Moreno I. Coco · Associate Professor of Computational Cognitive Science

I study how attention and memory jointly shape our experience of the visual and linguistic world, and what changes when that machinery begins to fail. I record eye movements and brain activity while people view, remember and describe naturalistic scenes, then use computational modelling and machine learning to turn those signals into predictions about individual cognition.

A central thread is neurodegeneration: identifying the earliest attentional and mnemonic markers that separate healthy ageing from mild cognitive impairment and dementia, and turning them into practical diagnostic tools.

Publications Research CV Contact
Animation showing a naturalistic scene alongside the scalp topography of the brain response recorded while it was viewed
● real co-registered gaze and EEG responses on a naturalistic scene
Research

What I work on

All research →
what is lost, and what survives

Ageing & neurodegeneration

Object semantics and visual binding are largely preserved in MCI and Alzheimer's; other signatures are specific enough to tell conditions apart before diagnosis.

the line →
Two versions of the same bathroom scene with gaze markers on the object that differs between them

Attention, memory & scene meaning

What an object means changes where the eye goes and what is remembered: an object that doesn't belong is found sooner and held longer.

watch it happen →
A subway map with two partners' eye movements overlaid and their conversation transcript alongside

Interpersonal coordination

When two people solve a task together their eyes and speech become coupled, and how tightly predicts how well they do.

watch it happen →
The same bedroom scene twice, with an English and a Portuguese speaker's scan paths drawn over it

Vision & language

Say the same thing about a scene and you look at it the same way, in English, Portuguese or Japanese alike.

watch it happen →
A bathroom scene shown twice, with shampoo and then a frying pan in the same place, beside two plots of the brain response at the fixation before the object and at the fixation on it

Eye movements & brain activity

Time-locking the EEG to each fixation during free viewing, rather than to an artificial trial onset.

watch it happen →
A reconstructed Lorenz attractor beside a recurrence plot being built

Methods & software

Recurrence-based tools for coupled behavioural time-series, released as the crqa R package.

how it works →

Currently funded by

  • PRIN 2022 · 2022APAFFNThe attentional curve of forgetting in younger and older adults →
  • PRIN PNRR 2022 · P2022WPNKZBiomarkers of Lewy body dementia in the prodromal stage →
  • Ateneo Ricerca Grande · SapienzaEnhancing digital neuropsychological assessments →
Selected Publications

Recent work

All publications →
Software

Open-source tools

All resources →
R package · CRAN

crqa

Cross-Recurrence Quantification Analysis for categorical and continuous time-series: profiling and in-depth recurrence measures.

CRAN Docs & stats
R package · CRAN

mousetrack

Extracts dependent measures (area under the curve, latency, x-flips) from two-dimensional mouse-tracking trajectory data.

CRAN Docs & stats
About

Background

Detail of an illustration by Panos Baras: a head in profile drawn over printed R code, the top of the skull opened to reveal layered geological strata where the brain would be

How panosbaras.com sees me

I am an Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome. My work merges cognitive neuroscience with computational modelling, using eye-tracking, electrophysiology and machine learning across the domains of language, vision, memory and attention.

Before joining Sapienza, I held positions at the University of East London, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Lisbon. I earned my PhD at the University of Edinburgh's School of Informatics.

I am actively looking for motivated students and scholars to join the lab. If you're interested in attention, memory and their breakdown in ageing and neurodegeneration, get in touch.