Francesca Ferroni

University of Parma (Italy) 

Alexander Bodini Fellow in Developmental and Adolescent Psychiatry

Social peripersonal space and bodily self-disturbances in schizophrenia 

2026–2027: Fall

Francesca Ferroni is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Medicine and Surgery at the University of Parma. Her research focuses on how the brain generates the experience of the body in space—also known as peripersonal space—by integrating multisensory information.

Situated at the intersection of cognitive and clinical neuroscience, her research explores how multisensory information is combined to shape the boundaries of the bodily self. She is particularly interested in individual variability and in the plasticity of peripersonal space representations, examining how these processes adapt across contexts and differ across individuals.

A central line of her work addresses alterations of multisensory integration in schizophrenia. Through behavioral paradigms and neuroimaging approaches, she investigates how disruptions in the integration of sensory signals may contribute to disturbances of bodily self-awareness, offering new insights into the mechanisms underlying self-related disorders.

More broadly, her research aims to advance current theoretical models of body representation and to elucidate the neurobiological bases of the sense of self. By bridging neuroscience with clinical research, her work contributes to a deeper understanding of how embodied experience is constructed—and how it may become altered in psychopathology.