Dario Cazzoli

My research focuses on understanding mechanisms underlying the control of visuospatial attention in the human brain, in both health and disease.

I’m particularly interested in the syndrome of hemispatial neglect. After a lesion to the right hemisphere, patients with hemispatial neglect have difficulties to direct attention towards the left side of space, failing to detect and react to left-sided stimuli. However, some evidence indicates that these neglected stimuli are still processed by the brain, at least at implicit level. One of my lines of research thus deals with different aspects of unconscious processing of unatttended stimuli, in hemispatial neglect patients and in healthy subjects.

I use a combinaton of different methods to address these questions, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS, a non-invasive form of brain stimulation), eye movement measurements, and behavioural paradigms.