Prof. Agostini's research group deals mainly with colour perception and visual illusions, perception and action in sport, psychoacoustics, art psychology and visual perception and disability. The group also boasts numerous application projects, making use of the methodological skills and knowledge developed in the laboratory with interventions aimed at the prevention and promotion of health and well-being, sensory disabilities, motor disorders, sport, tourism, road safety education, food education, and international cooperation.

Over the past 10 years, the group has implemented more than 20 projects financed by the European Union, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport, the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region, the Province of Trieste, the Municipality of Trieste and various local associations, receiving substantial funding.

There are numerous collaborations with research groups from other universities, both national and foreign, including: University of Milano Bicocca, University of Macerata, University of Verona, University of Udine, German Sport University in Cologne (Germany), Rutgers University in Newark (USA), University of Ljubljana (SI), University of Rijeka (HR), University of Zagreb (HR) and University of Belgrade (SRB).

Prof. Agostini's group is also active in organising scientific events of global relevance. In 2018, for example, he organised the 41st European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP), the most important European conference in the field of perception, which was attended by more than 900 researchers from all over the world. In 2021, he coordinated the 'diffuse' organisation of the 43rd edition of the same conference, which took place online with the participation of almost 2000 researchers. In 2022, he helped organise the 16th FEPSAC Congress on Sport and Exercise Psychology, which was attended by over 800 researchers from around the world, and in the same year he organised the 22nd Scientific Conference of the Society for Gestalt Theory and its Applications (GTA).

The main lines of research are:

1) Colour perception and visual illusions

Research in this area mainly concerns the effects of context on the phenomena of achromatic constancy and contrast. The systematic manipulation of spatial relationships between induced and inducing regions led to the discovery of the phenomenon of reverse contrast, which revolutionised the interpretation of the phenomenon of simultaneous whiteness contrast in the early 1990s by highlighting the role of global factors at the expense of local ones.

2) Perception and action in sport

Through research conducted both in the field and in the laboratory, the group investigates three main areas: the ability to distinguish the sound associated with one's own technical gesture from those of other athletes; the possibility of using visual and acoustic models to standardise performance; the relevance of visual and acoustic information in anticipating the outcome of technical gestures performed by opponents. The sports taken into consideration so far have included swimming, athletics, tennis, golf, football and volleyball, among others, providing potential insights for the development of perceptual-motor training protocols.

3) Perception and visual impairment

In the field of spatial cognition, the group focused on three main lines of research: the role of movement in spatial updating and the ability to create a mental representation of a verbally described environment. In this research, sighted and visually impaired participants (blind or visually impaired) were tested, thanks to the involvement of various local organisations and associations active in the field of visual impairment. Thanks to these collaborations, a line of research was also developed on the enjoyment of works of art through their 'translation' into tactile stimuli.

4) Taste and Food Education

Among the application projects mentioned in the introductory paragraph, one of the areas in which the group has also been most successful in conducting research is food education. In particular, through the Healthy Food Consumption Education Project (PESCA), it was possible to observe a reduction in food preconceptions in primary school children following a series of food education interventions based on a cognitive-sensory approach. This area also lends itself to science education (for all age groups), which is carried out both at events and during ad hoc meetings.

5) Psychoacoustics

In the context of perception studies, the group also examined certain aspects of acoustic perception. In particular, experiments were conducted in the psychoacoustics laboratory to test the Tomatis method. This method is based on a technology that, by means of a filtering system, modifies music and voice in order to enhance the listener's perception. The results obtained with simple sounds confirm the theoretical assumptions underlying the method devised by Tomatis. The group also studied the nature of synaesthetic experiences reported by non-synaesthetes in cross modal interference tasks, corroborating the existence of common processes between synaesthetic perception and audiovisual processing by non-synaesthetes.

6) Art Psychology

In this area of research, starting from a Gestaltist approach and adopting a phenomenological method, the criteria used by painters in the representation of time in works employing the technique of continuous pictorial narration were examined. The aim was to identify the spatial configurations devised by the artists to narrate their chosen stories and to identify the perceptual-representational criteria or strategies employed and their possible recurrences. In the same field, research was undertaken to create catalogues containing low-cost tactile maps in order to make art more accessible to blind people.