Silvia De Marchi was born on February 25, of 121 years ago. She was the first woman to obtain a degree in experimental psychology in Italy. In experimental psychology, she applied the method of magnitude estimation – a few years before Lewis Richardson – to analyze visual perception of collectivities of dots.
In applied psychology, she provided scientific basis to the psychology of testimony, using the inspiration-expiration ratio determined by a pneumograph – one of the first lie detectors – invented by Vittorio Benussi in 1914.
