Trieste Encounters in Cognitive Sciences (TEX) 2025

Session

Contributed Talk

Jun 25, 2025, 4:00 PM

Big meeting room, 7th floor (SISSA)

Conveners

Contributed Talk: Perceptual Compression of Evidence in Intuitive Model Selection

• Francesco Guido Rinaldi (SISSA)

Contributed Talk: Project 1917: Predictive processing of movie watching

• Tiziano Causin (SISSA & CIMeC)

Contributed Talk: Visual-premotor connections in the processing of visual duration

• Francesca Bellotti (SISSA)

Contributed Talk: Perceptual decision making of nonequilibrium fluctuations

• Aybüke Durmaz (SISSA)

Contributed Talk: Rat classification of visual temporal frequency is affected by the intensity of task-irrelevant auditory stimuli

• Mattia Zanzi (SISSA)

Contributed Talk: Temporal Sequences in Working Memory

• Yunyun Shen

Contributed Talk: Integration of Sensory Evidence With Reward History in Sequential Decision Making in Humans and Rats

• Monica Paoletti (Neural Computation Lab, International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy and SENSEx Lab, International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy)

Contributed Talk: Defining a functional hierarchy of millisecond time: from visual stimulus processing to duration perception

• Gianfranco Fortunato (SISSA)

20. Defining a functional hierarchy of millisecond time: from visual stimulus processing to duration perception

Gianfranco Fortunato (SISSA)

In humans, the neural processing of millisecond time is associated with the activation of a wide range of brain areas and involves different types of neural responses. Unimodal tuning to stimulus duration, for example, has been observed in some of these areas but not in others, and its presence is either inconsistently reported or appears redundant along the cortical hierarchy. Moreover, how...

8. Integration of Sensory Evidence With Reward History in Sequential Decision Making in Humans and Rats

Monica Paoletti (Neural Computation Lab, International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy and SENSEx Lab, International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy)

Throughout our lives, we observe, interact with, and immerse ourselves in the external world through sensory perception. Sensory stimuli are perceived in the context of the history of our past sensory percepts and actions. When performing standard tactile discrimination tasks in a lab setting, animals and humans are influenced by the history of the stimuli they receive. In this context, the...

7. Perceptual Compression of Evidence in Intuitive Model Selection

Francesco Guido Rinaldi (International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA), Trieste, Italy)

In order to survive, animals constantly face decisions between competing interpretations for noisy and sparse sensory data. In statistics this problem, known as model selection (MS), is typically tackled by balancing a model's goodness-of-fit with a penalty for its complexity. A similar preference for simpler models—a concept known as simplicity bias—has been observed in humans (Gershman &...

9. Perceptual decision making of nonequilibrium fluctuations

A. Aybüke Durmaz (SISSA)

A pedestrian deciding when to cross a busy street must consider not only the average traffic flow but also the fluctuations in the movement of individual cars. Similarly, the perceptual system must handle both local fluctuations in individual elements and the global patterns that emerge from their interactions. To investigate how the brain makes efficient decisions in such nonequilibrium...

13. Project 1917: Predictive processing of movie watching

Tiziano Causin (SISSA & CIMeC)

When confronted with dynamic and naturalistic visual input, the brain is continuously always trying to predict what’s coming next at different temporal scales and levels of feature complexity. Prediction would require stimulus-related features to be represented before their actual occurrence. This is also reflected in the active decisions that animals make. For example, the position to fixate...

11. Rat classification of visual temporal frequency is affected by the intensity of task-irrelevant auditory stimuli

Mattia Zanzi (SISSA)

The brain combines information from multiple sensory modalities to build a consistent representation of the world. The principles by which multimodal stimuli are integrated in cortical hierarchies are well studied, but it is less clear whether and how unimodal inputs systematically shape the processing of signals carried by a different modality. In rodents, for instance, direct connections...

14. Temporal Sequences in Working Memory

Yunyun Shen (CEA, DRF/Joliot, NeuroSpin; INSERM, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit; CNRS; Université Paris-Saclay, F-91191 Gif/Yvette, France.)

Cognition critically relies on both working memory (WM) and temporal information. However, how our brain processes temporal information in WM remains largely unresolved. Previous work using a novel n-item delayed duration reproduction task found that durations can be stored as discrete items in WM (Herbst et al., 2025). Herein, participants were presented with sequences of temporal intervals...

10. Visual-premotor connections in the processing of visual duration

Francesca Bellotti (SISSA)

Temporal processing relies on a distributed network of brain regions, with evidence indicating a hierarchical organization in which early sensory areas, such as the primary visual cortex (V1), relay information to higher-order regions like the supplementary motor area (SMA). However, the communication between these areas as well as its directionality and timing remain unclear. This study used...