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”.

2023 Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded to scientists who won the latest edition of the BIAL Award in Biomedicine

The BIAL Foundation congratulates and pays tribute to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, who were awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine today for their discoveries that have enabled the development of effective vaccines based on mRNA technology to prevent COVID-19.

Is it possible to guess who is calling?

Some people claim to occasionally know who is calling them without using traditional means. Some of these experiences are undoubtedly related to a combination of coincidence, selective memory, expectation, and subconscious anticipation from temporal regularities of calls with certain people. However, could this guess be due to an information transfer process (telepathy)? To study this, Helané Wahbeh, principal investigator of the research project 108/20 - A telephone telepathy study: Does genetic relatedness influence psychic abilities?, supported by the BIAL Foundation, conducted a cross-sectional study of groups of three participants (triads) who tried to guess who was calling them in 12 trials, six of which the web server randomly chose the caller before the callee's guess (telepathic/pre-selected) and six of which the caller was selected after the callee's guess (precognitive/post-selected). Accuracy was significantly above chance for the telepathic/pre-selected trials but not for the precognitive/post-selected trials. For more information check the paper Who's calling? Evaluating the accuracy of guessing who is on the phone published in the journal Explore.

What do we remember from a movie?

Matteo Frisoni, principal investigator of the research project 384/20 - Schema-based temporal memory in parietal cortex (SCHETEMP), supported by the BIAL Foundation, assessed the degree to which detailed verbal information (i.e., dialogues), as well as semantic and spatiotemporal (i.e., “what”, “where”, and “when”) elements of episodic memories for movies, are forgotten over the course of a week in two groups of young adult (20–30 years old) and middle-aged (40–55 years old) participants. The results indicate that memory decay over a week mainly affects the auditory verbal dimension of complex events, both in terms of memory accuracy and confidence, whereas information about the “what” (objects/characters), “where” (spatial) and “when” (temporal) elements seems to be better preserved. Moreover, young adults are more accurate and confident than middle-aged participants. To know more, please read the paper “Long-term memory for movie details: selective decay for verbal information at one week” published in the journal Memory.