Hi, my name is Marco Ciapparelli and I’m a researcher in cognitive science. I combine computational modeling with behavioral and neuroimaging data to study how humans and machines learn, organize, and deploy knowledge.

About me

I am currently a postdoc in the BottiniLab at the Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC) of the University of Trento.

Before that, I received my PhD in Psychology, Linguistics and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Milano-Bicocca, where I worked on computational models of conceptual combination and novel word processing with Marco Marelli and the team of BraveNewWord, and with Carlo Reverberi on the neural correlates (fMRI) of multimodal conceptual combination. During my PhD, I spent a visiting period at the Thompson-Schill lab at UPenn, where I investigated zero-shot learning of novel concepts. Before my PhD, I completed my MS and BS in Psychology at the University of Milano-Bicocca.

News

• [09/2025] Our work Compositionality in the semantic network: a model-driven representational similarity analysis is out in Cerebral Cortex!
• [08/2025] Gave a seminar on LLMs in psychology at the Social Connections and Well-being in the Digital era summer school
• [07/2025] Notebook on large language models (and some vision) made available! [repo]
• [06/2025] I gave a workshop on LLMs for (psycho)linguistics (notebook), a workshop on Python for linguists (notebook) and presented my work; all at the MEDAL summer school in computational modelling.
• [05/2025] I presented a poster on language-vision alignment at CAOs 2025.
• [03/2025] Our work Conceptual Combination in Large Language Models: Uncovering Implicit Relational Interpretations in Compound Words with Contextualized Word Embeddings is out in Cognitive Science!
• [02/2025] I successfully defended my PhD!
• [11/2024] Gave an invited talk on predicting the appearance of novel combined concepts via language-vision alignment at RWTH Aachen University (thanks Tanja Römbke!)