Beholder Lab

People

Meet the team behind Beholder Lab.

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Stefano Lasaponara, PhD

PI • Associate Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychology • Department of Psychology – Sapienza University of Rome

From 2025, Stefano Lasaponara is an Associate Professor in Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropsychology at the Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, and Principal Investigator of Beholder Lab. His work investigates how people form, maintain, and revise beliefs, with a broader interest in attention, uncertainty, and decision-making. His research combines behavioural experiments with neurophysiological and neuroimaging methods, including EEG, fMRI, TMS, pupillometry, and computational approaches.

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Email • ORCID • Scopus

Valentina Piga, PhD student

Researcher • PhD student in Behavioural Neuroscience XL cycle • Department of Psychology – Sapienza University of Rome

Valentina Piga is a Licensed Psychologist and, since 2024, a PhD Student in Behavioural Neuroscience at the Department of Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, where she also completed a Master’s degree in Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychological Rehabilitation (2023). She is currently a Visiting Researcher at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), where she studies the role of perspective in belief updating under the supervision of Professor Wim Gevers. Her research focuses on belief formation and updating, with particular interest in the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying how individuals revise or maintain their beliefs in uncertain and ambiguous environments. Her work integrates behavioral paradigms, neurophysiological measures, and computational approaches to study how beliefs evolve over time and why they can become resistant to change. In parallel, she has gained clinical and teaching experience, including neuropsychological assessment, digital literacy initiatives for psychiatric patients, and teaching support in cognitive neuroscience laboratories.