Ricerc@Sapienza

The present paper describes a tool developed to model and simulate tasks related to numerical cognition, a very important ele- ment of both animal and human cognition. In particular, we describe how this software has been used to study a bias that has been consis- tently observed in humans, both adults and children, about the calcu- lation of the middle point between two numbers and related with the position of numbers in intervals, called NIPE (number interval position effect).

How do genes modify cellular growth to create morphological diversity? We study this problem in two related plants with differently shaped leaves: Arabidopsis thaliana (simple leaf shape) and Cardamine hirsuta (complex shape with leaflets). We use live imaging, modeling, and genetics to deconstruct these organ-level differences into their cell-level constituents: growth amount, direction, and differentiation.