Dream and daydream: differences and similarities

Did you know that daydreams reflect events from the previous two days and “night” dreams resemble a fictional plot?

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”.

The Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition was recently launched

Did you know that the Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition, recently launched, is welcoming the submission of manuscripts? This scientific peer-reviewed journal links anomalous experience and cognition. The first one refers to unusual but not necessarily pathological experiences, such as mystical experiences, out-of-body experiences, and others. They can be spontaneous or induced and have life-changing effects. Anomalous cognition refers to rigorous multidisciplinary research that seeks to improve our understanding of psycho-physical interrelations, including the hypothesis that organisms can be affected by spatially or temporally distant stimuli - unmediated by the senses or reason - and that intentions can directly affect physical systems, as well as attitudes, beliefs, and other variables related to such claims. For any questions kindly contact the Editor-in-Chief, Etzel Cardeña, Ph.D., Thorsen Professor in Psychology.

How the brain controls certain actions?

Stephanie Rossit, lead researcher of project 184/14 - Decoding neural representations of human tool use from fMRI response patterns, funded by the BIAL Foundation, published the paper Hand-selective visual regions represent how to grasp 3D tools: brain decoding during real actions in the Journal of Neuroscience and discussed the subject in The Conversation UK. “Most neuroimaging experiments that investigate how tools and their actions are represented in the brain use visual paradigms where tools or hands are displayed as 2D images and no real movements are performed. These studies discovered selective visual responses in occipito-temporal and parietal cortices for viewing pictures of hands or tools, which are assumed to reflect action processing, but this has rarely been directly investigated. Here, we examined the responses of independently visually defined category-selective brain areas when participants grasped 3D tools (N=20; 9 females). Using real action fMRI and multi-voxel pattern analysis, we found that grasp typicality representations (i.e., whether a tool is grasped appropriately for use) were decodable from hand-selective areas in occipito-temporal and parietal cortices, but not from tool-, object-, or body-selective areas, even if partially overlapping. Importantly, these effects were exclusive for actions with tools, but not for biomechanically matched actions with control non-tools. In addition, grasp typicality decoding was significantly higher in hand than tool-selective parietal regions. Notably, grasp typicality representations were automatically evoked even when there was no requirement for tool use and participants were naïve to object category (tool vs non-tools). Finding a specificity for typical tool grasping in hand-, rather than tool-, selective regions challenges the long-standing assumption that activation for viewing tool images reflects sensorimotor processing linked to tool manipulation. Instead, our results show that typicality representations for tool grasping are automatically evoked in visual regions specialised for representing the human hand, the brain’s primary tool for interacting with the world.”

How stress affects social cognition?

The research team of project 72/18 - Temperamental influences on social cognition under stress, coordinated by Frederike Beyer, published in the journal Stress: The International Journal on the Biology of Stress the paper Regulating interpersonal stress: the link between heart-rate variability, physical exercise and social perspective taking under stress. “Social interactions can be stressful, especially if they involve provocation or ambiguity. At the same time, such interactions necessitate social cognition. The question thus arises how stress affects social cognition and how personality attributes modulate this effect. The aim of the current study was to investigate the link between emotional reactivity, physical exercise, and social cognition under stress. As a measure of social cognition, we used spontaneous perspective taking, i.e., the degree to which participants represented the mental state of another agent. Studying young female participants, we investigated how physiological regulation, measured through resting heart-rate variability, is related to spontaneous social perspective taking under stress, and to predicted anger in an ambiguous social scenario. When controlling for resting heart rate, vagally mediated heart-rate variability was negatively correlated with the effect of stress on perspective taking, indicating that good physiological regulation supports social cognition under stress. Further, participants who reported to exercise at least once a week showed higher perspective taking under stress than less active participants. Finally, we found tentative evidence for participants who exercised regularly to show reduced predicted anger in response to an ambiguous provocation. Our findings suggest that good physiological regulation and regular physical exercise support social cognition under stress.”