Neuroscience

Invited speaker: 
Dr Silvia Elena Benavides Varela
Assistant professor at the Department of Psychology of Developmental Age and Socialization (DPSS), University of Padova (Italy).

She is trained as a biotechnology engineer and obtained a PhD. in cognitive neuroscience from SISSA, Trieste. The most important part of her research has focused on developing new methods for unveiling the initial state of memory capacities in humans, the environmental factors that modulate learning, and the properties of the brain systems that support language and mathematical achievements across the life-span. She has used a range of neuroimaging techniques, including magnetic resonance imaging, electroencephalography, and functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) combined with behavioral metrics and analyses, both in healthy and clinical populations. Before becoming an Assistant Professor at Padova University, she worked as post-doc at various universities and research institutes including Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception & Université Paris Descartes, France, IRCCS Fondazione Ospedale San Camillo (Lido-Venice), Fondazione HPNR & Polo Apprendimento Padova.

Email: silvia.benavidesvarela@unipd.it

Core Contents of the talk: 
When do babies build their first memories? In the first part of the talk, the speaker will present a series of studies investigating this subject under a new perspective that emphasizes the study of phonological memory as a journey in its making during infancy. The studies provide insights into how memories are initially formed and sometimes stored for more extended periods, how this is made possible by rewiring our neuronal circuitries, and how babies' memory processes and capacities vary as their brains evolve in the first months of life. In the second part of the talk, she will present recent studies of her group, investigating the interaction between linguistic processing and numerical discrimination capacities in young infants. The studies illustrate how specific features of the stimuli affect numerical discrimination abilities and modulate the putative limits of the numerical representational systems. She will also provide suggestive evidence about the neural mechanisms underlying spatial-numerical associations in 6–7-month-olds infants.