Does your dog have social skills?

A study suggests that viewing the owner’s face works as a positive social reinforcement for dogs. Learn more about this and other surprising results about “man’s best friend”.

Are near-death experiences (NDEs) and psychedelic experiences alike?

Pascal Michael and colleagues aimed to analyse the similarities and differences between an NDE while in a coma and the experience induced by an endogenous psychedelic drug (5-Methoxy-DMT). There was a very high level of comparability between the original NDE and psychedelic experience in general, emerging common themes, such as, space-time transcendence, ego dissolution, cosmic love. However, there were also a few unique themes (life review, meeting deceased loved one, and threshold of no-return) that emerged in the NDE and were not present in the psychedelic experience. Despite the convergences observed in several domains, according to the participant’s subjective appraisal both experiences are almost completely different. To know more about this study, read the paper This is your brain on death: a comparative analysis of a near-death experience and subsequent 5-Methoxy-DMT experience published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, in the scope of the research project 359/18 - DMT and Epileptiform activity as an integrative model of the Near-Death Experience: A phenomenological, psychometric and psychophysiological study, supported by the BIAL Foundation.

Is motor-response execution part of the decisional process?

Michele Scaltritti, principal investigator of the research project 79/20 - Redefining the boundaries between cognition and action through the psychophysiological investigation of binary decisions, supported by the BIAL Foundation, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance the article Redefining the Decisional Components of Motor Responses: Evidence From Lexical and Object Decision Tasks. The research team aimed to evaluate whether motor-response execution is or is not part of the decisional process. They have exploited the electromyographic (EMG) signal to partition the reaction time (RT) into a premotor time (PMT), capturing the time from stimulus onset until the onset of the EMG activity, and a motor time (MT), reflecting the time from the onset of the EMG burst until the button press, to assess whether decision processes terminate before response initiation or, instead, whether they are still at play during motor-response execution. The results supported the latter perspective, that is, motor-response execution is not segregated from ongoing decisional dynamics.

How spatial information modulates Pavlovian learning?

The paper Threat learning in space: How stimulus-outcome spatial compatibility modulates conditioned skin conductance response was published in the International Journal of Psychophysiology, in the scope of research project 47/20 - Fear in action: How Pavlovian fear learning shapes goal-directed motor responses led by Francesca Starita. Participants completed a Pavlovian threat conditioning task in which visual conditioned stimuli - CSs (images of four different white geometrical shapes) appeared on the same (compatible) or opposite (incompatible) hemispace as the unconditioned stimuli (US) delivery (aversive shock to one hand), while their skin conductance response (SCR) was being measured, serving as an index of learning. No information was provided regarding which stimulus would be associated with the shock, and participants had to learn the CSs-US relationship from experience. Results showed that, before learning which CSs predicted the shock, compatible CSs elicited greater mean SCR than incompatible ones. In contrast, during threat acquisition, when participants learned that incompatible as well as compatible CSs predicted shock delivery, SCR increased to CSs+ as compared to CSs-, indicating that the conditioned response was successfully acquired regardless of CS compatibility. Additionally, at the beginning of extinction, the conditioned response was greater to incompatible than compatible CSs, but it was extinguished for both incompatible and compatible CSs by the end of extinction. These results suggest that stimulus-outcome spatial compatibility influences the acquisition, extinction and recovery (following reinstatement) of Pavlovian threat conditioning.