Maria Bortot

Maria Bortot serves as a Research Fellow at the Interdepartmental Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMEC) at the University of Trento, located at P.zza Manifattura, 1 - 38068 Rovereto. Her work bridges cognitive neuroscience and comparative psychology through experimental investigations of numerical cognition in invertebrate models.

Her research focuses on numerical cognition mechanisms across species, particularly examining the approximate number system in honeybees and other invertebrates. Key interests include magnitude processing, cross-modal transfer of numerical information, and the evolutionary foundations of quantitative abilities. Her methodological contributions involve developing standardized experimental tools like the GeNEsIS stimuli generator for non-symbolic numerical experiments.

Bortot's publication record reveals a concentrated research trajectory in invertebrate cognition since 2019, with increasing methodological sophistication in experimental design. Her work consistently demonstrates that insects possess surprisingly advanced numerical competencies previously thought exclusive to vertebrates, challenging traditional assumptions about cognitive complexity.

Her laboratory work is centered at CIMEC, where she collaborates extensively with Professor Giorgio Vallortigara and other researchers in the Comparative and Neural Cognition Laboratory. Current projects investigate abstract coding of magnitude in honeybees and the standardization of experimental protocols for cross-species numerical comparisons.