Adriana Fiorentini

Adriana Fiorentini (1 November 1926 – 29 February 2016) was an Italian physicist and physiologist active in research on human and animal visual perception.

Biography Born in Milan, Fiorentini studied up to high school in the same city, obtaining the Classical Maturity in the Liceo Classico of Voghera, and then graduated from the University of Florence in Physics in October 1948 in Florence, discussing a thesis on the topic of physical spectroscopy with Professor George Abetti.

Visual perception research While working at the National Institute of Optics in Arcetri, she noticed a contrast phenomenon which she correctly interpreted as an optical illusion, and was able to relate it to the phenomenon known as Mach bands. This led her to shift her interest from optics towards visual perception, on the stimulus and in collaboration with physicist Giuliano Toraldo di Francia. Working together with Maffei, Fiorentini used a method which consisted in asking the same questions to human perception and to the individual visual cells of animals, aiming to interpret, as far as possible, visual perception in terms of the properties of neurons. This innovative approach has produced numerous works including “The visual cortex as a spatial frequency analyzer” and "The unresponsive regions of the visual cortical receptive fields." In this last work, the two authors identified the existence of interactions between neurons located in different areas of the visual cortex, anticipating the discovery of "horizontal connections," which allow the integration of information coming from different points of the field visual and allow the so-called context effects, i.e. the change in the perception of a stimulus according to the visual context in which it is inserted. on the nature of visual perception and visual language, which was very successful and received numerous awards. She also authored Eyes and Glasses.

Over the years, she personally helped build a European research community devoted to visual perception. She organized two conferences of the European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP) and was on the editorial board of Perception for many years, and on the editorial boards of Vision Research, Brain and Behavioural Research, Clinical Vision Sciences, and Optica Acta.