Bianca M. Trovò is a Ph.D. candidate (Computational Brain Team) in Brain, Behaviour, Cognition at Sorbonne University, Paris, Faculty of Science and Engineering, where she is completing her thesis under the direction of prof. Aaron Schurger (now at The Brain Institute, Chapman University), within the European Project ACTINIT – brain-behavior forecasting: The causal determinants of spontaneous self-initiated action in the study of volition and the development of asynchronous brain-computer interfaces.

      Her research focuses on the study of spontaneous voluntary movements (as decisions about when to act without external evidence) under the theoretical framework of a leaky stochastic accumulator model (as in Schurger et al. 2012). During her Ph.D., she performed a series of EEG/MEG studies aimed to unveil the nature of the neural antecedents that commit the brain to self-initiate a movement at a specific moment in time. These experiments tackle the determinants of the motor-threshold-crossing event in case of perceptual uncertainty (such as when the stimulus is absent or present at different noise levels) or temporal uncertainty (such as in case of randomly varying limits of time in which to perform a movement), and the role of sub-threshold fluctuations in neural activity in the initiation of spontaneous actions.
      Previously, during her masters (in Mathew Diamond’s lab), she investigated the integration of the perception of time duration and vibrotactile stimulus intensity in rats and the effect of priors on learning, perceptual decision making, and working memory.
      On the side, she has also been working on decentralized applications for open science with the Ethereum blockchain (see preprint).