CALM Project
Three studies on cognitive control and neurodevelopmental disorders from the NeuroDev group
The NeuroDev research group of the Department of General Psychology at the University of Padua, coordinated by Prof. Giovanni Mento, has recently published three new scientific studies within the multicentric CALM project, launched three years ago through the collaboration of approximately thirty institutions, including clinical centers, schools, family associations, and research laboratories.
Among these partners is the IRCCS Medea – La Nostra Famiglia network, with which the University of Padua has maintained a long-standing research agreement. Overall, the project
involved around 500 children and adolescents aged 5 to 14 years and included collaborations with Italian and international researchers, including Duncan Astle (University of Cambridge) and Corentin Gonthier (University of Nantes).
The multicentric nature of the project represents a particularly important aspect of the work. The collaboration among numerous clinical and research centers made it possible to collect a large sample over several years. This methodological investment is especially relevant in the study of ADHD, a condition characterized by high inter-individual variability, where adequately large samples are essential for obtaining reliable and robust findings.
The overall aim of the project is to understand how children and adolescents learn to regulate attention, impulsivity, and distractibility in complex and dynamic environments. In particular, the studies investigated the role of implicit learning of environmental regularities — for example, the probability that a given event will require increased attention or control — in shaping adaptive behavior.
The first study, published in Scientific Reports (Toffoli et al., 2026), showed that the ability to
automatically adapt cognitive control is already present from the age of 5, but continues to develop when tasks become more complex and require the simultaneous management of attention and impulsivity.
The second paper, published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry (Toffoli et al.,
2026), demonstrated that children and adolescents with ADHD are also able to use these implicit regularities to regulate their behavior. However, compared to typically developing peers, they show greater difficulties when attentional and cognitive demands increase.
The third study, published as a preprint on bioRxiv (Duma et al., 2026), was conducted using high-density electroencephalography (hdEEG) recordings collected at the Integrated Psychology Laboratories (LIP) within the framework of the PNRR DARE project. The findings suggest that ADHD is associated with specific differences in brain functioning, both at the local level (cortical excitability in specific brain regions) and at the global level (dynamics and fluidity of neural networks). However, beyond these neural differences, the results indicate that the relationships between brain activity, cognition, and behavior are not organized according to rigid diagnostic categories. Rather than identifying a specific “neurocognitive profile” for ADHD, the study supports the existence of dimensional neurodevelopmental trajectories distributed along a continuum spanning both clinical andtypically developing populations.
Overall, the CALM project contributes to a broader and more integrated understanding of cognitive control development and neurodevelopmental disorders by combining behavioral, clinical, and neurophysiological approaches within an innovative developmental framework.
References and links to publications
1. Toffoli, L., Stefanelli, G., Del Popolo Cristaldi, F. et al. Learning-based cognitive control:
developmental trajectories in children aged 5- to 14-years. Scientific Reports (2026).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-51912-1
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-51912-1#citeas
2. Toffoli, L., Stefanelli, G., Del Popolo Cristaldi, F., Duma, G.M., Pastore, M., Tarantino, V.,
Franzoi, M., Vecchi, M., Danieli, A., Martinez, F., Blaye, A., Gonthier, C., CALM-1 Team
and Mento, G. (2026). Learning-based cognitive control in ADHD: a multicentric study.
Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.70162
https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jcpp.70162
3. Duma, G. M., Stefanelli, G., Toffoli, L., Ferri, G., Pellegrino, G., Danieli, A., ... & Mento,
G. (2026). Where is ADHD in the brain? Evidence for a neurodevelopmental continuum of
brain dynamics. bioRxiv, 2026-05.
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.04.722738v1.abstract
