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 2021/22 Colloquium Committee: Alireza Karami, Federica Sigismondi, David Sastre Yagüe 

Academic Guidance: Prof. Uri Hasson 

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

2021-2022 Doctorate Academic Year - June Colloquium:

A vision of (numerical) cognition: neural mechanisms of numerosity

Serge O. Dumoulin, Ph.D.
Director, Spinoza Centre for Neuroimaging, VU University Amsterdam

Abstract: Numerosity, the set size of a group of items, helps guide behaviour and decisions. Using ultra-high field MRI at 7T and population receptive field modelling, we have described neural populations responding to specific numerosities organized in systematic topographic maps, analogous to primary sensory and motor cortical maps. These numerosity maps extend topographic principles to higher-order features in association cortex. Besides topographic principles, we found that many principles that are well-established in vision extend to the field of numerical cognition, though we will also describe some differences. Last, I will also show why the reconstruction of these maps, and cognitive neuroscience in general, needs 7T MRI.

Thursday, June 30, 2022 4:00 p.m.

Past 2021-2022 Academic Year Colloquia:

• Claudia Bagni, Department of Fundamental Neurosciences, University of Lausanne, Switzerland - Molecular Complexes Underlying Motor and Social Skill Development (November 2021)
• Pascal Fries, Ernst Strüngmann Institute (ESI) for Neuroscience in Cooperation with Max Planck Society, Germany - Rhythms for Cognition: Communication through Coherence (December 2021)
• Francesco Papaleo, Tenured Senior Researcher, Neuroscience Area, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Genova, Italy and Adjunct Faculty Investigator, Lieber Institute for Brain Development, Baltimore, MD, USA. - Neural Circuits of Emotion Discrimination (February 2022)
• Elizabeth M. Brannon, Full Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania - Developmental and evolutionary building blocks for the human mathematical mind (March 2022)
• Christopher Baker, Senior Investigator, Section on Learning and Plasticity, Laboratory of Brain and Cognition (LBC), National Institute of Health, USA - Making sense of the world: People, places, and THINGS (April 2022)
• Richard Betzel, Assistant Professor, Brain Networks and Behavior Lab, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University (USA) - Edge-centric connectomics (May 2022)