The role of the Macaque frontal pole cortex in exploration and evaluation of self and others’ choices

• Speaker: Professor Aldo Genovesio
  University of Rome "La Sapienza"
• Title: The role of the Macaque frontal pole cortex in exploration and evaluation of self and others' choices
• Researcher Host: Elvira De Leonibus

I started my career with a PhD in Behavioral Neurophysiology at the University of Rome La Sapienza, during which I explored the role of the posterior parietal cortex in macaques in visually guided eye and hand movements. Following the completion of my doctoral studies, I spent six years at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, United States. During all these past years, my research ranged from studying the parietal lobe in motor and sensorimotor contexts to investigating the macaque prefrontal cortex. After returning to Rome my studies focused on the role of different subdivisions of the prefrontal cortex in representing action goals, their memory and monitoring, and the representation of time and space. More recently, my interests have expanded into Social Neuroscience within an ERC project, with a particular emphasis on the single-neuron level study of self and other representation in tasks of social interaction and learning within the prefrontal cortex, especially in the Frontal Pole cortex, an area still largely unexplored in neurophysiology but critical to understanding the evolution of the prefrontal cortex.