About
Stefano F. Cappa
IUSS School for Advanced Studies, Pavia & IRCCS Istituto Auxologico, Milan, Italy
Main areas of research
- Language Disorders and Aphasia
- Alzheimer’s Disease and Frontotemporal Dementia
- Digital Cognitive Assessment
- Brain–Language Relationships
- Semantic Memory and Meaning Representation
Bio
Stefano F. Cappa is a neurologist and cognitive neuroscientist. Professor Emeritus of Neurology at the University Institute for Advanced Studies (IUSS), he is presently a consulting neurologist at the IRCCS Istituto Auxologico in Milan. His main areas of clinical and research activity are disorders of language, memory, and social cognition, with a focus on Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia. His main scientific contributions deal with the representation of meaning in the brain (semantic memory), its degradation due to brain disorders, and the mechanisms of recovery. In recent years, his interests have extended to brain health, the prevention of memory decline, and the development of digital assessments. He has published more than 400 papers in peer-reviewed journals and several books on aphasia and cognitive neurology.
Research Interests
- Linguistic aspects of aphasia, with particular emphasis on the neurological correlates of language impairment
- Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias
- Diagnosis and neuropsychological features of memory disorders in dementia
- Application of functional imaging methods (positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging) to the study of cognitive functions, particularly language and semantic memory
- Cognitive studies of spatial cognition and exploration disorders, their neurological correlates, and factors influencing recovery
Keynote Lecture
The contribution of Primary Progressiva Aphasia to language neurobiology
The primary progressive aphasias (PPA) are clinical syndromes characterised by progressive language dysfunction, reflecting an (initially) selective degeneration of the brain language networks due to a variety of neuropathological mechanisms.
The enormous research interest in PPA, testified by the impressive increase in number of publications during the last decade, can be attributed to several reasons:
– the detailed analysis of spared/impaired aspects of language dysfunction in PPA provides a model of progressive and selective impairment, complementary to the evidence coming from aphasia due to stroke, which, in contrast, is characterised by the sudden onset of language impairment and by possible recovery
-at the neurological level, the PPA syndromes are characterised, at least in the early to moderate stages, by selective patterns of involvement of grey and white matter, which are generally consistent at the single subject level, and can be explored in vivo by multiple structural and functional imaging methods, allowing insights into brain segregation and integration of the neurological mechanisms of language function The study of PPA syndromes is providing important insights into multiple aspects of language neurobiology. In particular, patients living with the semantic variant have crucially contributed to the understanding of the brain organization of semantic knowledge. The non fluent/agrammatic variant offers a window into the brain mechanism of speech production and syntactic processing. The logopenic/phonological variant is specially informative about the relation of other cognitive functions, such as short-term memory, with language performance. Recent development in this field of study are based on the promising application of AI methods to the important issue of rehabilitation and to the development of cross-linguistic investigations.