معرفی
Hiruni Samadi Galpayage Dona serves as a Research Fellow at the Interdepartmental Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMEC) within the University of Trento, Italy. Her position is dedicated to advancing interdisciplinary research at the intersection of cognitive science and neuroscience, with specialized focus on invertebrate perception systems and animacy detection mechanisms.
Her research program centers on:
- Cognitive Science: Investigating fundamental perception processes across species
- Neuroscience: Mapping neural correlates of animacy detection in arthropods
- Animal Cognition: Challenging vertebrate-centric models through invertebrate studies
- Perception: Decoding biological motion and life-detection mechanisms
- Invertebrate Behavior: Analyzing complex visual processing in bees, spiders, and wasps
- Neuroethology: Bridging evolutionary biology with cognitive mechanisms
Galpayage Dona's 2024 Frontiers in Psychology publication demonstrates sophisticated animacy perception capabilities in arthropods, revealing unexpected cognitive complexity in invertebrate visual systems. Her work establishes critical parallels between invertebrate and vertebrate perception mechanisms, fundamentally challenging traditional hierarchies of cognitive evolution and expanding our understanding of distributed intelligence in nature.
Scientific Awards:
- No awards documented in source materials
Advising and Grants:
- No graduate students supervised
- No specific grants identified
Labs and Teams:
As a core researcher at CIMEC, Galpayage Dona operates within University of Trento's premier interdisciplinary neuroscience hub, collaborating with cross-departmental teams including the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science, Department of Cellular, Computational and Integrative Biology (CIBIO), and international partners. The center provides advanced behavioral testing facilities, motion-capture systems, and neuroimaging resources enabling cutting-edge experimental paradigms for studying invertebrate cognition.