Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions-PhD student

Contact info

Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg
Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine Psychologie und Methodenlehre
Markusplatz 3, Room 219
96047 Bamberg

marella.campagna@uni-bamberg.de
Consultation hours: by appointment (via e-mail)

About me

Marella Campagna is a PhD student in Tactile Aesthetics and Multisensory Perception at the University of Bamberg and part of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network EXPLORA.

Her research examines how tactile experience is anticipated, enacted, and mediated across physical and digital environments, with a focus on the perceptual, psychological mechanisms that shape material experience, aesthetic evaluation, and engagement.

Her work is grounded in the view that tactile experience often has an anticipatory component: objects, materials, surfaces can appear tactually inviting through vision, eliciting expectations of touchability, pleasantness, informativeness, or avoidance before physical contact occurs. From this perspective, she investigates how tactile engagement emerges from the interplay between perceptual information, individual differences, exploratory behaviour, and context.

Her current research connects three closely related domains: visually guided tactile anticipation, active material exploration, and touch-restricted experience. She studies how people infer tactile qualities from visual cues, how visual and tactile information interact during manual exploration, and how crossmodal interactions may support haptic inference, perceived material quality, and product experience when direct touch is unavailable, as in digital fashion and online commerce.

Academic Research

• Tactile aesthetics

• Haptic perception and exploratory behavior 

• Multisensory perception and cross-modal interaction

• Material perception 

• Neuroaesthetics

• Individual differences in tactile perception and aesthetic evaluation

• Applied perception in art, fashion, design, and digital commerce

Education

Marella Campagna received her MSc in Psychology of the Arts, Neuroaesthetics and Creativity from Goldsmiths, University of London, graduating with Distinction. Her MSc research, supervised by Dr Rebecca Chamberlain, examined how material sensory properties and individual differences shape the haptic aesthetic appeal of visually presented stimuli; this work was later published in Scientific Reports.

Before moving into psychology and empirical aesthetics, she trained in fashion and design, receiving a BA in Fashion Design from the University of Bari Aldo Moro and a diploma from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

This interdisciplinary background informs her current research on tactile aesthetics, material perception, and multisensory experience across art, design, fashion, and digital contexts.

Scientific Papers (peer-reviewed)

Campagna, M., & Chamberlain, R. (2024). How material sensory properties and individual differences influence the haptic aesthetic appeal of visually presented stimuli. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 13690.

doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-63925-9

Conference presentations and talks

Campagna, M., & Chamberlain, R. (2023). How material sensory properties and individual differences influence the haptic aesthetic appeal of visually presented stimuli. International Association of Social and Affective Touch (IASAT) Festival of Touch Conference, Marseille, France.

Campagna, M., Pastukhov, A., & Carbon, C.-C. (2024). Multisensory aesthetic perception: A qualitative study accompanied by eye-tracking and video-capturing to analyse visuo-tactile interactions with material textures. 10th Visual Science of Art Conference, Aberdeen, Scotland.

Campagna, M., Pastukhov, A., & Carbon, C.-C. (2025). Multisensory aesthetic perception:A quantitative-qualitative study on visuo-tactile interactions with material textures. Human Vision and Electronic Imaging (HVEI) Conference, San Francisco, USA.

Campagna, M., Pastukhov, A., & Carbon, C.-C. (2025). Multisensory aesthetic perception:A quantitative-qualitative study on visuo-tactile interactions with material textures. Tagung Experimentell Arbeitender Psychologen (Teap) Conference, Frankfurt, Germany

Campagna-Grimaldi, M., & Carbon (2026). Feeling Without Touching: Multisensory Coherence and the Inference of Material Feel in Digital Fashion. Visual Science of Art Conference, London, UK

Posters

Campagna, M., Pastukhov, A., & Carbon, C.-C. (2024). Capturing aesthetic experience by verbal expressions: Identifying core concept variables from natural language processing. European Conference on Visual Perception, Aberdeen, Scotland.

Campagna, M., Pastukhov, A., & Carbon, C.-C. (2025). Multisensory aesthetic perception: An eye-tracking, qualitative study on visuo-tactile interactions with material textures. International Association of Social and Affective Touch (IASAT) Conference, Jena, Germany

Campagna, M., & Chamberlain, R. (2025). Do we all imagine touch in the same way? How material sensory properties and individual differences influence the haptic aesthetic appeal of visually presented stimuli. Visual Science of Art Conference, Wiesbaden, Germany

Campagna-Grimaldi, M., & Carbon, C.-C. (2026). Feel without Touching (FWT):Audio-visual cues for haptic product assessment in clothing e-commerce. International Multisensory Research Forum (IMRF) Conference, Genoa, Italy

Campagna, M., Pastukhov, A., & Carbon, C.-C. (2026). Visual Expectations and Haptic Experience in the Perception of Everyday Materials. EuroHaptics conference, Siena, Italy

Academic service 

• PhD Representative, Bamberg Graduate School of Affective and Cognitive Sciences, University of Bamberg;
• Social Media and Outreach Manager, Department of General Psychology and Methodology, University of Bamberg;
• Reviewer, Art & Perception and i-Perception;
• Symposium Organiser and Chair, Visual Science of Art Conference (VSAC), 2026, London, UK;
• Symposium Organiser and Chair, European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP), 2025, Mainz, Germany;
• Session Chair, Human Vision and Electronic Imaging (HVEI), 2025, San Francisco, USA;
• Session Chair, Visual Science of Art Conference (VSAC), 2025, Wiesbaden, Germany;
• Organising Committee Member, Visual Science of Art Conference (VSAC), 2025.