Tomaso Vecchi

Bio: Tomaso Vecchi is an academic researcher from University of Pavia. The author has contributed to research in topics: Working memory & Cognition. The author has an hindex of 35, co-authored 153 publications receiving 4092 citations. Previous affiliations of Tomaso Vecchi include Sapienza University of Rome & University of Milan.

Visuo-spatial working memory and individual differences

Abstract: Introduction The Study of Individual Differences in Visuo-spatial Abilities Models and Components of Visuo-spatial Representation and Working Memory Gender Differences in Visuo-spatial Abilities Individual Differences in Children's Visuo-spatial Working Memory Visuo-spatial Working Memory in Ageing Imagery, Blindness and Visuo-spatial Working Memory Visuo-spatial Abilities in Genetic Syndromes A Continuity Approach to Visuo-spatial Working Memory References

Gender effects in spatial orientation: cognitive profiles and mental strategies.

Abstract: Experimental evidence and meta-analyses offer some support for gender-related differences in visuo-spatial ability. However, few studies addressed this issue in an ecological context and/or in everyday tasks implying spatial abilities, such as geographical orientation. Moreover, the relation of specific strategies and gender is still unclear. In the present investigation, we compared men and women in a newly designed battery of spatial orientation tasks in which landmark, route and survey knowledge were considered. In addition, four visuo-spatial working memory (VSWM) tasks were presented. Significant differences favouring men in VSWM tasks were reported, supporting existing evidence. However, men and women did not significantly differ in orientation tasks performance. The patterns of correlation between working memory and spatial orientation tasks indicated that men and women used somewhat different strategies in carrying out the orientation tasks. In particular, active processes seem to play a greater role in females' performance, thus confirming the importance of this variable in interpreting gender effect in VSWM tasks. Altogether, results indicate that gender effects could well result from differences in cognitive strategies and support data indicating that adequate training could reduce or eliminate them. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Do We Really Need Vision? How Blind People “See” the Actions of Others

Abstract: Observing and learning actions and behaviors from others, a mechanism crucial for survival and social interaction, engages the mirror neuron system. To determine whether vision is a necessary prerequisite for the human mirror system to develop and function, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare brain activity in congenitally blind individuals during the auditory presentation of hand-executed actions or environmental sounds, and the motor pantomime of manipulation tasks, with that in sighted volunteers, who additionally performed a visual action recognition task. Congenitally blind individuals activated a premotor-temporoparietal cortical network in response to aurally presented actions that overlapped both with mirror system areas found in sighted subjects in response to visually and aurally presented stimuli, and with the brain response elicited by motor pantomime of the same actions. Furthermore, the mirror system cortex showed a significantly greater response to motor familiar than to unfamiliar action sounds in both sighted and blind individuals. Thus, the mirror system in humans can develop in the absence of sight. The results in blind individuals demonstrate that the sound of an action engages the mirror system for action schemas that have not been learned through the visual modality and that this activity is not mediated by visual imagery. These findings indicate that the mirror system is based on supramodal sensory representations of actions and, furthermore, that these abstract representations allow individuals with no visual experience to interact effectively with others.

Sex Differences in

Abstract: This study suggests that there are sex differences in vocational attitude maturity. In the four-school stratified sample of eleventh grade boys and girls studied, the girls scored significantly higher than the boys in vocational attitude. No sex differences in overall level of self-esteem, as measured by the Tennessee Self-Concept Scale, were found. For both sexes a significant relationship between the over all level of self-esteem and vocational attitude maturity was indicated, with the relationship being higher for males than for females. The self-concept variables of self-satisfaction, family, and moral-ethical self were found to contribute to the vocational attitude maturity of males. For females, the self-concept variables of identity and moral-ethical self contributed to their vocational attitude maturity.

The Perception of the Visual World. By James J. Gibson. U.S.A.: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1950 (George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., London). Price 35s.

Abstract: Let's read! We will often find out this sentence everywhere. When still being a kid, mom used to order us to always read, so did the teacher. Some books are fully read in a week and we need the obligation to support reading. What about now? Do you still love reading? Is reading only for you who have obligation? Absolutely not! We here offer you a new book enPDFd the perception of the visual world to read.

Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations by Solving Jigsaw Puzzles

Abstract: We propose a novel unsupervised learning approach to build features suitable for object detection and classification. The features are pre-trained on a large dataset without human annotation and later transferred via fine-tuning on a different, smaller and labeled dataset. The pre-training consists of solving jigsaw puzzles of natural images. To facilitate the transfer of features to other tasks, we introduce the context-free network (CFN), a siamese-ennead convolutional neural network. The features correspond to the columns of the CFN and they process image tiles independently (i.e., free of context). The later layers of the CFN then use the features to identify their geometric arrangement. Our experimental evaluations show that the learned features capture semantically relevant content. We pre-train the CFN on the training set of the ILSVRC2012 dataset and transfer the features on the combined training and validation set of Pascal VOC 2007 for object detection (via fast RCNN) and classification. These features outperform all current unsupervised features with \(51.8\,\%\) for detection and \(68.6\,\%\) for classification, and reduce the gap with supervised learning (\(56.5\,\%\) and \(78.2\,\%\) respectively).