Dr Antonio Cataldo

Profile

Antonio Cataldo is a lecturer in Psychology at the School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences, Queen Mary University of London, and an Honorary Lecturer at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London. His research focuses on human somatosensory perception and sensorimotor integration. After studying Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Bologna (Italy), he obtained a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience in the Action and Body Lab (Prof. Patrick Haggard, UCL). His work on self-touch and on tactile, thermal, and pain perception has been published in prestigious scientific journals, including Current Biology, iScience, Proceedings of the Royal Society B - Biological Sciences, and the Journal of Neurophysiology. Early in his career, he also obtained a research grant from the John Templeton Foundation to investigate the minimal spatial properties of the tactile system.

Research

Research Interests:

My research aims to understand how the bodily senses shape our perception of the world, while simultaneously creating a representation of our body as a unique object in the world.  I currently have two active research lines in the field of human somatosensory perception and action.

Interactions within and between somatosensory submodalities. My goal is to understand how multiple stimuli across tactile, thermal, and pain modalities are integrated into coherent percepts.  To this aim, I use a variety of psychophysical techniques and innovative experimental paradigms based on mechanical, vibrotactile, electrotactile, thermal, nociceptive, and even chemical and ultrasound stimulation methods.

Sensorimotor foundations of spatial perception.  During my work at UCL, I have developed a robotic setup to study the complex interplay between motor and somatosensory signals taking place during self-touch. I am currently investigating how the brain acquires an internal model of space through self-touch, both in healthy and clinical populations.