Draft:Marco Bertamini

Marco Bertamini (born 06 January 1966 in Vigevano, Italy) is a professor of psychology in the Department of General Psychology, of the University of Padova, Italy. He is most known for discovering the Venus Effect and the Honeycomb Illusion. The latter was a finalist of the Best Illusion of the Year Contest in 2015.

Career
Marco Bertamini graduated in Experimental Psychology in 1990 from the University of Padova. That same year, he moved to the United States and obtained an MA and a PHD from the University of Virginia. He was a Lecturer at Staffordshire University, and from 2000 to 2017 worked at the University of Liverpool where he established the Visual Perception Lab. His research is mainly focused on visual perception, empirical aesthetics, illusions, and naive physics.

Symmetry, shape, and figure/ground
Comparing types of symmetries, Bertamini has described their role in perceptual organisation, using both phenomonology, psychophysics and electrophysiology.

The recently created catalogue of results has over 1 TB of data and is an example of good practice in open science. He has clarified aspects of figure/ground segmentation, the special case of closure (visual holes), and how contour polarity relates to perception of solid shape.

Mirror cognition
Starting from naive physics he expanded the area into naive optics: children and adults make systematic mistakes in their descriptions of how mirrors work and in their predictions about mirror images. One striking example is the Venus effect, discovered and named by him in 2003.



Aesthetics
He has studied the sense of beauty, aesthetic experiences and physical attractiveness, both in the case of works of art and with controlled stimuli. In some cases, perception mechanisms can explain preferences, and these preferences manifest themselves in art and in aesthetics judgments. He has studied preference for symmetry and for smooth curvature.

Numerosity
Visual illusions of Numerosity have a long tradition and they are now integrated with formal models. He has studied the perception of numerosity and its relation to clustering.

Body image
Multisensory information affects inner models of our body as shown by the Rubber hand illusion. Bertamini demonstrated the flexibility of the Rubber Hand Illusion and its effect on haptic perception.

Activities
In 2015 he was the main organiser of the European Conference in Visual Perception (ECVP) in Liverpool. He was part of the organisation of the online version of ECVP in 2021. He is an editor on the following journals: Perception, British Journal of Psychology, and Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

In 2017 he published a book that combines an introduction to visual illusions with an introduction to programming in Python. He has also authored various short stories.

He has created and is the coordinator of the Working group on Psychology of Art and Neuroesthetics (PAN), within the Associazione Italiana di Psicologia.