Multisensory perception of looming and receding objects in human newborns

When newborns leave the enclosed spatial environment of the uterus and arrive in the outside world, they are faced with a new audiovisual environment of dynamic objects, actions and events both close to themselves and further away. One particular challenge concerns matching and making sense of the visual and auditory cues specifying object motion [1-5]. Previous research shows that adults prioritise the integration of auditory and visual information indicating looming (for example [2]) and that rhesus monkeys can integrate multisensory looming, but not receding, audiovisual stimuli [4]. Despite the clear adaptive value of correctly perceiving motion towards or away from the self - for defence against and physical interaction with moving objects - such a perceptual ability would clearly be undermined if newborns were unable to correctly match the auditory and visual cues to such motion. This multisensory perceptual skill has scarcely been studied in human ontogeny. Here we report that newborns only a few hours old are sensitive to matches between changes in visual size and in auditory intensity. This early multisensory competence demonstrates that, rather than being entirely na\uefve to their new audiovisual environment, newborns can make sense of the multisensory cue combinations specifying motion with respect to themselves

Three essays on banking and asset pricing

Chapter 1 of my Thesis studies in a cross-sectional analysis lenders' beliefs. The coauthor and I use a novel loan-level dataset containing borrower-specific probability of default that allows to measure accurately lenders' expectations. We found our empirical analysis on a learning model where bankers endowed with diagnostic expectations observe noisy fundamentals from firms and estimate their probability of default. We provide empirical evidence that financial institutions are subject to expectational distortions: banks tend to overreact to both micro and macro news, overestimating (underestimating) borrowers' defaults after negative (positive) signals. We also document that the degree of overreaction is quite heterogenous among banks. In addition, overreacting bankers decrease (increase) interest rates more than rational ones and the probability of issuing a new loan rises (fall) in light of positive (negative) news. We confirm these results with a structural estimation exercise departing from a model of banking competition where banks' profit function depends on borrowers' creditworthiness, driven by the level of banks' expectation distortion and firm-specific economic news. In Chapter 2 I develop a structural model of loan demand and lender competition to study how transition risk may affect the Italian credit market. First, I show that transition risk is not currently priced by banks, nor that firms likely more exposed to this risk tend to default more frequently. Then, I use the estimated model to study the effect of policies aimed at more tightly integrating climate-related and environmental risks into banks' business planning. Modeling any such policy as in increase in the cost of lending to ``brown'' firms, counterfactual analyses show that if these marginal costs were to increase by one standard deviation interest rates would on average increase by 130 basis points, while quantities would decrease by about 20k EUR. In Chapter 3 together with coauthors I quantify the exposure of major financial markets to news shocks about global contagion risk accounting for local epidemic conditions. For a wide cross section of countries, we construct a novel dataset comprising (i) announcements related to COVID19 and (ii) high-frequency data on epidemic news diffused through Twitter. Across several financial assets, we provide novel empirical evidence about financial dynamics both around epidemic announcements and at daily/intra-daily frequency. Contagion data and social media activity about COVID19 suggest that the market price of contagion risk is significant. Hence policies that mitigate global contagion or local diffusion may be extremely valuable

Modeling, simulation and control of a 4WD electric vehicle with in-wheel motors

A relatively new technology for the electric vehicles considers the use of brushless permanent magnet motors directly connected to the car wheels (in-wheel motors or hub motors). In order to evaluate the performance that can be obtained, a complete dynamic model of a four-wheel drive (4WD) electric vehicle equipped with four in-wheel motors is developed and a correspondent parametric simulator is implemented in Matlab/Simulink™. The simulator is also employed for designing, testing and comparing various control logics which reproduce the handling behavior of a real vehicle

Direct gaze modulates face recognition in young infants

From birth, infants prefer to look at faces that engage them in direct eye contact. In adults, direct gaze is known to modulate the processing of faces, including the recognition of individuals. In the present study, we investigate whether direction of gaze has any effect on face recognition in four-month-old infants. Four-month infants were shown faces with both direct and averted gaze, and subsequently given a preference test involving the same face and a novel one. A novelty preference during test was only found following initial exposure to a face with direct gaze. Further, face recognition was also generally enhanced for faces with both direct and with averted gaze when the infants started the task with the direct gaze condition. Together, these results indicate that the direction of the gaze modulates face recognition in early infancy

Can you see what i am talking about? Human speech triggers referential expectation in four-month-old infants

Infants’ sensitivity to selectively attend to human speech and to process it in a unique way has been widely reported in the past. However, in order to successfully acquire language, one should also understand that speech is a referential, and that words can stand for other entities in the world. While there has been some evidence showing that young infants can make inferences about the communicative intentions of a speaker, whether they would also appreciate the direct relationship between a specific word and its referent, is still unknown. In the present study we tested four-month-old infants to see whether they would expect to find a referent when they hear human speech. Our results showed that compared to other auditory stimuli or to silence, when infants were listening to speech they were more prepared to find some visual referents of the words, as signalled by their faster orienting towards the visual objects. Hence, our study is the first to report evidence that infants at a very young age already understand the referential relationship between auditory words and physical objects, thus show a precursor in appreciating the symbolic nature of language, even if they do not understand yet the meanings of words

the distance to in the grand orlicz spaces

We establish a formula for the distance toL∞from the grand Orlicz spaceLΦ)Ωintroduced in Capone et al. (2008). A new formula for the distance toL∞from the grand Lebesgue spaceLn)Ωintroduced in Iwaniec and Sbordone (1992) is also provided

Chapter Sulla bellezza delle immagini per la narrazione del pensiero architettonico. Riflessioni sui disegni di progetto di Francesco Cellini

The 43rd UID conference, held in Genova, takes up the theme of ‘Dialogues’ as practice and debate on many fundamental topics in our social life, especially in these complex and not yet resolved times. The city of Genova offers the opportunity to ponder on the value of comparison and on the possibilities for the community, naturally focused on the aspects that concern us, as professors, researchers, disseminators of knowledge, or on all the possibile meanings of the discipline of representation and its dialogue with ‘others’, which we have broadly catalogued in three macro areas: History, Semiotics, Science / Technology. Therefore, “dialogue” as a profitable exchange based on a common language, without which it is impossible to comprehend and understand one another; and the graphic sign that connotes the conference is the precise transcription of this concept: the title ‘translated’ into signs, derived from the visual alphabet designed for the visual identity of the UID since 2017. There are many topics which refer to three macro sessions: - Witnessing (signs and history) - Communicating (signs and semiotics) - Experimenting (signs and sciences) Thanks to the different points of view, an exceptional resource of our disciplinary area, we want to try to outline the prevailing theoretical-operational synergies, the collaborative lines of an instrumental nature, the recent updates of the repertoires of images that attest and nourish the relations among representation, history, semiotics, sciences

Cultural modulation of face and gaze scanning in young children

Previous research has demonstrated that the way human adults look at others’ faces is modulated by their cultural background, but very little is known about how such a culture-specific pattern of face gaze develops. The current study investigated the role of cultural background on the development of face scanning in young children between the ages of 1 and 7 years, and its modulation by the eye gaze direction of the face. British and Japanese participants’ eye movements were recorded while they observed faces moving their eyes towards or away from the participants. British children fixated more on the mouth whereas Japanese children fixated more on the eyes, replicating the results with adult participants. No cultural differences were observed in the differential responses to direct and averted gaze. The results suggest that different patterns of face scanning exist between different cultures from the first years of life, but differential scanning of direct and averted gaze associated with different cultural norms develop later in life

Social touch: a new vista for developmental cognitive neuroscience?

open3siopenGliga T.; Farroni T.; Cascio C.J.Gliga, T.; Farroni, T.; Cascio, C. J