Valeria Anna Sovrano

Valeria Anna Sovrano is an Associate Professor at the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC) and the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of Trento. Her research focuses on comparative cognition, brain asymmetries, and spatial-numerical skills in fish and reptiles, with a particular emphasis on visual perception of illusions and environmental geometry encoding. She leads the Lower Vertebrates Behavior and Neurobiology Unit at CIMeC and has supervised numerous doctoral projects.

• PhD in Experimental Psychology (University of Padua, 2004)
• Master degrees in Legal Psychology, Criminology, and Human Rights

Recent work explores neurodevelopmental disorders in zebrafish models, inhibitory control in reptiles, and environmental pollutant impacts on cognition. Her studies on fish spatial navigation and numerical discrimination have been widely cited across cognitive science and developmental psychology.

Notable awards include the AIP Section of Experimental Psychology award (2000) and the Gold Medal of the Italian President (2007). She has taught courses like Biological bases of social behavior, Animal Cognition, and Psychobiology of stress, while coordinating STEM outreach programs and serving on equality & diversity committees.