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 projects supported by the BIAL Foundation produced 1.457 indexed publications

Did you know that the research funded by the BIAL Foundation has resulted until April 2021 in the publication of 1.829 papers, 1.457 of which in indexed journals (in Scopus or Web of Science) and 1.238 in impact factor journals?

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.”