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”.

Stimulus novelty and emotionality interact in the processing of visual distractors

In the scope of project 287/20 - Emotional Distraction: contextual modulation of attentional capture, supported by the BIAL Foundation, Maurizio Codispoti et al. published in the journal Biological Psychology the paper Stimulus novelty and emotionality interact in the processing of visual distractors with the following highlights

Is there continuity of consciousness between waking and sleeping states?

Benjamin Baird, supported by the BIAL Foundation in the scope of project 334/18 - Inducing lucid dreams with optimized sensory cues, concluded that episodic thoughts of both the past and the future rarely occur in either N2 or REM sleep, while common during waking spontaneous thought. The paper “Episodic thought distinguishes spontaneous cognition in waking from REM and NREM sleep” featuring these results was published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition

Neural signature of attentional reorienting

Spectral signature of attentional reorienting in the human brain, published in the journal NeuroImage, reports some of the main findings of the research project 159/16 - Unraveling the neural mechanisms of human memory decisions with magnetoencephalography, carried out by Carlo Sestieri and Stefania Della Penna, with the financial support of the BIAL Foundation.