MARCO
DADDA
Associate
Professor

Prof. Marco Dadda began his academic career working at the comparative psychology laboratory of the University of Padua under the supervision of prof.Angelo Bisazza. Starting in 2003, he began a twenty-year research activity in the field of behavioral ecology which was mainly focused on the study of the costs and benefits of cerebral lateralization in animals. With the aim of contributing to a possible explanation of why many cognitive functions are localized in an asymmetric way in the brain, he conducted research using genetic lines characterized by a high or low degree of hemispheric specialization in the teleost fish G. falcatus, highlighting consistent differences in the processing of information, the most important of which seems to be the ability of subjects with specialized brains to carry out simultaneous tasks without mutual interference. Subsequently, the possible costs associated with lateralization as well as environmental factors that can influence the development of behavioral asymmetries were investigated on the same species.

He was involved in investigating the possible genetic and neural bases of cerebral lateralization in zebrafish using strains that differ in the direction of lateralization in order to map the probable genes involved in the development of asymmetries and to investigate the relationship between behavioral and neuroanatomical asymmetries. In 2005 he spent a period of research at the Yerkes Primate Research Center of Emory University under the supervision of Prof. WD Hopkins, carrying out some research focusing on clarifying the relationship between handedness and asymmetries at the brain level. The combined use of behavioral tests and brain imaging (MRI) techniques in chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) allows us to identify possible correlations between behavioral and brain asymmetries. Following this methodology, asymmetries in the “knob” (a specific region of the precentral gyrus), in the parietal planum and studied the differences in the percentage of gyri and sulci (gyrification) in relation to the handedness of the subjects. Beside this, part of his research involved the study of quantity discrimination abilities in lower vertebrates. The studies conducted made it possible to identify the counting mechanisms in fish, using the teleost Poecilia reticulata as a model. Finally, he conducted research on the perceptual mechanisms shared between our species and animals aiming at understanding whether species phylogenetically distant from ours share certain perceptive mechanisms using visual illusions as investigation tools on two species of fish, P. reticulata and zebrafish.

selected publications

2024 – Handedness in Animals and Plants

2024 – One-trial odour recognition learning and its underlying brain areas in the zebrafish

2024 – Exploring the Importance of Environmental Complexity for Newly Hatched Zebrafish

2023 – Illu-Shoal Choice: An Exploration of Different Means for Enrichment of Captive Zebrafish

2023 – Shortest path choice in zebrafish (Danio rerio)

2022 – Learning and visual discrimination in newly hatched zebrafish

2022 – Environmental enrichment decreases anxiety-like behavior in zebrafish larvae

2022 – Effects of environmental enrichment on recognition memory in zebrafish larvae

complete list of publications