Visual Neuroscience Lab
SISSA / PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience
Welcome to the website of Davide Zoccolan’s Visual Neuroscience Lab.
The lab is part of the PhD program in Cognitive Neuroscience of the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) of Trieste (Italy), and was established in 2009 thanks to the support of an Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei - Compagnia di San Paolo Grant.
Our research aims at understanding the neuronal mechanisms underlying visual object recognition, using a combination of psychophysics, electrophysiology, and computational modeling.
March 2013. The international team, of which Davide Zoccolan is a member, has been awarded an HFSP Program Grant to study the neuronal substrates of concept formation.
April 2013. Our new study (revealing the complexity of rat visual object recognition strategy) has been published in The Journal of Neuroscience.
February 2013. Davide Zoccolan, in collaboration with David D. Cox (Harvard), Clay Reid (Harvard) and Andrea Benucci (UCL), is host editor of a Frontier Research Topic titled: What can simple brains teach us about how vision works? Articles accepted for the Research Topic will be published in Frontiers in Neural Circuits.
Relevant deadlines:
Abstract Submission: 30 Apr 2013
Full Article Submission: 30 June 2014
August 2013. Our new study (about the coding of visual objects in monkey inferotemporal cortex) has been published in PLoS Computational Biology.
January 2014. Davide Zoccolan has been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant to study the development of visual object representations.
November 2015. Publication of the ebook titled What can simple brains teach us about how vision works?, edited by D Zoccolan, DD Cox, A Benucci and RC Reid.
Lab News [see all news here]
April 2017. Our new study (about the coding of visual objects in rat visual cortex) has been published in eLife.
March 2018. Our new study (about the perceptual strategies deployed by rats in object recognition tasks) has been published in Current Biology.
July 2018. Applications are open for ICTP Winter School on Quantitative Systems Biology: Learning and Artificial Intelligence, co-directed by Antonio Celani (ICTP), Chris Mathys (SISSA) and Davide Zoccolan (SISSA). The school will be held at ICTP (Trieste, Italy) from Nov 12 to Nov 23, 2018. [See Poster]
Relevant deadlines:
Applicants requesting financial support: 1 Sep 2018
Applicants not requesting financial support: 15 Oct 2018
November 2018. Publication of the book Handbook of object novelty recognition (Academic Press, London), where D. Zoccolan and A. Di Filippo contributed a chapter about the Methodological approaches to investigate visual perception in rodents.
March 5, 2019. Davide Zoccolan & Andrea Benucci (Riken, Japan) have organized the Cosyne workshop Studying visual processing in rodents: where a decade of research has taken us and what is awaiting ahead.
This is the first workshop abut rodent vision @ Cosyne!
February 2019. Our new study (about shape processing in rat visual cortex) has been published in The Journal of Neuroscience.
July 2019. Davide Zoccolan has been awarded an ERC Proof of Concept Grant to design and build smart cameras for head and eye tracking.
Press Release [IT] [ENG] ERC Press Release
Sep & Oct 2019. Check out Davide Zoccolan’s seminars at Trieste NEXT and ICTP Workshop in Data Science.
Apr 2020. 300 Italian scientists winners of an ERC grant have written a letter in support of ERC and its vision to fund basic, bottom-up, cutting research.
Letter [IT]
May 2020. Our new study on the causal involvement of temporal continuity in the development of V1 complex cells has been published on Science Advances.
Press: Il Sole 24 ore [IT] La Repubblica [IT] Il Piccolo [IT] Daily Mail [ENG]