Title: "The Language Of Dreams: the relationship between sleep mentation, neurophysiology, and neurological disorders" . PI: Giulio Bernardi

Title: "Boosting intellectual humility to improve science communication in healthcare" 

 Head of Unit: Gustavo Cevolani, Folco Panizza

The objective of TweakDreams is to determine whether particular sensory-stimulation protocols could be used to directly modulate sleep intensity in a local, region-specific manner. Different approaches will be used to non-invasively perturbate regional sleep-related brain activity, thus allowing to determine the causal consequences of local activity changes on sleep mentation, subjective sleep quality and sleep-related functions, including learning and memory. [PI: Bernardi]

The project entitled "Mentation report analysis across distinct states of consciousness: a linguistic approach" will investigate the potential value and feasibility of big-data collection and analysis of dream reports based on the most advanced tools of computational linguistics. [PI: Bernardi]

 Social cognition in the blind brain [PI: Pietrini]

 Assessing and Accepting Scientific Models [PI: Cevolani]

The role of cochlear implantation and bimodal bilingualism in early deafness [PI: Bottari]

PRO.CO.P.E. is a multidisciplinary research project funded by the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca that studies how the likelihood of prosocial behavior is affected by the mode of cognition, the structure of social interactions and their interplay. PRO.CO.P.E. contributes to the research-based design of policies fostering prosociality [PI: Bilancini, Ricciardi, Garlaschelli, Tribastone]

The Neuroscience Lab stems from the collaboration between Intesa Sanpaolo Innovation Center and the scientific partner IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca. The Neuroscience Lab of Intesa Sanpaolo Innovation Center represents an innovative model of applied neuroscience to organizational and management topics. [PI: Ricciardi]

'REMIND - REal-time MIND' project for the analysis of the platform for the real analysis of the functional magnetic resonance time (fMRI), for the development of neurofeedback paradigms for clinical or research applications. The project aims at developing a platform for real-time analysis of fMRI data, for future neurofeedback paradigms for clinical or research applications [PI: Ricciardi]

"Meditating to grow: effects of transcendental meditation on psycho-social well-being and sleep quality in adolescence" project aimed at quantitatively verifying the effectiveness of the practice of transcendental meditation in reducing anxiety and stress levels in adolescents and improving the quality of sleep [PI: Pietrini]

"Synergy-based Open-source Foundations and Technologies for Prosthetics and RehabilitatiOn”, Horizon 2020 Call 2 for Robotics CT 24-2015.2.a Cognitive Systems and Robotics [2016-2019]: the SoftPro project studied and designed soft synergy-based robotics technologies to develop new prostheses, exoskeletons, and assistive devices for upper limb rehabilitation. Building on solid neuroscientific and methodological bases, SoftPro is producing a significant social impact, promoting advanced robot prosthetic and assistive technology “from bench to bedside”. [PI: Ricciardi]

Aesthetics in the Brain: an interdisciplinary investigation on the functional and neural mechanisms mediating aesthetic experience -  The aim of the research was to investigate - through an interdisciplinary approach that combined knowledge from the history of art and the experimental methods of cognitive neuroscience - several significant but still relatively unexplored aspects of the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying aesthetic appreciation [PI: Ricciardi, Catoni]

A multimodal approach to supramodality in the blind brain - this project merges multidisciplinary, integrated tasks with state-of-the-art methodological approaches in sighted and congenitally blind samples to characterize the neural substrates that subtend the supramodal cortical organization and answer how unisensory information integrated into a multimodal, more ‘conceptual’ representation, and how different sensory modality contribute to a conscious sensory experience. [PI: Pietrini]

The hand embodied - Research Program 7th Framework IST Program. Cognitive Systems and Robotics (ICT-2009.2.1) [2010-2015]: THE project studied how the embodied characteristics of the human hand and its sensors, the sensorimotor transformations, and the very constraints they impose, affect and determine the learning and control strategies we use for grasping and manipulating. The project learnt from human data and hypotheses‐driven simulations how to devise improved system architectures for the “hand” as a cognitive organ, and how to better design and control robot hands and haptic interfaces. [PI: Ricciardi-Pietrini]