Daniele Ortu

Graduated in Psychology in 2004 in Cagliari, Italy. My main areas of interests were neuroscience and social psychology of groups in relation to theories of democratic systems, in particular an interpretation of majority/minority dynamics as ingroup/outgroup ones. In 2005 I graduated from the Master's program Ailun in Nuoro, in Science of Organization, were I learned about Behavior Analysis and its fundamental role in both life and social sciences (shouldn't they be the same?) with great professors such as Giulio Bolacchi and Dave Palmer. In February 2006 Professor Palmer allowed me to spend a few months at Smith College, Massachusetts were he teaches and he introduced me to selectionist principles and cognitive interpretations based on operant selection. I was then invited by Dr. Sigrid Glenn as a research assistant at the Behavior Analysis department of University of North Texas where I contributed to research done on Cultural Analysis and Neuro-Operant Analysis. In 2008 I joined the SINAPSE team here in Scotland as a Ph.D. student in the PIL Lab run by Professor David Donaldson in order to experiment with ERPs, event related potentials, and do a moment to moment analysis of what is happening in the brain during the important gap between stimuli and responses, and to measure responses beyond the threshold of observability or emission.

My PhD project involves assessing reliability across different neuroimaging labs in Scotland. In order to do that I'm using several preparations, specifically ones that manipulate electrophysiological effects in a variety of time-windows in order to study a continuum that goes from early perceptual responses to later motor ones. I'm very interested in the effect of stimuli on the behavioral repertoire and how those effects remain often beyond the threshold of emission and of observability. Electrophysiological tools such as EEG/ERP are of great help in measuring moment to moment changes in response strength of unemitted operants or operants beyond the threshold of observability.