A metacognitive approach to hearing and listening in older adults

Hearing loss is one of the most prevalent age-related sensory changes, with major consequences for communication and quality of life. Yet, many older adults respond to listening challenges with maladaptive strategies, such as delayed help-seeking or denial, even when aware of their difficulties. This thesis examined this paradox through the lens of metacognition, focusing on how monitoring, beliefs, and perceptions shape older adults’ responses to auditory challenges. Across six experimental ...

The effect of Trust on Innovation: A Behavioral Investigation

Trust and innovation are two central concepts in economics and social sciences. This dissertation investigates the relationship between trust and innovation in dyads faced with the choice between following an existing habit or attempting a novel approach. The design draws on the exploration-exploitation dilemma described by March (1991), whereby firms must decide whether to exploit existing capabilities or explore new solutions. Our dissertation is composed of three chapters. In the first cha...

On Language as an Interface for Controlling Image Generation

The emergence of vision-language foundation models, such as CLIP and DALL·E, has significantly advanced the use of natural language for image generation and manipulation. These models learn broad alignments between visual and textual representations, enabling flexible and general-purpose multimodal capabilities. However, using language as an efficient and robust interface for image generation remains challenging, with limitations in controllability, semantic expressiveness, and visual fidelit...

Dynamical perspective of stability in glasses

From Rest to Action: Functional Connectivity Architecture of the Human Hand Motor Network

Skillful hand motor control relies on complex interactions within a distributed brain network. Over the past two decades, neuroimaging (fMRI) and neurostimulation (TMS) techniques have greatly advanced our understanding of the functional contributions of individual regions. Yet, a central open question in motor neuroscience concerns the dynamic interactions among these regions: while their local roles are well characterized, their network-level organization and functional integration remain l...

Making Sense of Our Surroundings: A Study of Environmental Temperature Across Perception, Multisensoriality, and Social Behaviour

Our perception of temperature is not only a matter of physics: it shapes how we feel, think, and even behave around others. While previous research has mostly focused on how single body parts detect localised temperature changes, improving our understanding of the physiological and neurological basis of thermal sensing, no study with a similar methodological approach had investigated our ability to perceive ambient temperature at the whole-body level. This PhD thesis aimed to explore precisel...

Influence of Optogenetic Modulation and Convulsant Drugs on Neuronal Activity

ADOPTING THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY: SUPPLY CHAIN AND ORGANIZATIONAL PERSPECTIVES

The circular economy (CE) is an alternative economic paradigm that is regenerative by design and aims at decoupling economic growth from material input by reducing, reusing, recycling and recovering materials and energy to minimise resource depletion, waste and emissions. The adoption of CE practices requires companies to access external resources and capabilities, creating disruptive changes due to the creation of the reverse flow of value, materials and information. Despite the proliferatio...

New perspectives on the multimodal validation of the human brain white matter anatomy.

For much of history, the brain has fascinated scholars as the seat of thought, sensation, and behavior. Early theories of brain functioning focused on the cortical surface, seeking to localize cognition within discrete gray matter regions. Today, it is clear that the richness of human behavior cannot be explained based on the activity of isolated cortical modules alone, but rather emerges from the communication between them, supported by networks of white matter connections. Diffusion MRI-bas...