I completed my BSc and MSc in clinical psychology at the University of Padova (Italy), whereby I also obtained my PhD in developmental psychology and spent two additional years as a postdoctoral research associate. Then, I moved to the University of Oxford working as a postdoctoral researcher on an ERC-funded project on the neurocognitive bases of mathematical learning. Before joining the Centre for Mathematical Cognition in Loughborough, I was a lecturer at the department of psychology at the University of Sheffield.
My research focuses on understanding the cognitive mechanisms involved in the acquisition of numerical skills in typically and atypically developing individuals. I have been implementing different research methods to explore basic numerical representations in preschool and primary school children and how these representations relate to mathematical learning. I am particularly interested in how young children learn the numerical meaning of number words and Arabic digits (i.e., symbol-grounding).