Welcome to the Perception to Concepts Group!
At the Per2Con we are interested in understanding how the human brain learns and organizes abstract representations of concepts starting from basic perceptual experience. We investigate which aspects of perception (and action) act as fundamental building blocks for the development and acquisition of abstract concepts and how symbolic acquisitions, in turn, shape perception and action.
We study:
-- adults at the Experimental Psychology Labs and the NeuroImaging Labs @CIMeC, combining psychophysics with neuroimaging (fMRI, M-EEG).
-- children with different cognitive/perceptual skills (e.g. dyscalculics and/or dyslexics and typically developing)
-- infants from the first hours of life at the BabyLab and at the Neonatal Neuroimaging Unit @CIMeC, using HD-EEG and eye-tracking.
Finally, sometimes we have the privilege to perform field work investigating the effects of culture on cognitive/perceptual skills, studying adults and children from amazonian and african indigenous traditional oral cultures.
Our research spans over two main high-level cognitive areas: language and maths.