia C. (2013). Refractive errors affect the vividness of visual mental images. PLOS ONE, 8(6): e65161.