My research focuses on social cognition and the cognitive processes that support it, including gaze detection, face processing, and spatial navigation. I use behavioral experiments, virtual reality, eye tracking, and computational modeling to understand how these abilities vary across individuals, with a particular focus on people on the autism spectrum.
Journal articles
DeStefani, S., Blain, S., Kraft, J., Locarno, L., Mathis, K., Lasagna, C., Colombi, C., Burton, C., Turner, J., Thakkar, K., Tso, I. (2026) “The dynamics of social gaze: visual attention and autonomic arousal among individuals with varying levels of autistic traits,” Research in Autism. (in press)
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
Kemp, K., Blain, S. D., Zehra, S., DeStefani, S., Locarno, L., Mathis, K., Lasagna, C., & Tso, I. F. (2025). “Sex Differences in Social Cognition: Insights from a Sample Enriched for Social Dysfunction.” (in revision)
*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.”
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.”
Mathis, K., Blain, S. D., Locarno, L., Lasagna, C., DeStefani, S., Kraft, J., Colombi, C., Thakkar, K., Burton, C., & Tso, I. F. (2026). “The link between basic visual processing and higher-level social cognition: Eye gaze perception as a mechanistic bridge in a transdiagnostic sample enriched with social dysfunction.”