The CIMeC Colloquia Series is an annual set of invited talks given by leading researchers in the mind/brain sciences, both from Italy and abroad, aimed principally at our PhD Students. Given the multi-disciplinary backgrounds of the CIMeC students and researchers, the Colloquia are aimed at a general scientific level rather than at a more specialized audience.

The 2022/23 Colloquium Committee: Chiara Pepe, Alexander Eperon, Davide Cortinovis

Academic Councilor: Dr. Moritz Wurm

Colloquia usually take place on the first Thursday of each month except August. 

2022-2023 Doctorate Academic Year - June Colloquium:

How do infants learn? Neural oscillations shed light on infant attention & learning

Prof. Stephanie Hoehl
University of Vienna 

Infants constantly integrate novel information into their developing semantic networks. The role of the theta rhythm in encoding and memory formation has been well established in animal models and human adults. Meanwhile, our understanding of neural oscillations in human infants is still very limited. I will present our recent studies implicating the 4 Hz theta rhythm in 9-month-old infants’ processing of unexpected events. Results suggest that oscillatory activity in the theta band supports integration of novel information into existing concepts in infants. I will further present our ongoing work into the role of theta oscillations for the formation of novel object representations. We applied multivariate pattern analyses on the EEG data of 6- to 8-month-olds and adults viewing various images from four different categories. Results show that theta band neural oscillations form the basis of visual category representations in infants, and that these representations are shifted to the faster alpha/beta band in adults. Together, results speak to an integral role of the theta rhythm for learning in the infant brain.

Thursday, June 1, 2023 4 p.m.

Previous 2022-2023 academic year Colloquium speakers:

November 10: Nancy Kanwisher, MIT - Functionally Specific Cortical Regions in Humans:  What Others and Why These?

December 1: Giacomo Rizzolatti, Parma University - The mirror brain: past, present, and future

February 2: Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Columbia University - Neural network models as mechanistic explanations of brain information processing

March 3: Marlene Behrmann, University of Pittsburgh Medical School - Hemispheric organization in humans: two hemispheres, one mind

April 13: Nicolas Schuck, University of Hamburg - Learning and replay of state representations in the human brain

May 4: Bratislav Misic, McGill University - Tools for multi-scale, multi-modal annotation of brain networks