Ilaria Vergari, MSc
Ilaria is a neuropsychologist who completed her Master's degree at Leiden University in 2017. Afterwards, she completed one year of post-graduate internship at the Alzheimercentrum of VU University Medical Center (VUmc) in Amsterdam. At the same time, Ilaria worked as a student assistant for two European longitudinal projects - European Prevention of Alzheimer's Dementia Consortium (EPAD) and Models of Patient Engagement for Alzheimer's disease (MOPEAD), which aims to increase understanding on the earliest stages of Alzheimer's disease (AD) to facilitate earlier diagnosis of mild AD dementia and prodromal AD patients. Starting from September 2020, she will join the Focus on Emotions Lab as a research intern to collaborate on a project on empathy in autistic children.
Understanding emotions from other people’s faces and from social situations is essential for daily social interaction. But how is that for children with hearing loss? Can they learn to understand emotions just as easily as hearing children?Through a collaboration between Developmental Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, and Otorhinolaryngology (LUMC and Chang-Gung Memorial Hospital Taiwan), Yung-Ting’s unique eye-tracking studies show that daily "exposure" in the social environment in which emotions take place is essential for the development of this aspect of emotional intelligence. The results are now published in 
