Olimpia Pino was fellow in Developmental Psychology (M-PSI/04, E11) at the Faculty of Education, University of Palermo. She remained in Palermo until joining the University of Parma in 1999. In 2000, she was appointed Associate Professor of Psychology (M-PSI/01, E11) at Parma University, and served as Chair of the Master Degree in Emergencies Psychology and Psycho-traumatology in 2005. Currently Associate professor of Rehabilitation Memory and Data Analysis Techniques II for the master's degree course in Psychobiology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the Department of Medicine and Surgery, Neuroscience Unit of the University of Parma, teaching also “General Psychology”, “Communication and anxiety management in dentistry settings” for Dentistry “General Psychology” for CS Midwifery, “Psychology” for Biomedical laboratory techniques master degree coordinating the “Human obstetric and psycho-pedagogical sciences” course for Midwifery and “Safety in the workplace and biological risk management” course for Biomedical laboratory techniques degree.
Olimpia Pino’s research has focused on both cognitive and rehabilitative aspects of human memory. For many years she investigated the ways that people learn and recall in laboratory and everyday tasks. She is particularly interested in memory rehabilitation to integrate the clinical phenomenon of amnesia into the experimental and theoretical analyzes of typical human memory. Currently to gain insight into ways that the human brain changes as a function of experience, treatment or training, her research interests has been moved towards Brain Computer Interface Technologies. She has published over 90 manuscripts.
Winners of the XIII AIAMC congress award (Milano, 2005) for the contribution given to the advancement of knowledge and research in the verbal behavior of Skinner. She has also received a second award for her research, including the VII National SIPSA (Italian Society of Health Psychology) (Cesena, 2006) for her research on the impact of psychosocial factors in the quality of life in people with Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (LES).
In her Cognitive Psychology lab, the researchers were a group of engineers, computer scientists, psychologists, and medical professionals. Neuro-Upper is the first Brain Computer Interface prototype created by the group which used brainwaves audio-visual entrainment in the treatment of anxiety and depressive disorders. The research group is involved in experimental studies in the fields of Human Robot Interaction (HRI) and robot-assisted therapies (RAT) in which the NAO-H25 robot is used as support in the memory rehabilitation of individuals with Mild Cognitive Impairment through a strict cooperation first with the Robotics Laboratory of the Department of Information Engineering from the Bologna University and with the Department of Computer Science, University of Bari. The research program aimed to provide evidence that large mutual influences between cognitive neuroscience and robotics enable a better understanding which leads to an increased acceptance of future robotic in society and health care provision services. New tools and technologies based on machine learning and robotics are successfully applied to the field of psychology and could be used to in memory training program for people with MCI and dementia. With the support of CARIPARMA we used NAO h25 by Aldebaran Robotics in our research program as a tool to promote neuro-cognitive stimulation within the elderly population and Pepper because it is easy to use by the patients with dementia, relatives, and caregivers. The research group had also developed and evaluated a tool aiming at automatic facial expression recognition of users for automatically measuring the quality of human-robot interaction. Currently, we are focusing on humanoid robots and tablets to investigate how seniors with MCI relate with and perceive humanoid robots.
A second research line concerns neuro-feedback and entrainment obtained with Neuro-Upper (NU) a Lab prototype different from usual BCI designed for enabling the auto-calibration of neural oscillations in different psychopathological disorders and for the increasing of cognitive functions.
