Antonio Zafarana
Postdoctoral Associate
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: BSc University of Turin; MSc Birkbeck University of London; PhD University of Kent
Research Websites: Sustainable and Innovative Transport Demand (SIT-D Lab)
Research Areas: Cognitive neuroscience; Somatosensory-motor integration; Perceptual learning; Neuroscience of decision-making
Antonio Zafarana is a cognitive neuroscientist and Postdoctoral Associate in the Engineering Division at New York University Abu Dhabi. He holds a PhD in Psychology (Cognitive Psychology/Neuroscience) from the University of Kent, where his doctoral research, supervised by Luigi Tamè, examined how visual and tactile training shape motor behavior.
Zafarana's research uses behavioral psychophysics, fMRI, and TMS to study how the brain represents sensory-motor and spatial information, with work spanning visual and tactile perceptual learning, somatosensory contributions to motor cortex function, and high-level visual object representation. Before joining the Engineering Division, he was a Postdoctoral Associate at NYUAD's Center for Brain and Health, where he conducted behavioral and fMRI studies on object representation. His current research applies neuroscientific and computational methods to transportation-related decision-making, aiming to translate neuroscientific insights into tools for understanding travel behavior and informing policy.
His work has been published in journals including Brain Structure and Function, the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, and Cortex. He has collaborated with researchers across the UK, France, Italy, and Japan and presented his research at international conferences and invited talks in the UK.