Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation (CNBS)
Optimizing and applying noninvasive brain stimulation to health care and research

Faculty

Lorella Battelli, PhD
Research Faculty

I received my undergraduate degree in Psychology from the University of Padova, Italy and a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Trieste in 2000. The same year I joined the Vision Sciences Laboratory at Harvard University, Psychology Department where I was a postdoctoral fellow for three years with Patrick Cavanagh and at present I am an associate to the lab. In 2004 I became a member of the Noninvasive Brain Stimulation Laboratory at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and I am supported by an NIH-NRSA fellowship.

Research Interests / Research Focus

I am interested in dynamic vision and motion perception. My previous research has focused on the effects that a brain lesion to the associative visual areas has upon the ability to discriminate and integrate visual events. While this neuropsychological work has suggested a hypothesis about the role of the parietal cortex, the general approach is severely limited. For example, brain lesions caused by a stroke usually extend beyond the area of interest in the study, and a damaged brain may have undergone months or years of reorganization and adopted compensatory strategies. Moreover lesion studies may reveal the capability of other cortical areas in the absence of the damaged cortical tissue and not the true functions of that specific area. For these and other reasons, I am now using the virtual-lesion methodology applying TMS to the visual cortex of healthy volunteers and producing reversible functional disruption. TMS has excellent temporal resolution, and can be spatially confined, and this has been useful in mimicking selective brain lesions.

Relevant Publications

Grossman E., Battelli L. and Pascual-Leone A. (2005) Repetitive TMS over posterior STS disrupts perception of biological motion. Vision Research, 45, 2847-53.

Battelli L., Cavanagh P., Martini P. and Barton JJS. (2003) Bilateral deficit of transient visual attention in right parietal patients. Brain, 126: 2164-74.

Battelli L., Cavanagh P. and Thornton IM. (2003) Perception of biological motion in parietal patients. Neuropsychologia, 41: 1808-16.

Battelli L., Black K. and Wray S.H. (2002) Transcranial magnetic stimulation of visual area V5 in migraine. Neurology, 58: 1066-1069.

Battelli L., Cavanagh P., Intriligator J, Tramo M.J., Hénaff M-A, Michèl F. and Barton J. (2001) Unilateral right parietal damage leads to bilateral deficit for high-level motion. Neuron, 32: 985-995.

Battelli L., Casco C. and Sartori G. (1997) Dissociation between contour based and texture based shape perception. A single case study. Visual Cognition, 4 (3), 275-310.

Ellison A., Battelli L., Cowey A. and Walsh V. (2003) The effect of expectation on facilitation of colour/form conjunction tasks by TMS over area V5. Neuropsychologia, 41: 1794-1801.

Walsh V., Ellison A., Battelli L. and Cowey A. (1998) Task-specific impairment and enhancement induced by magnetic stimulation of human visual area V5. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London: Biological Sciences, 265, 537-543.

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