
The goal of CAOs is to provide a unique forum for researchers with varying perspectives on Concepts, Actions, and Objects to come together to discuss their research, foster new directions, and establish collaborative opportunities.
In contrast to larger conferences CAOs features a selected number of invited speakers without concurrent talks. Additionally, the workshop includes a dedicated poster session, providing students, post-docs, and young researchers the chance to present and discuss their work.
CAOs is organized by the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC).
The workshop begins on May 6, 6pm (welcome reception) and ends on the evening of May 8 (social dinner).
If you would like to stay updated on CAOs news (such as workshop dates, deadlines, etc.), please join our newsletter. We typically send 4-5 emails per year.
The workshop will start on Wednesday (May 6) with a welcome reception at 6 pm, and end on Friday evening/night (May 8).
The social dinner will take place on Friday (May 8) at 8 pm.
18:00: Welcome reception and registration
8:30 - Registration
9:00 - Domenica Bueti: Tracking millisecond time in the human brain: from sensory features extraction to perception
10:15 - Coffee break and Poster session
11:15 - Laurent Cohen: Signs, Notes, and Subtitles: The Brain’s Alternative Literacies
12:30 - Break for lunch
14:00 - Brigitte Roeder: The role of early visual experience for object and action development
16:15 - Jorge Almeida: Contentopic mapping and object dimensionality - a novel understanding on the organization of object knowledge
9:00 - Marieke Mur: Frequency-tagged fMRI: a new platform for examining the neural computations supporting object competition and attention
10:15 - Coffee break and Poster session
11:15 - Arash Afraz: How is visual perception constructed by the activity of visually responsive cortical neurons?
12:30 - Break for lunch
14:00 - Abstract award session
15:15 - Coffee break and Poster session
16:30 - Paul Cisek: An evolutionary perspective on cognitive neuroscience
20:00 - Social dinner
Important deadlines
Abstract submission for poster presentation: the form is now closed
Workshop registration: April 20, 2026
Registration to CAOs 2026 workshop is mandatory for all participants.
In order to submit the registration successfully and to ensure participation in this event, all sections of the registration form must be completed.
Workshop registration Deadline: April 20, 2026
The fee includes the welcome reception and coffee breaks.
The social dinner (48 euro per person) is not included in the registration fee.
The fee can not be refunded.
Please, register using the form below.
Abstracts (maximum of 250 words) should briefly state the background to the research, the methods used, the principal findings, and the theoretical significance of the work. Please do not cite references in the abstracts. Each author can appear as first author on one poster only.
The CAOs workshop supports Open Science. If you follow(ed) any of the Open Science principles (open access, open data, open source, open materials, preregistration), please, consider including the Open Science badges in your poster. See here for more information on the badges
Each poster session participant will be provided with a freestanding poster board measuring approximately 125 cm in height and 95 cm in width. Please ensure that your poster does not exceed these dimensions.
Abstract submission deadline for poster presentation: February 23, 2026. IMPORTANT UPDATE: This deadline has been extended to March 2nd.
This form is now closed.
Five 200 Euro awards will be granted on the basis of the submitted abstracts. Only non-faculty first authored posters are eligible for the awards. The organizing committee will jointly decide the winning posters and will send emails with decisions to the winners.
Several accommodations offer special rates for guests attending University of Trento events.
A list of hotels with active agreements with the University can be found on the dedicated page.
Rooms at the following Hotels in Rovereto have been reserved for workshop participants for the nights of the 6th, 7th, 8th of May 2026.
Due to the high demand for rooms on these days we suggest booking the hotel as soon as possible.
We advise participants to contact the hotel directly to make a reservation. Booking details should include as reference “CAOs Workshop 2026 - University of Trento”, surname, length of stay and credit card details. Please contact the hotel directly if there are any cancellations or changes to the reservation.
To have further information about other accommodations in Rovereto, please, go to the accommodation page of the Azienda per il turismo di Rovereto e Vallagarina
The workshop, organized by the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences of the University of Trento, will take place in Rovereto (TN), Italy.
By car
A22 Brennero Motorway, exit Ala-Avio, exit Rovereto sud/Lago di Garda nord and exit Rovereto nord. Create your own route with http://www.google.com/maps/ or www.viamichelin.com
By train
Rovereto Railway Station, on the Bologna-Brennero line. For timetables check the Trenitalia website
By plane
Rovereto is about 100 km from Verona airport (Valerio Catullo), 200 Km from Venice airport (Marco Polo), 215 Km from Milano-Linate airport, 170 km from Milano Bergamo airport, 203 from Bologna airport and 245 km from Milano Malpensa airport.
Set amid hills and vineyards, Rovereto is in the center of Valle dell’Adige, along the main road linking Trento and Verona.
We advise you to explore the city on foot, the streets of the city center are like a journey through different time periods:
Along the city streets, you can see the most important and prestigious Eighteenth century palazzi, from Accademia degli Agiati, to Teatro Zandonai, to the city library in palazzo Annona.
Many illustrous guests have visited the city. Perhaps the most famous is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who held his first concert in Italy in the church of San Marco.
In Rovereto you can visit museums of art, history and science such as Mart, Depero’s House of Futurist Art, the Italian War Museum and the City Museum Foundation.
Rovereto is also a City of Peace, as evidenced by the large memorial bell Campana dei Caduti. Cast using bronze of the cannons of the nations that took part in WWI, each evening its 100 tolls spread a universal message of peace.
Here you can find a Map of Rovereto with the locations of the train station, the workshop venue, and hotels.
CAOs26 Poster (PDF | 1,2 MB )
Modulo Partecipazione InterniUniTn CAOs2026 (PDF | 0,1 MB )
PA Modulo Dati Fatturazione CAOs 2026 (PDF | 59.7KB )
Speakers, presentation titles, and videos (if authorized by the speaker) of previous CAOs editions
Wilma Bainbridge - Memories are Predictable
Chaz Firestone - Seeing ‘How’
Rhodri Cusack - Innate and Learned Components of the Infant Ventral Visual Stream
Roberto Bottini - Looking for knowledge in conceptual spaces
Stefania Bracci - Understanding Human Object Vision: The Role of Behaviour in Shaping Visual Cortex Organisation
Jeffrey S. Bowers - Deep Problems with Neural Network Models of Human Vision and Language
Talia Konkle - Mapping Mechanisms to Competencies: Deep Neural Networks as the New Model Organism for Vision Science
Video: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiX54geLkpPLVJyLyKV0fGqFjXdcdPNKu
Luca Bonini- Objects, actions, and beyond: neural bases of pragmatic remapping
Patrizia Fattori - Vision at the service of action control in medial posterior parietal cortex
Moritz Wurm - Conceptual and structural representations in the "action observation network"
Anna Jenkins - Are social concepts special?
Floris de Lange - Prediction in visual cognition
Martin Hebart - Beyond category: Re-evaluating the role of the ventral visual system for the processing of objects
Katja Fiehler - Localizing objects in naturalistic environments
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiX54geLkpPKG6W8O-SPekyAtTaL2b5a8
Melissa Võ - Reading Scenes: Tapping into the Hierarchical Structure of Scene Representations
Christian Doeller - Structuring experience in cognitive spaces
Beth Jefferies - A gradient perspective on the neural basis of (semantic) cognition
Gabriella Vigliocco - Beyond the here and now: the role of visual context in conceptual processing
Bob Kentridge - Perception and Sensation (in that order)
Gilles Vannuscorps - The nature of mid-level representations in visual processing
Yanchao Bi - Knowledge derived from language and sensory experiences: A neural dual-coding position
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/
Gergely Csibra - The representation of third-party social interactions
Anna Papafragou - Mapping events onto language
Janice Chen - Brain dynamics underlying memory for continuous natural events
Charan Ranganath - Time and the transformation of memories for complex events
Bevil Conway - Color as a tool for understanding how brains/minds work
Morgan Barense - When seeing becomes knowing: Integration of perception and conception
Ivan Toni - Neural and cognitive mechanisms of epistemic engineering in human communication
Michael McCloskey - Handwriting and the grammar of action: Computational, behavioral & neuropsychological perspectives
Olivier Collignon - Crossmodal plasticity: Recycling the intrinsic neural and computational architecture of the brain?
Ingrid Johnsrude - Cognitive mechanisms and brain signatures underlying the perception of sound objects
Josef Rauschecker - What, where, how and when in the auditory cortex
Daniel Harari - The ‘digital baby’: guiding learning by innate structures
Nicole Rust - Remembering what we’ve seen
Nick Turk-Browne - Hippocampal prediction from objects and actions
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLiX54geLkpPKdTEAs03X3qP02i8HgEF0X
Angelika Lingnau - Organizing principles of human actions
Richard Ivry - Embodied Decision Making: System interactions in movement execution and action selection
Uta Noppeney - See what you hear - How the brain forms a representation of the world across the senses
Anjan Chatterjee - Some thoughts on embodiment and abstraction
György Gergely - The pragmatic sense: Communicative mind-reading without language
Sandra Waxman - Early links between language and cognition: New insights from young infants
Susan Carey - The ontogenetic origins of abstract, combinatorial, thought
Tom Griffiths - Leveraging deep learning to study human cognition
Dietmar Heinke - Computational modeling of visual object identification and reaching movements
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBchraMG8EM&list=PLiX54geLkpPLhD6gxOqkS_GrZgOU56ATc
Pietro Pietrini - New light from the dark: understanding the sighted brain by studying the blinds’
Thomas Carlson - The brain as its own decoder: predicting behaviour from the structure of brain
Lorraine Tyler - How do we understand what we see?
Alfonso Caramazza - Object knowledge: domains and attributes
Michael Beauchamp - Models and mechanisms of multisensory speech perception
Isabelle Peretz - The biological foundations of music: insights from anomalies
Elizabeth Brannon - The approximate number system as a foundation for symbolic math
Pieter Medendorp - Multisensory integration for stable perception and motor planning
Emily Cross - Experience-dependent plasticity in the action observation network
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwLyBl_FrfY&list=PLiX54geLkpPKqVY8VqI5Oc9Wt2dlF8hoo
Ori Friedman - Ownership in children's reasoning about object use
Marlene Behrmann - Face and word recognition: Flip sides of the same coin
Marina Bedny - Origins of functional specialization in the human brain: insights from visual cortex plasticity in blindness
Brian Scholl - There are no top-down effects on perception
Joern Diedrichsen - Representation of action sequences in the human motor system
Angela Sirigu – Varieties of movement representation in the human brain
Rodrigo Quian Quiroga – Concept cells
Scott Grafton – Abstract and concrete action planning
Maria Gorno-Tempini - Semantic Processing in PPA: cognition, anatomy, and molecules
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nd8L-1LJ2LQ&list=PLiX54geLkpPKYLBpW0VR4k7oTbf6-UP-j
Ehud Zohary - On the representation of hands in action
Patrick Haggard - The experience of control in the human brain
Zoe Kourtzi - Perception, plasticity and prediction: how the brain learns from experience
Irving Biederman - The neural basis of object recognition
Brad Duchaine - Investigating the organization of visual recognition via acquired agnosias
Yaoda Xu - Multi-level and dynamic visual object representation in the human brain
Antonia Hamilton - Neurocognitive models of human social interaction
Marius Peelen - Neural mechanisms of attentional selection in real-world scenes
Tim Shallice - Reflections on category specificity: and an extension to abstract concepts?
Roberto Caminiti - On-line control of movement: Anatomy, physiology and neuropsychology
Brad Mahon - Action shapes the organization of artifact knowledge in the brain
Laurel Buxbaum - Actions and objects: Competition, facilitation, and conceptual organization
Raffaella Rumiati - Actions all over
Sheng He - Attention and interocular competition
Frank Tong - The role of early visual areas in high-level visual cognition
Pawan Sinha - Learning to see late in life
Hans Op de Beeck - Visual expertise and object representations: Putting the modules back into the map
Alex Martin - Object concepts, properties, and experience-dependent plasticity
Chris Baker - Expanding neuroanatomical, functional and experimental frameworks for vision
Geoffrey Aguirre - Dissecting neural similarity: scale, prototypes, and interactions
Aude Oliva - Property-based neural representation of scene and space
Russell Epstein - From scenes to cognitive maps: spatial navigation systems in the human brain
Alfonso Caramazza - Actions and objects or verbs and nouns? Neuropsychological and neuroimaging evidence
Pierre Jacob - Having, sharing and ascribing a goal
Doris Tsao - Mechanisms for visual recognition
David Leopold - Probing high level visual processing using natural stimuli
Mel Goodale – “Visual” activity in the blind brain: The neural underpinnings of echolocation in the blind
Paul Downing - Bodies, faces, and objects in the extrastriate cortex
Salvatore M. Aglioti - Anticipatory action perception in expert brains
David Milner - Is the brain conscious of what its dorsal stream sees?
Sabine Kastner - Representation of object information in the primate brain
Gabriel Kreiman - Deciphering the neuronal circuits for visual object recognition: Neurophysiology and computational models
Niko Kriegeskorte - Representational similarity analysis of visual object representations in man, monkey, and models
Jody Culham - Bringing the real world into the brain scanner: Functional magnetic resonance imaging of perception and action for real objects
Michael Graziano - The Organization of Behavioral Repertoire in the Motor Cortex
Simon Thorpe - Two routes to action: brain mechanisms underlying ultra-rapid scene processing
Maximilian Riesenhuber - Simple accounts of face discrimination differences in autism and of object recognition in clutter: it’s all about specificity
Stephen Macknik - The role of feedback in visual attention and awareness
Patrik Vuilleumier - Emotion processing: conscious and unconscious control
Kalanit Grill-Spector - The role of experience in shaping functional selectivity in the ventral stream: insights from development and fMRI-adaptation
Michael Tarr - Decoding visual object representation using fMRI
Nancy Kanwisher - Searching for new functionally specific regions in the human brain in vision and beyond
Bruno Rossion - Towards a non-hierarchical view of face recognition: evidence from neuroimaging studies of the healthy brain and of acquired prosopagnosia
James Haxby - Neural representational spaces in the ventral object vision pathway
John Assad - Moving the mind’s eye
Daniel Ansari - Numeracy and arithmetic in the brain: the roles of development and individual
David Burr - A visual sense of number
Camillo Padoa-Schioppa - Neuronal representation of economic value
Marco Zorzi - On the representation of number concepts: computational and empirical investigations
Alan Leslie - Pretending and early “theory of mind”: why pretense should not be the poor cousin of false belief
Neil Macrae - Who washes the dishes? Minds, brains and person perception
Gergely Csibra - Natural pedagogy
Christian Keysers - How the brain shares the inner states of others
Nikos Logothetis - In vivo Connectivity: MRI, Paramagnetic Tracers and Electrical Microstimulation
Amir Amedi - Can the blind hear shapes? Insights into vision and brain plasticity from studying blindness and sensory substitution
Elizabeth Spelke - Natural Number and Natural Geometry
Giacomo Rizzolatti - The mirror neuron system: organization and role in intention understanding
Sharon Thompson-Schill - When hand-sight is 20/20: How sensorimotor experience affects memory for object appearance
Judy DeLoache - Gulliver's Toddlers: Scale Errors Early in Life
Scott Frey - Personalizing objects: neural adaptations to the use of tools and others' hands
Marc Jeannerod – Consciousness of action: revisited
Mel Goodale - Getting a grip on things: the neural substrates of object-directed actions
Ferdinand Binkofski - Integration of actions with objects
Giovanni Buccino - Language processing in your motor system
James Lewis - Cortical processing of auditory objects and action knowledge
Lawrence Barsalou - Grounding knowledge in the brain’s modality-specific systems
Jason Mitchell - Inferring others’mental states: neural mechanisms of social cognition
John Dylan Haynes - Decoding conscious and unconscious mental states from brain activity in humans
Rafael Malach - Critical elements in the emergence of visual percepts
Manuela Piazza - Number concepts: quantity meets symbols in parietal cortex
Alex Martin - Neural foundations for conceptual representations
Stefania Bracci: stefania.bracci@unitn.it
Moritz Wurm: moritz.wurm@unitn.it
Events Office
University of Trento
Corso Bettini, 84 - Rovereto (Trento)
eventi-rovereto@unitn.it