Consciousness is that thing that happens to you when you wake-up. Explaining what it is hard, but it’s fundamentally linked to understanding who we are. I’m currently studying the relationship between brain activity and conscious experience in the framework of the Cogitate project. An adversarial collaboration where we pit against each other the Integrated Information Theory and the Global Neural Workspace theory; two of the most influential current theories of consciousness.

I completed a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience under the co-supervision of Jacques Mehler (SISSA, Italy) and Tristan Bekinschtein (University of Cambridge, UK), where I used EEG and pupillometry to study predictive processes in auditory speech processing. Later I joined the lab of Davide Crepaldi (SISSA, Italy) to study how the processing of visual words is supported by the statistical learning abilities of our visual system.

At a theoretical level I’m interested in integrating the study of Predictive Processes, Statistical Learning and Perceptual Decision Making. On a technical side, lately I have become very interested in computational modeling. In particular in deep learning models of sensory processing.