Curriculum
Neuroscience, Technology and Society, XXXIX series
Grant sponsor
Università degli Studi di Padova
Supervisor

Eloisa Valenza
Co-supervisor
s
Antonio Rodà
Contact
ilaria.lorenzi@studenti.unipd.it

Project description
How does musical knowledge develop, and how does it impact the development of high-order cognitive abilities such as language and cognitive flexibility? Rule learning (RL) is the cognitive ability to extract and generalize repetition-based rules. It is impaired in infants at high risk of developing language and learning impairments (Bettoni et al., 2022a, 2022b), and Developmental Dyslexia individuals show difficulties in morphosyntactic skills (e.g., Cantiani et al., 2015; Casani et al., 2022; Guasti et al., 2015). Unlike a control group, two-year-old children with language impairments also have difficulty perceiving differences between regular or irregular musical chord sequences (Jentschke S, et al., 2008). This is because the neural circuits of syntactic processing in music and language are the same (Patel, A.; 2003). Since language impairments are identified late in children's lives, the first aim has been to deeply understand the relationship between the ability to implicitly learn harmonic musical rules and the efficiency in language morphosyntax performance. The project investigates music's impact on testing and promoting high-level cognitive skills (i.e., language and cognitive flexibility) in early infancy. To realize this aim, it implements unique software tools suitable for preschoolers based on various serious musical games specifically planned to test infants aged from 9 months to 3 years, and it might be extended to promote the development of high-level cognitive abilities in educational and clinical contexts. Based on the concepts of visual RL, all the serious games planned in the project might become an early screening tool for possible neurodevelopmental problems such as language impairment and developmental dyslexia or be used in educational contexts with infants with typical development.