Giovanni's Interview & Publication
SYNLAB Italy
Giovanni Federico
What inspired your research and what did it cover?
My research is driven by a deep fascination with understanding how we perceive and interact with the physical world. This interest goes beyond academic curiosity, stemming from a desire to unravel the cognitive and neural underpinnings of human interaction with technology and the environment. Not surprisingly, according to the journal Science, investigating such aspects constitutes one of the most important scientific missions of the millennium (Kennedy & Norman, 2005; Science).
Looking at the potential of your findings, what difference can they make?
My research investigates technology through the lens of an integrated model of physical understanding that originates from the cognitive and clinical neuroscience of action understanding. This framework contemplates the neurocognitive processes by which individuals interact with their environment, integrating distinct kinds of knowledge via specific brain networks. These processes begin at the earliest visual stages and extend to complex cognitive functions. Thus, by mapping these mechanisms in the human brain these mechanisms, my research may hold significant potential for clinical applications, particularly for neurological, neurodegenerative and neurodevelopment disorders. Also, my research may have the potential to modernise clinical neuropsychology by giving impetus to a new class of data-driven methods for diagnostic purposes, such as machine-learning procedures applied to behavioural, eye-tracking and neuroimaging data.
Publication
Bringing cumulative technological culture beyond copying versus reasoning
National Library of Medicine – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36283920/
The dominant view of cumulative technological culture suggests that high-fidelity transmission rests upon a high-fidelity copying ability, which allows individuals to reproduce the tool-use actions performed by others without needing to understand them (i.e., without causal reasoning). The opposition between copying versus reasoning is well accepted but with little supporting evidence. In this article, we investigate this distinction by examining the cognitive science literature on tool use. Evidence indicates that the ability to reproduce others' tool-use actions requires causal understanding, which questions the copying versus reasoning distinction and the cognitive reality of the so-called copying ability. We conclude that new insights might be gained by considering causal understanding as a key driver of cumulative technological culture.