Laurea triennale, Sapienza University of Rome, 2006
Laurea magistrale, Sapienza University of Rome, 2009
PhD, Sapienza University of Rome, 2014
Professor Alfredo Spagna started teaching at JCU in 2026. His research examines how the brain supports attention, perception, and mental imagery, with a particular interest in how we focus on the world and how we imagine what is not physically present.
At John Cabot University, he teaches neuroscience courses ranging from introductory classes to advanced seminars. Before joining JCU, he worked for eight years in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University in the City of New York.
He earned his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology from Sapienza University of Rome. During his postdoctoral training with Dr. Jin Fan at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Queens College (CUNY), he developed experimental paradigms to study attention and cognitive control, conceptualizing attention as an integrated system supported by specialized brain networks.
His current work focuses on understanding what distinguishes human imagination from perception and how attentional mechanisms operate across different sensory modalities.
