My recent work examines how visual attention supports social perception. Using eye tracking and behavioral tasks, I study how people explore faces over time, how accurately they judge gaze direction, and how these processes relate to the ability to infer other people’s mental states. I am particularly interested in how the timing and organization of visual exploration help explain individual differences in social understanding.
Journal articles
DeStefani, S., Blain, S. D., Kraft, J. D., Locarno, L., Mathis, K., Lasagna, C. A., Colombi, C., Burton, C. Z., Turner, J. A., Thakkar, K. N., & Tso, I. F. (2026). “The dynamics of social gaze: Visual attention and autonomic arousal among individuals with varying levels of autistic traits.” Research in Autism, 131, 202821.
Mathis, K., Blain, S. D., Locarno, L., Lasagna, C. A., DeStefani, S., Kraft, J., Colombi, C., Thakkar, K. N., Burton, C. Z., & Tso, I. F. (2026). “The link between basic visual processing and higher-level social cognition: Eye gaze perception as a bridge in a transdiagnostic sample enriched with social dysfunction.” Psychological Medicine, 56, e152.
Kemp, K. C., Blain, S. D., Zehra, S., DeStefani, S., Locarno, L., Mathis, K., Lasagna, C. A., Colombi, C., Burton, C. Z., Moe, A. M., & Tso, I. F. (2026). “Sex differences in social cognition: Insights from a sample enriched for social dysfunction.” PLOS ONE.
Sohn, S., DeStefani, S., Schwartz, M., Roberts, F., Stromswold, K., Kapadia, M., Feldman, J. (2025). “On the Separability of Human Navigational Behaviors in Virtual Reality,” Proceedings for the 47th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
DeStefani, S., Stromswold, K., & Feldman, J. (2020). “Integration of visual and spoken cues in a virtual reality navigation task,” Proceedings for the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Under review
* student co-author
DeStefani, S., Blain, S., Locarno, L., Mathis, K., Lasagna, C., Colombi, C., Burton, C., Turner, J., Thakkar, K., Tso, I. (2026). “Visual Exploration Efficiency Moderates the Association Between Autistic Traits and Social Cognition.”
*Kvetnoy, A., Suchojad, J., DeStefani, S., Stromswold, K., Feldman, J. (2025). “The role of eye gaze in social wayfinding.” (in revision)
DeStefani, S., Sohn, S., Schwartz, M., *Sharma, Y., Roberts, F., Stromswold, K., Kapadia, M., Feldman, J. (2025). “Behavioral effects of anti-pandemic preventive measures: a VR study.”