Enrico Varano

Enrico Varano is postdoctoral researcher affiliated with LiRI, the University of Zurich and the University of Geneva, currently working on the Neural Integration Task  of the Information Integration NCCR Evolving Language Work Package. Enrico also develops the online experiment platform for LiRI.

Enrico’s received his PhD in Neurotechnology from Imperial College London, Department of Bioengineering, in 2023. Employing electroencephalography (EEG) and a variety of visual signals, he focused on the brain’s ability to integrate the audio and visual components of natural speech to overcome comprehension difficulties in noisy environments, and the neural mechanisms that underpin this skill. He also investigated how multimodal integration processes change with ageing and published a corpus of speech media specifically designed to enable reproducible and ecologically valid EEG studies in audiovisual speech comprehension and integration. By employing AI-generated talking head videos to improve speech-in-noise comprehension, he showed that findings in the field may be immediately applicable in the development of multimodal hearing prostheses. Enrico also worked with transcranial electrical stimulation at Imperial College London, and later at UZH and UNIGE, investigating the mechanisms employed by the brain when processing degraded speech or two concurrent speech streams.

His current research project aims to explore how turn-taking (who's speaking turn is it?) and prosodic vocal cues (rhythmic and tonal variables) interact with voice recognition (who spoke?), and to investigate the neural temporal dynamics of how speaker identification is integrated with linguistic content during processing.