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”.

Do eyes on robots matter?

Artur Pilacinski, principal investigator of the research project 260/22 - TrustyCobots: Human-like or machine-like? Tracking psychophysiological components of trust in human-robot collaboration, supported by the BIAL Foundation, assessed, using both subjective and objective measures (heart rate, pupil size and task completion time), the human trust when collaborating with eyed and non-eyed robots of the same type. Although humans seem to report marginally higher trust in eyed robots, they showed larger pupil size and faster task completion when interacting with robots without eyes, suggesting a more comfortable cooperation with them. This indicates that humans might not need human-like machines to trust and work with them. Instead, they seem to collaborate better with machine-like, eyeless machines. To know more about this study, read the paper The robot eyes don't have it. The presence of eyes on collaborative robots yields marginally higher user trust but lower performance published in the journal Heliyon.

The contribution of nucleus accumbens in anxiety

In the scope of the research project 175/20 - The role of nucleus accumbens in the perception of natural rewards, led by Carina Cunha and supported by the BIAL Foundation, it was published the paper Involvement of nucleus accumbens D2–medium spiny neurons projecting to the ventral pallidum in anxiety-like behaviour in the Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience. In this study, the contribution of a specific population of dopaminergic neurons in a central nucleus for emotional behaviors is highlighted, now in the context of anxiety.

Connectivity between premotor and motor cortex impacts inter-areal communication

The paper Changing connectivity between premotor and motor cortex changes inter-areal communication in the human brain was published in the journal Progress in Neurobiology in the scope of the research project 44/16 - Inducing and measuring plasticity in response control mechanisms in the human brain, supported by the BIAL Foundation and led by Alejandra Sel de Felipe. It has been suggested that the efficacy or strength of connections between neuronal groups influences the communication strength between brain regions. The research team tested this possibility in the human brain by using manipulations that have been established to either increase or decrease connectivity strength in a human cortico-cortical pathway, the route connecting ventral premotor cortex (PMv) and primary motor cortex (M1) and demonstrated that changing short-term synaptic efficacy of the PMv-M1 pathway changes interregional brain communication between the premotor and the primary motor control regions. Moreover, increasing PMv-M1 coupling strength leads to increased beta and alpha coherence, while decreasing PMv-M1 coupling strength results in decreased theta coherence.