Dept. of Developmental Psychology and Socialisation (DPSS) (12)

Eloisa Valenza

Present position

Full professor in Developmental Cognitive Psychology (M-PSI/04), Padova University School of Psychology

She is author of 67 scientific contributions among articles published on peer-reviewed international (30) and national (21), academic book chapters (14) and monographs (2). Scopus citation: 996, Scopus h-index: 14.

Major research interest

Her research interests focus on cognitive development in infancy, with specific reference to the early effect of attentional, perceptual and postural abilities on high level cognition (e.g., language acquisition). A clear understanding of early cognitive abilities and motor functioning is critical for identifying precocious predictors of atypical development that originate in infancy but continue throughout childhood.

Francesca Simion

Present position

Full professor MPSI-04 (Developmental Psychology), University School of Psychology, University of Padova, Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialisation  (DPSS)

Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience and Developmental Cognitive Psychology.

Director of the Neonatal Lab, located in UOC Intensive Care Unit and Neonatal Pathology, Department of Women’s and Children’s Health Università di Padova- Azienda Ospedaliera.

Member of the Scientic Committees ERC and ANF.

Major Research interests

 The focus of my research is Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, the study of functional brain development over the first years of life. The key questions  concern  the innate predispositions of the human system at birth and how specialized cognitive functions emerge in the brain during development.

Jeff Kiesner

Jeff Kiesner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Developmental and Social Psychology at the University of Padova. He has a broad background in both research and teaching, including courses taught in statistics, developmental psychology, social psychology, clinical psychology, and neuroscience; and research publications across areas of developmental psychology, social psychology, clinical psychology and psychoneuroendocrinology.

He has conducted pioneering research on individual differences in symptom experience associated with the menstrual cycle, with the goal of better understanding what characterizes Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder (PMDD). This work has focused on demonstrating the importance of studying each woman’s individual profile and trajectory of physical and psychological changes across the menstrual cycle.

Judit Gervain

Judit Gervain is a Full Professor at the Department of Developmental and Social Psychology. She is trained as a theoretical linguistic, obtained a PhD in 2002 in Cognitive Neuroscience under the mentorship of Jacques Mehler from SISSA, Trieste, Italy. She then worked as a post doctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. In 2009, she took up a researcher position at the CNRS, in Paris, France, from which she moved to the University of Padua in 2020.

Her research focuses early speech perception and language acquisition in typically developing monolingual, bilingual infants as well as in infants with hearing difficulties.

Livio Finos

Livio Finos is Associate Professor at the University of Padova.

Previously he has been Assistent Professor (’08-’14) at Department of Statistical Sciences University of Padua (SSD secs-s/01) and held a Researcher position at Department of Medical Statistics and Bioinformatics (MSBI)

at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC). Advisor: Dr. J. Goeman. Also member of Bioinformatics Center of Expertise (’08-’09)

As a post-doc, he has held positions at CIBB, University of Roma “Tor Vergata” (2007- 2008) and at University of Ferrara.

He received his M.S. in Demographic Statistics and Statistics for the Social Sciences (2000) and his Ph.D. in Statistics (2004) from the University of Padua.

Paola Rigo

Paola Rigo is an Assistant Professor (RTD-B) at the Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialisation of the University of Padua (2018 – at present). She received her master’s degree in Psychology path Neuroscience (2009) and her Ph.D. in Psychological Sciences and Education (2013) at the University of Trento. As a Ph.D. student, she visited the Family and Child Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Denver (CO, US). She was a post-doctoral fellow at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institute of Health (NICHD -NIH, Bethesda, MD, US; 2014-2015) and Nanyang Technological University (Singapore, SG; 2016-2017).

Scientific Production
She is an author of 22 peer-reviewed articles in international scientific journals (most of them in high-quality journals including Scientific Report Nature, Proceeding of National Academy of Sciences, Developmental Review, NeuroImage and Social neuroscience), 1 book and 4 book chapters.

Paola Sessa

Paola Sessa obtained her PhD in Cognitive Sciences in 2005 at the University of Padova where is now Associate Professor. Much of her initial research was on basic attentional and visual working memory processes. She directs the Electroencephalography Laboratory at the Department of Developmental and Social Psychology and she is a member of the Cognition and Language Laboratory (CoLab) and of the Padova Neuroscience Center (PNC) of the same University.

She is author of about 35 publications (of which 12 as first/corresponding author) and most of them have been published in leading international journals like Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Scientific Reports, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Neuropsychologia and Psychophysiology.

Roberta Sellaro

Roberta Sellaro is an Assistant Professor (RTDb) at the Department of Developmental Psychology and Socialization of the University of Padova.

She graduated in Psychology in 2007 at the University of Padova, before moving to the Center for Mind and Brain Sciences (CIMeC) of the University of Trento where, in April 2013, she obtained a PhD in Cognitive and Brain Sciences (Cognitive Neuroscience Programme). During her graduate studies, she investigated whether and to what extent cognitive control efficiency can be affected by the social context surrounding us.

Immediately after obtaining her PhD, she joined the Cognitive Psychology Unit of the Leiden University (the Netherlands) and the Leiden Institute for Brain & Cognition (LIBC), where she worked as a postdoctoral fellow, from April 2013 ‘til July 2016, and as an Assistant Professor, from February 2017 ‘til September 2020.

Roberto Dell’Acqua

Current position

Full professor of Cognitive Science at the School of Psychology of the University of Padova. Former Head of the Department of Developmental Psychology (DPSS). Founder of the Neuroimaging Labs sector in his Department. Member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Attention & Performance Society, and Editor of major scientific Journals in the field of Cognitive Science and Neuroscience. Principal investigator of the EEG and NIRS Units at the DPSS.

Research areas

  • Behavioral investigations of attention limitations in the temporal domain. As a pioneer in the discovery of the attentional blink (AB) phenomenon, several research lines in his labs are still underway to unveil the AB’s EEG and neural correlates.

Silvia Benavides Varela

Silvia Benavides Varela is an Associate Professor affiliated to the Department of Developmental and Social Psychology and Department of Neuroscience at Padua University. She is trained as a biotechnology engineer, obtained a PhD in Neuroscience under the mentorship of Jacques Mehler from SISSA, Trieste, Italy. She then worked as a post doctoral researcher at the IRCSS San Camillo Hospital in Venice, and the Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception (CNRS & Université Paris Descartes), in Paris, France.

The most important part of her research 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 mathematic achievements across the life-span.

Simone Cutini

Present Position

Associate Professor, University of Padova, Department of Developmental Psychology.

Head of functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy Laboratory, Department of Developmental Psychology.

Major research interests

Use of functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

Behavioral and neuroimaging investigation of:

  • cognitive control
  • visual short-term memory
  • numerical cognition
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Teresa Farroni

Present position

Teresa Farroni is Full Professor in Developmental Psychology at University of Padua (Italy) with over twenty years of research experience. She is teaching Developmental Psychology (undergraduate courses) and Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience (master course) both in Italian and in English.

Scientific production

More than 50 peer-reviewed papers (all in ISI journals); ore than 100 reviews for more than 20 different ISI journals (including Nature, Neuron, PNAS etc.), project proposals (ERC, Cost Actions, etc.), and official reviewer for ANVUR – National Agency for the Evaluation of the University and Research Systems; reviewer for the following international journals: Nature Neuroscience, Scientific Report (Nature), Proceeding of National Academy of Sciences, Cognition, Developmental Science, Neuropsychologia, Neuron, Brain Research, Psychological Bulletin, Child Development, Cortex, European Journal of Neuroscience, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, PlosOne, European Journal of Developmental Psychology, Visual Cognition, Emotion Review, Biological Psychology, Early Childhood Research Quarterly, Psychological Science.