Elise Piazza

Elise Piazza is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester, affiliated with the School of Arts & Sciences and Neuroscience. Her research focuses on understanding how communication, auditory perception, and music cognition operate across developmental stages and social interactions. She employs naturalistic paradigms and neuroscience techniques like fNIRS to study neural synchrony between infants and adults, temporal processing in music, and adaptive mechanisms in vocal communication.

Her work spans topics such as the influence of tonal context on musical tasks, the role of pitch dynamics in child-directed speech, and neural correlates of learning in infants. Piazza’s methodologies include combining experimental psychology with computational modeling, as seen in her use of language transformer models to analyze creative narratives and quantify musical perceptual similarity.

Key research themes include two-person neuroscience, real-world communication dynamics, and the interplay between auditory perception and developmental milestones. Her recent studies highlight how naturalistic temporal structures impact memory and prediction in music, and how rapid adaptation occurs to timbral features in auditory environments.

Piazza’s research emphasizes interdisciplinary approaches, bridging cognitive science, neuroscience, and developmental psychology to uncover fundamental principles of human communication and learning. Her lab utilizes cutting-edge neuroimaging tools to explore real-time neural coupling during social interactions, particularly between caregivers and infants.