Federica Danaj

Brief description of the doctoral project

If we are told to watch for someone about to jump, even before we see the person, our mind begins preparing to detect that specific action. This ability to anticipate and prioritize expected actions, while effectively allocating limited brain resources, is central to my research. I investigate how top-down attention—shaped by goals, tasks, or expectations—affects the recognition of human actions. While this mechanism has been extensively studied in the context of objects, comparatively little is known about how it operates for actions such as climbing, jumping, running, or walking. Using behavioral, neuroimaging, and eye-tracking methods, I explore how prior knowledge shapes performance, neural representations, and gaze strategies during action recognition.