BabyLab CIMeC
@cimecbabylab.bsky.social
The CIMeC BabyLab of the University of Trento studies cognitive development in infants using neuroscience and behavioral methods. https://r1.unitn.it/babylab/
🧪🧠 Rovereto CuttingEEG Garden 2026 – REGISTRATIONS OPEN We're thrilled to announce that @cimecunitrento.bsky.social and DIPSCO (UniTrento), in collaboration with Università degli Studi Milano-Bicocca and IRCCS Eugenio Medea, will host the Rovereto @cuttingeeg.bsky.social Garden 📅 21–25 Sept 2026
🧪🧠 Rovereto CuttingEEG Garden 2026 – REGISTRATIONS OPEN We're thrilled to announce that @cimecunitrento.bsky.social and DIPSCO (UniTrento), in collaboration with Università degli Studi Milano-Bicocca and IRCCS Eugenio Medea, will host the Rovereto @cuttingeeg.bsky.social Garden 📅 21–25 Sept 2026
We had a great time at #CAOs2026 last week at @cimecunitrento.bsky.social. We really enjoyed the amazing talks and discussions! And thanks to everyone who stopped by our posters! w/ @eugenioparise.bsky.social, @giuliamz.bsky.social and @aliceguerrini.bsky.social
Wrapping up #CAOs2026 Talks by Marieke Mur, Marius Peelen, and Paul Cisek, together with posters & valuable moments of exchange. Thanks to all speakers, presenters, participants, & organisers for two inspiring days 🙌 🔗 event.unitn.it/cimec-caos/ @moritzwurm.bsky.social @stefania-bracci.bsky.social
Very happy to share our review on Reinforcement Learning vs Statistical Learning, with @ambrafer.bsky.social and @predictivebrain.bsky.social: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... A nice summary: www.sainsburywellcome.org/blog/two-eng...
Where learning paths meet: Convergence and divergence of statistical and reinforcement learning
Learning enables organisms to adapt to a dynamic world by forming and updating internal representations of their environment. Statistical Learning (SL…
sciencedirect.com
Sainsbury Wellcome Centre@sainsburywellcome.bsky.social · 5mo agoNew review maps the convergence and divergence of statistical and reinforcement learning, from origins to neural implementation. @athenaakrami.bsky.social, @ambrafer.bsky.social & Floris de Lange Blog: www.sainsburywellcome.org/blog/two-eng... Paper: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
🌟 Big news 🌟 This May I’ll join SISSA (Trieste, Italy) as an Assistant Professor in cognitive neuroscience, leading the Multimodal Communication Lab. We will combine cognitive, computational and developmental methods to study how we communicate before and beyond words. 🧠🧪 #neuroskyence #neurojobs
International Day of Women & Girls in Science. At CIMeC, brilliant women advance cognitive neuroscience & help us better understand the brain, across our labs and classrooms By sharing their achievements, we hope to inspire the next generation of women scientists & support greater inclusion in STEM
Our lab is back from #BCCCD26 in Budapest 🧠👶 We really enjoyed the conference (and party!) and had a great time sharing our work, meeting old friends and making new ones! 🌟
🚨NEW PREPRINT🚨 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... w/ Giulio Degano and Uta Noppeney In this work, we use music to investigate how the brain extracts and integrates multisensory information in real-world environments. 🧠🧪 #psychscisky #neuroskyence TL;DR 🧵👇
Feeling the music: Audiotactile encoding of temporal structure in the human brain
In everyday situations, like a rock party or an organ concert, we feel music vibrating through our bodies. How do these vibrotactile signals influence music processing? How do they aid auditory scene analysis? Combining psychophysics, fMRI and time-resolved EEG decoding, this work reveals how the brain encodes the temporal structure of music (beat and envelope) across audition and touch and uses this information to guide multisensory integration and segregation in simple and more complex perceptual scenes. Participants experienced monophonic and polyphonic piano pieces through auditory, vibrotactile and audiotactile stimulation. Vibrotactile signals improved the detection of a brief target embedded in music, establishing the functional relevance of audiotactile integration in naturalistic settings. fMRI and EEG multivariate decoding revealed that auditory and tactile beat information converged in planum temporale and parietal operculum, albeit through distinct neural dynamics and representations. Superior temporal cortices reliably encoded envelope information from audition, but only weakly from touch. Nevertheless, vibrotactile signals significantly enhanced neural encoding of auditory beat as early as 100 ms, and envelope representations from 250 ms onward. These encoding benefits were associated with superadditive interactions in primary auditory cortex, where tactile signals sharpen and amplify auditory envelope representations. In complex polyphonic music, touch further amplified the segregation and encoding of temporally coherent auditory streams. Our findings highlight the important, yet largely unexplored influence of touch on auditory processing, enriching music perception and supporting auditory scene analysis in real-world environments. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. European Research Council, 309349, 101096659
biorxiv.org
A few days ago, @eugenioparise.bsky.social was at Medea BabyLab (IRCCS Medea, LC, Italy) to lead a hands-on tutorial on infant EEG analysis using our #WTools toolbox. A great opportunity to share expertise and connect with researchers studying brain development in the first years of life! 🧠👶
...and, over the summer, we also attended the Rovereto Workshop on Cognition and Evolution (COGEVO), a unique forum for researchers interested in ethology, development, comparative psychology and neuroscience! 🧠 👶 🧪
Last week @eugenioparise.bsky.social attended the Lancaster Conference on Infant and Early Child Development (LCICD). A great occasion to catch up with friends and share the science of our BabyLab!
Out now in Science Advances! We find that infants estimate environmental volatility to learn optimally, with early individual differences linked to temperament. This has be so much fun to work on and ended up being my favourite personal paper! So excited it's out! www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Volatility-driven learning in human infants
Infants estimate environmental volatility to learn optimally, with early individual differences linked to temperament.
science.org
It's a busy conference season for the lab 🔥 We just got back from #DUCOG2025, where we shared some of your ongoing work. It was four intense days of science, networking, and inspiring ideas about how children, adults, and animals understand themselves and others! 🧠👶🧪
A few weeks ago, our lab attended #CAOS2025 at @cimecunitrento.bsky.social. We really enjoyed the talks and had a great time sharing our work during the poster sessions!
🚨NEW PAPER🚨 We are proud to introduce WTools, a new toolbox for time-frequency analysis that is particularly suited for infant EEG. 🔗 doi.org/10.1371/jour... By @ambrafer.bsky.social @marcobuiatti.bsky.social @eugenioparise.bsky.social @cimecunitrento.bsky.social
WTools: A MATLAB-based toolbox for time-frequency analysis of infant data
Electroencephalography (EEG) is an established method for investigating neurocognitive functions during human development. In cognitive neuroscience, time-frequency analysis of the EEG is a widely use...
doi.org
Come do a PhD in Neuroscience at @cimecunitrento.bsky.social! Cutting-edge research in a supportive and friendly environment, in beautiful Trentino Alto-Adige (quality of life is top!)
CIMeC_UniTrento@cimecunitrento.bsky.social · last yr.Applications are now OPEN for 15 PhD fellowships in the Doctoral Programme in Cognitive and Brain Sciences at CIMeC, University of Trento, Italy! 📅 Deadline: June 5, 2025 🧠 Research mind, brain & behavior ℹ More info 🔗 phd.unitn.it/drcimec 🔗 www.unitn.it/en/phd/cognitive-and-brain-sciences
We're looking for a PhD student interested in developing brains and developing new methods to study them! Anna Kowalczyk and myself have a fully funded PhD position to advance OPM-MEG methods for infant and neonatal brain imaging. 👉 Please repost to help us spread the word 🙏 More info & links 👇
📢 We are delighted to announce our keynote speakers for LCICD 2025! We will be joined by Karen Adolph, Diane Poulin-Dubois, and Judit Gervain. Abstract submission is OPEN now. Submit: wp.lancs.ac.uk/lcicd/abstra... #PsychSciSky Thank you to sponsors @nirx-nirs.bsky.social
@sarahjessen.bsky.social of the Babylab @uniluebeck.bsky.social took Martin Orf and me from the @jonasobleser.bsky.social lab along an intriguing journey into the neural fate and consequences of a mother‘s voice in her infant’s brain. Under review now. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
New paper published in Human Nature: Core Moral Concepts and the Sense of Fairness ⚖️ in Human Infants ! With Luca Surian and Alessandra Geraci 😊 rdcu.be/egamh
Core Moral Concepts and the Sense of Fairness in Human Infants
rdcu.be
Interested in infant cognitive development? Here is an interview (in Italian) about "Piccolamente" (English: Littlemind), the new book 📕 for parents and curious people by Stefania Benetti and myself 😊 www.nostrofiglio.it/neonato/cura...
stimolare lo sviluppo cerebrale del neonato - Nostrofiglio.it
Come stimolare lo sviluppo cerebrale del neonato? Quando riconosce i volti? A queste e ad altre domande hanno risposto i ricercatori.
nostrofiglio.it
Do babies sense their own body rhythms? Our new paper on 🫀 & 🫁 interoception in 👶 is now out in @elife.bsky.social: Respiratory and cardiac interoceptive sensitivity in the first two years of life doi.org/10.7554/eLif... @kinderstudien.bsky.social @univie.ac.at led by @markustuente.bsky.social
Respiratory and cardiac interoceptive sensitivity in the first two years of life
Infants are sensitive to their own respiration and heartbeat already in the first two years of life.
doi.org
📢 CIMeC is now on BlueSky! From now on, we’ll be sharing updates from our Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, including research highlights, academic activities, events, and much more! 🔗 www.cimec.unitn.it #neuroscience #cognitivescience #unitrento #cimec_unitreno
Why do we not remember being a baby? One idea is that the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic memory in adults, is too immature to form individual memories in infancy. We tested this using awake infant fMRI, new in @science.org #ScienceResearch www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants
Humans lack memories for specific events from the first few years of life. We investigated the mechanistic basis of this infantile amnesia by scanning the brains of awake infants with functional magne...
science.org
It's CAOS time! Join us in beautiful Rovereto with a fantastic lineup of speakers: event.unitn.it/cimec-caos/
New paper in Imaging Neuroscience by Pierre Corvilain, Julie Bertels, et al: Pushing the boundaries of MEG based on optically pumped magnetometers towards early human life doi.org/10.1162/imag...
New preprint by lab members @giuliamz.bsky.social and @ambrafer.bsky.social on how prior expectations guide multisensory integration in face-to-face communication. This work raises fascinating questions about the evolutionary, developmental and cultural origins of these priors.
Ambra Ferrari@ambrafer.bsky.social · last yr.PREPRINT: In face-to-face communication, we have a stronger prior tendency to bind vocal and bodily signals that share the same function, such as signalling the intention to communicate. Work started while at @mpi-nl.bsky.social w/ CIMeC (University of Trento) 🧠🧪 #psychscisky #academicsky See 🧵👇
Using mobile #eyetracking to study #dogs’ understanding of human referential communication. New study w/ Karoline Gerwisch, Paula Berg, Zsófia Virányi and Ludwig Huber royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
Looking forward to bcccd.org in Budapest this week! You can meet our lab members @eugenioparise.bsky.social @ambrafer.bsky.social @giuliamz.bsky.social @aliceguerrini.bsky.social 🧠🧪👶
BCCCD 2025 :: Welcome
BCCCD25<br>Budapest CEU Conference on Cognitive Development
bcccd.org