My research interests lie in the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience with a particular focus on written language processing. Specifically, I am interested in understanding the cognitive and neural processes that underlie the recognition of written words, and reading in general. In my primary line of research, I use a combination of behavioral and electrophysiological (EEG) measures to investigate the functional and spatio-temporal dynamics of the processing mechanisms that operate during the transformation of abstract letter strings into meaningful linguistic units. I have investigated orthographic processing in both adults and children, looking at the very early phase of visual word recognition where letter identification and letter position encoding takes place. More recently, I have been examining the processes through which people read multi-syllabic words.  With the use of behavioral, neuropsychological and computational modelling approaches I seek to uncover the cues that adult (dyslexic and non-dyslexic) readers use to assign stress on words comprising more than one syllable.

Maria joined the lab in January 2017, experiencing on her very first working day the craziest Bora of the last decade. She somehow managed not to fly away, and thus is now working on the role of statistical learning in reading through behavioral, eye-tracking, neurophysiology and neuroimaging techniques.