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 learn, represent, and combine concepts. Because machines have gotten quite good at that, I’m also interested in how they do it.

About me

I am currently a postdoc at the University of Milano-Bicocca working with Carlo Reverberi on the neural correlates (fMRI) of conceptual combination in language and vision modalities, and with the team of BraveNewWord on novel word processing. 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 with Marco Marelli. During my PhD, I spent a visiting period at the Thompson-Schill lab at UPenn, where I investigated how the alignment of language and vision may aid 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!)