Motivation is a multifaceted phenomenon that we explore within the framework of decision-making. Through this cognitive process, actions are directed towards specific goals by performing a trade-off between the cost and benefit of an action. The dorsomedia ...

EPFL2024

Temporal aspects of feature integration in vision

Lukas Vogelsang

To fully comprehend visual perception, we need to necessarily understand its temporal dimension. Our visual environment is highly dynamic, requiring the processing and integration of temporal signals in order to make sense of it. Many processes, such as th ...

EPFL2024

Цена автономии^ Университет, «украинский вопрос», (не)академическая память в долгом двадцатом веке [The Price of Autonomy: University, the "Ukrainian question," (un)academic memory In the long twentieth century]

Alexander Dmitriev

The subject of the book is the specificity of social, national-cultural and historical self-consciousness of the "educated class" of the former Russian Empire and the former Soviet Union. The phenomenon of "intelligentsia" is considered in the spirit of V ...

Peter Lang Verlag2024

Involvement of prelimbic cortex neurons and related circuits in the acquisition of a cooperative learning by pairs of rats

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Elias Georges Gebara

Social behaviors such as cooperation are crucial for mammals. A deeper knowledge of the neuronal mechanisms underlying cooperation can be beneficial for people suffering from pathologies with impaired social behavior. Our aim was to study the brain activit ...

Springer2024

Neurocognition and NMDAR co-agonists pathways in individuals with treatment resistant first-episode psychosis: a 3-year follow-up longitudinal study

Lijing Xin

This study aims to determine whether 1) individuals with treatment-resistant schizophrenia display early cognitive impairment compared to treatment-responders and healthy controls and 2) N-methyl-D-aspartate-receptor hypofunction is an underlying mechanism ...

Springernature2024

White adipose tissue distribution and amount are associated with increased white matter connectivity

Jean-Philippe Thiran, Gabriel Girard, Elda Fischi Gomez, Philipp Johannes Koch

Obesity represents a significant public health concern and is linked to various comorbidities and cognitive impairments. Previous research indicates that elevated body mass index (BMI) is associated with structural changes in white matter (WM). However, a ...

Wiley2024

Amygdala volumes and associations with socio-emotional competencies in preterm youth: cross-sectional and longitudinal data

Elda Fischi Gomez, Vanessa Siffredi

Background Socio-emotional difficulties often result from very preterm (VPT) birth. The amygdala's developmental trajectory, including its nuclei, has been recognized as a significant factor in observed difficulties. This study aims to assess the relations ...

Springernature2024

Hearing structure in music: An empirical inquiry into listening as representation and processing

Gabriele Cecchetti

As a universal expression of human creativity, music is capable of conveying great subtlety and complexity. Crucially, this complexity is not encoded in the score or in the sounds, but is rather construed in the mind of the listener in the form of nuanced ...

EPFL2024

Subcortical correlates of consciousness with human single neuron recordings

Olaf Blanke, Fosco Bernasconi, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Michael Eric Anthony Pereira

Subcortical brain structures such as the basal ganglia or the thalamus are involved in regulating motor and cognitive behavior. However, their contribution to perceptual consciousness is still unclear, due to the inherent difficulties of recording subcorti ...

2024

Non-invasive stimulation of the human striatum disrupts reinforcement learning of motor skills

Friedhelm Christoph Hummel, Takuya Morishita, Maximilian Jonas Wessel, Elena Beanato, Traian Popa, Pierre Theopistos Vassiliadis, Fabienne Windel, Esra Neufeld

Reinforcement feedback can improve motor learning, but the underlying brain mechanisms remain underexplored. In particular, the causal contribution of specific patterns of oscillatory activity within the human striatum is unknown. To address this question, ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Changes in spatial self-consciousness elicit grid cell–like representation in the entorhinal cortex

Olaf Blanke, Hyeongdong Park, Baptiste Gauthier, Emanuela De Falco, Louis Philippe Albert, Hyukjun Moon

Grid cells in the entorhinal cortex (EC) encode an individual’s location in space, integrating both environmental and multisensory bodily cues. Notably, body-derived signals are also primary signals for the sense of self. While studies have demonstrated th ...

2024

“But of course i’m going to look happy” or “He needed to know I was angry”? Comparing use of emotional labour in teamwork in engineering and hospitality students

Roland John Tormey, Nihat Kotluk

Being able to work effectively in a team is a vital professional skill but how do students in different disciplines, engineering and hospitality, display their emotions when working together? We investigated their self-reported use of emotional labour stra ...

EAPRIL - European Association for Practitioner Research on Improving Learning2024

The interplay between white adipose tissue, adipokines, and structural gray matter changes

Jean-Philippe Thiran, Gabriel Girard, Elda Fischi Gomez

The growing global obesity issue emphasizes the importance of understanding its health implications. Previous research has identified consistent alterations in gray matter (GM) volume in connection with obesity. Given the various implications of distinct f ...

Wiley2024

Ethological computational psychiatry: Challenges and opportunities

Mackenzie Mathis

Studying the intricacies of individual subjects' moods and cognitive processing over extended periods of time presents a formidable challenge in medicine. While much of systems neuroscience appropriately focuses on the link between neural circuit functions ...

Current Biology Ltd2024

Probing and modulating inter-areal coupling in the cortical visual motion processing pathway with non-invasive brain stimulation

Michele Bevilacqua

In the last few years, stroke ranked as the second most common cause of death and is the third most significant condition affecting disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) worldwide. Being the most prevalent and quality of life impacting post-stroke symptom ...

EPFL2024

Butterfly effects in perceptual development: A review of the 'adaptive initial degradation' hypothesis

Lukas Vogelsang

Human perceptual development evolves in a stereotyped fashion, with initially limited perceptual capabilities maturing over the months or years following the commencement of sensory experience into robust proficiencies. This review focuses on the functiona ...

Academic Press Inc Elsevier Science2024

Robotically-induced auditory-verbal hallucinations: combining self-monitoring and strong perceptual priors

Olaf Blanke, Fosco Bernasconi, Nathan Quentin Faivre, Pavo Orepic, Melissa Faggella

Background. Inducing hallucinations under controlled experimental conditions in nonhallucinating individuals represents a novel research avenue oriented toward understanding complex hallucinatory phenomena, avoiding confounds observed in patients. Audito ...

2024

An immersive virtual reality tool for assessing left and right unilateral spatial neglect

Olaf Blanke, Andrea Serino, Roberta Ronchi

The reported rate of the occurrence of unilateral spatial neglect (USN) is highly variable likely due to the lack of validity and low sensitivity of classical tools used to assess it. Virtual reality (VR) assessments try to overcome these limitations by pr ...

Wiley2024

Serial Dependence in Human Visual Perception and Decision-Making

Gizay Ceylan

Decisions about a current visual stimulus are systematically biased by recently encountered stimuli, a phenomenon known as serial dependence. In human vision, for instance, we tend to report the features of current images as more similar â i.e., an attra ...

EPFL2024