Born in 1977 in Parma, Italy, Dr Valeria Gazzola is an Italian Neuroscientist studying the neural basis of social cognition. She studied Biology at the University of Parma and performed her Masters Thesis with Vittorio Gallese in the laboratory of Giacomo Rizzolatti, showing that seeing other people being touched leads to activations of the somatosensory cortex. She then moved to Social Brain Lab at the University of Groningen and University Medical Center Groningen where she was awarded her PhD with Cum Laude for her work on the human mirror neurons system with Prof. Christian Keysers. Since 2007 she is a post-doctoral researcher in the Social Brain Lab.
Current Research Focus Humans are social animals. While it is of cardinal importance for us to understanding what other people do and feel, we still lack an understanding of how our brain achieves this function. Research on social perception has focused so far on cognitive processes. I investigate an alternative account: ‘shared circuits’. Shared circuits are brain areas involved when we ourselves do an action, feel an emotion or sense a sensation AND when we observe or listen to someone else perform the same actions, express the same emotions and experience the same sensations. Such shared circuits reflect an automatic transformation of what other people do and feel into the neural representation of our own actions, emotions and sensations. Using fMRI we investigate the role of brain regions involved in the execution of actions during the perception of the actions of others; the role of the somatosensory cortices during the perception of other people being touched; and the role of emotional structures (e.g. amygdala and insula) during the observation of the emotional stimuli. The emphasis of the work is to investigate the idea that a single mechanism - shared circuits - could give valuable insights into all three domains.
Publications Thioux M, Gazzola V, Keysers C(2008), Action Understanding: How, What and Why, Current Biology 18:10 R431-R434.
Gazzola V, van der Worp H, Mulder T, Wicker B, Rizzolatti G, Keysers C(2007) Aplasics born without hands mirror the goal of hand actions with their feet. Current Biology 17:1235-1240.
Keysers C and Gazzola V(2007) Integrating simulation and theory of mind: from self to social cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
Gazzola V, Rizzolatti G, Wicker B, Keysers C (2007), The Anthropomorphic Brain: the mirror neuron system responds to human and robotic actions, NeuroImage .
Gazzola V, Aziz-Zadeh L, Keysers C (2006), Empathy and the somatotopic auditory mirror system in humans, Current Biology 16:1824-9.
Keysers C, Gazzola V (2006), Towards a unifying neural theory of social cognition, Progress in Brain Research.
Keysers C, Wicker B, Gazzola V, Anton JL, Fogassi L, Gallese V (2004), A touching sight: SII/PV activation during the observation and experience of touch, Neuron 42: 335-346.