PhD programmes - Cognitive sciences
Doctoral programme
Cognitive and Brain Sciences
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Home > Admission > 2023 Research Topics

2023 Research Topics

***The following is the list of research topics proposed in last year's call. This year's topics will be posted by end of March 2023***

Action and Intention Understanding

  • Beyond action recognition – an RSA approach to elucidate the neural basis of higher-level action interpretation (M. Wurm, F. Pavani)

Cognitive Neurorehabilitation

  • Identifying outcome predictors of brain lesions in humans from early functional and anatomical indexes of brain connectivity and plasticity (L. Cattaneo)

Conceptual Representations

Decision Making and Reasoning

  • Neurophysiological study on the integration between motivation and abstract rules in motor decisions (L. Cattaneo)

Development

  • Neural and Cognitive Basis of Communication and Reference in Infants (E. Parise)

  • Language Development, Understanding Words and Forming New Concepts in Infants (E. Parise)

  • Intuitive Physics in Infants (E. Parise)

  • The environment regulation in the development of brain and behavioural asymmetries in an animal model (E. Frasnelli)
     

Language

  • Visually grounded language processing (R. Bernardi)

Learning and Motivation

  • Cognitive and neural mechanisms to cope with distraction (M. Turatto)

  • How neutral stimuli acquire motivational and attentional salience (M. Turatto)

  • Visuomotor mechanisms through which animals learn about the environment they navigate through (E. Frasnelli)

Motor Control and Action Planning

  • Studying the cortical motor system in real-world ecological settings (L. Cattaneo)

  • Executive control and action inhibition (L. Cattaneo)

  • Transforming object features into action affordances – how the brain extracts physical features of tools to infer their function and usage (M. Wurm, F. Pavani)

Neuroethics

  • Understanding the lived experiences of Parkinson's disease patients with deep brain stimulation (DBS) (C. Bonfiglioli)

Neuroimaging Methods and Analysis

  • An integrated TMS-EEG and MRI approach to explore the interregional brain connectivity (C. Miniussi)

  • Brain MRI markers of microstructural and functional plasticity: methodological developments and applications in health and disease (e.g. neurodegeneration, oncology) (J. Jovicich)

  • Clustering functional connectivity in autism (A. Gozzi)

Neurostimulation

Numerical Cognition

Perception and Attention

  • Predictive mechanisms controlling sensory filtering (M. Turatto)

  • Establishing a network tracking strategy, a to disclose the principles of communication in the Dorsal Attention Network (C. Miniussi)

application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.documentResearch Statement(DOCX | 24 KB)