Staff profile

Bio

I graduated in Psychology at the University of Turin (Italy) and I studied for my Ph.D. in Psychology at both the University of Genoa (Italy) and Nice (France). I then worked for a few years in Italy as a Clinical Psychologist and Neuropsychologist, and as an Associate Teaching Fellow, before pursuing again my academic path. After working as a postdoctoral researcher in France and in the UK, I took a lectureship in Psychology at Keele University in 2019 and I joined Durham University in September 2022. 

I am a Chartered Psychologist in Italy, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a member of the Vision Science Society.

Student supervision and research collaboration

I am always happy to discuss about ongoing research projects or new projects. Please drop me an email if you are interested to have a chat about working with me as a research assistant, research project student or Ph.D. student, or to discuss about potential collaborations.

• links between visual attention, perception and memory
• real-world scene and object processing
• eye movements
• cerebral hemispheric functional specialisation
• lifespan
• healthy and clinical populations

• Research Group

Journal Article

• Ramzaoui, Hanane, Faure, Sylvane & Spotorno, Sara (2022). Age-related differences when searching in a real environment: The use of semantic contextual guidance and incidental object encoding. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 75(10): 1948.
• Ramzaoui, Hanane, Faure, Sylvane, David, Renaud & Spotorno, Sara (2022). Top-down and bottom-up sources of eye-movement guidance during realistic scene search in Alzheimer’s disease. Neuropsychology 36(7): 597.
• Ramzaoui, Hanane, Faure, Sylvane & Spotorno, Sara (2021). Top-down and bottom-up guidance in normal aging during scene search. Psychology and Aging 36(4): 433.
• Leroy, Anaïs, Spotorno, Sara & Faure, Sylvane (2021). Traitements sémantiques et émotionnels des scènes visuelles complexes  une synthèse critique de l’état actuel des connaissances. L’Année psychologique Vol. 121(1): 101.
• Leroy, Anaïs, Spotorno, Sara & Faure, Sylvane (2021). Emotional scene processing in children and adolescents with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder: a systematic review. European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry 30(3): 331.
• Leroy, Anaïs, Faure, Sylvane & Spotorno, Sara (2020). Reciprocal semantic predictions drive categorization of scene contexts and objects even when they are separate. Scientific Reports 10(1).
• Ramzaoui, Hanane, Faure, Sylvane & Spotorno, Sara (2018). Alzheimer’s Disease, Visual Search, and Instrumental Activities of Daily Living: A Review and a New Perspective on Attention and Eye Movements. Journal of Alzheimer's Disease 66(3): 901.
• Spotorno, Sara, Evans, Megan & Jackson, Margaret C. (2018). Remembering who was where: A happy expression advantage for face identity-location binding in working memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 44(9): 1365.
• Spotorno, Sara & Tatler, Benjamin W. (2017). The elephant in the room: Inconsistency in scene viewing and representation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 43(10): 1717.
• Spotorno, Sara, Masson, Guillaume S. & Montagnini, Anna (2016). Fixational saccades during grating detection and discrimination. Vision Research 118: 105.
• Spotorno, S., Malcolm, G. L. & Tatler, B. W. (2015). Disentangling the effects of spatial inconsistency of targets and distractors when searching in realistic scenes. Journal of Vision 15(2): 12.
• Spotorno, S., Malcolm, G. L. & Tatler, B. W. (2014). How context information and target information guide the eyes from the first epoch of search in real-world scenes. Journal of Vision 14(2): 7.
• Spotorno, Sara, Tatler, Benjamin W. & Faure, Sylvane (2013). Semantic consistency versus perceptual salience in visual scenes: Findings from change detection. Acta Psychologica 142(2): 168.
• Spotorno, Sara & Faure, Sylvane (2011). Change Detection in Complex Scenes: Hemispheric Contribution and the Role of Perceptual and Semantic Factors. Perception 40(1): 5.
• Spotorno, Sara & Faure, Sylvane (2011). The right hemisphere advantage in visual change detection depends on temporal factors. Brain and Cognition 77(3): 365.