Being able to regulate behaviour and pay attention to important information in the environment are complex but very important skills that influence cognitive, social and emotional functioning in humans. Autonomic arousal, for example, is an index of how physiologically active or reactive our body is in a specific situation. The autonomic nervous system (ANS), part of the peripheral nervous system, is responsible for adjusting our bodily functioning and state so that we can adapt to the world around us and pay attention to important and relevant information around us. The ability to self-regulate starts developing in infancy and continues until young adulthood, in parallel with the development of frontal brain systems involved in learning, information processing, and self-regulation.
The main goals of our research are investigating different domains of human functioning, including attention, autonomic arousal and perception, to investigate why self-regulation processes sometimes do not develop as they do in most infants and children, leading to the onset of behavioural and emotional difficulties that affect quality of life and wellbeing (e.g., inattention and hyperactivity/impulsivity, social and communication difficulties, anxiety and emotional dysregulation). We use experimental methods and techniques widely used in cognitive neuroscience and psychology, including eye-tracking and pupillometry, electro-encephalography (EEG), heart rate and skin conductance measurements, psychological testing and assessment.
Our research group embraces the ideas of ‘mental health continuum’ and ‘neuro-diversity’, which point towards the fact that mental health and psychological difficulties are only one extreme end of a continuum of behavioural, emotional and personality traits that characterise every human being and change throughout life, due to both external and individual factors. We conduct our research within the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework, which proposes to collate and interpret information from different domains of human functioning, to better understand how brain development and functioning affects behaviour and psychological well-being. Among the six domains of human functioning the RDoC focuses on, we are specifically interested in the Arousal/Regulatory and the Cognitive systems, including arousal, sleep and wakefulness, attentional and perception mechanisms, working memory and response inhibition.