Sapienza University of Rome

Sapienza University of Rome (www.uniroma1.it) is the first Campus in Rome and the largest University in Europe, with over 700 years of history, 112,000 students, over 4,000 professors and almost 4,000 technicians, librarians, administrative and technical staff. Sapienza plans and carries out important scientific investigations in almost all the disciplines, achieving high-standard results both on a national and on an international level, thanks of the work of its 63 departments and 30 centres devoted to scientific research. Sapienza is among the first Italian universities in a variety of rankings in 2017-2018: it is the third Italian university according to QS World University Rankings 2016-2017 and the US News 2015, third in Italy according to the THE (Times Higher Education) classification, and the first Italian university according to both the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Rankings 2018 and the Centre for World University Rankings (Cwur) 2018. Sapienza has a wide experience in coordinating and participating in European Projects in the 4th, 5th, 6th and 7th Framework Programs and in H2020.

The group at the Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology has expertise in cognitive psychology, cognitive science and cognitive and social neuroscience. It is internationally recognized for its work on grounding on language in the sensorimotor system, on abstract concepts, on affordances and social affordances. The group has previously coordinated an European ICT project in robotics (ROSSI FP7 project, call Cognitive Systems, coordinator Anna Borghi) on affordances, language grounding, and motor resonance.

The approach of the Sapienza research group moves from the idea that cognition is embodied and situated. In addition to extensive theoretical work on embodied and grounded cognition, the empirical work of the group focuses on cognitive and developmental psychology and cognitive and social neuroscience. We perform both behavioural experiments (e.g. reaction time recording, kinematics) and experiments investigating the neural bases of cognition (EEG and TMS studies). The Sapienza group has strong and documented research interactions with the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, Italian National Research Council (ISTC- CNR) – Anna Borghi is associate researcher to this institute.