Maurizio Corbetta

Who they are: Maurizio Corbetta is a professor of neurology and director of the Padova Neuroscience Center at the University of Padua, and an adjunct professor at Washington University in St. Louis. He is one of the most highly cited researchers in the world on attention and the neural networks that control it.

The concept HaELM draws from: With Gordon Shulman, Corbetta identified two distinct brain networks that control attention: a dorsal network that directs attention voluntarily toward a goal, and a ventral network that reorients attention automatically toward something salient or unexpected. Decode uses this dorsal/ventral distinction to explain the difference between an ad a viewer chooses to look at and one that involuntarily grabs their attention.

Decode articles where their thinking appears: Spider-Man Took Over Times Square. It Didn’t Need to Say Anything Else.

Source: Padova Neuroscience Center faculty profile, “Maurizio Corbetta” (pnc.unipd.it).