Curiosity is a fundamental driver of human behavior. Yet, the interplay of emotional valence, self-relevance, and uncertainty in non-instrumental information-seeking remains unclear. This study aims to disentangle these influences using a trivia-based paradigm designed to isolate intrinsic motivation. Participants will decide whether to wait for answers to trivia questions varying in valence,...
In animal societies, acoustic communication is deeply connected to group behaviour and social network structure, coordinating group decisions and maintaining relationships. Yet research on social behaviour and vocal communication has often proceeded in parallel, largely because it is difficult to track interactions while simultaneously attributing vocalisations to multiple nearby individuals....
Studying freely moving animals, as opposed to restrained or head-fixed animals, provides an excellent opportunity to study a wider range of complex, natural behaviours and interactions in neuroscience beyond the confines of the traditional laboratory setting. Advances in motion tracking technology, with the help of machine learning, are beginning to make the study of natural behaviours...
Artificial light at night (ALAN) is a growing environmental problem influencing the fitness of individuals through effects on their physiology and behaviour. Research on animals has primarily focused on effects on behaviour during the night, whereas less is known about effects transferred to daytime. Here, we investigated in the lab the impact of ALAN on the mating behaviour of an ecologically...
Where in the brain is a decision made? Previous studies showed that activity in prefrontal areas reflects information pertinent to the ongoing decision, suggesting that decision-making is part of the frontal lobe’s executive functions. However, decision-related neural modulation is also shown in sensorimotor areas. Does this imply that these areas are all causally involved in the decision...
Introduction
Intensifying partisan animosity poses a significant challenge to sustainability. This research explored whether non-binding communication through numerical pledges of intended behaviour (cheap-talk) could foster cooperative sustainability across politically aligned and mis-aligned groups in an online experimental common-pool resource (CPR)...
Human perception is susceptible to social influences. To determine if and how individuals opportunistically integrate real-time social information about noisy stimuli into their judgment, we tracked perceptual accuracy and confidence in social (dyadic) and non-social (solo) settings using a novel continuous perceptual report (CPR) task with peri-decision wagering. In the dyadic setting, most...
Real-life social interactions often unfold continuously and involve dynamic cooperation and competition, yet most studies rely on discrete games that do not capture the adaptive and graded nature of continuous sensorimotor decisions. To address this gap, we developed the Cooperation-Competition Foraging game — a novel, ecologically grounded paradigm in which pairs of participants (dyads)...
The ecological constraint hypothesis proposes that ecological conditions, e.g. limited breeding resources, constrain dispersal and solitary breeding, promoting cooperative breeding. The impact of climate and weather variables on cooperative plural breeding, where all females in a group can reproduce, are unclear. Female grey mouse lemurs, Microcebus murinus, forage solitarily at night, and...
Keywords: Conversational AI [1], elder mental health [2], psychological well-being [5].
The global surge in aging populations and digital mental health interventions underscores the urgency to understand how cultural preferences shape the adoption and efficacy of conversational AI tools for supporting older adults’ mental well-being. This systematic review aims to (1) examine how cultural...
Prior research suggests that modal thought emerges around age four. For instance, when confronted with one certain and two uncertain options (3-cups-task), preschoolers choose randomly. Apparently, they fail to represent mutually exclusive possibilities and do not consider their uncertainty. This contrasts with findings that already 3-year-olds provide accurate metacognitive judgments about...
Mental fatigue is a common challenge in human–robot collaboration (HRC), yet it often remains undetected until performance failures occur. To support adaptive systems that respond proactively to user states, this study examined behavioral and pupillometric indicators of mental fatigue in a controlled yet ecologically valid scenario mimicking HRC. Forty‑one participants completed either a low‑...
How does curiosity unfold during reading? Although curiosity is central to how people seek out and engage with information, its role in everyday reading remains underexplored. In this study, we adapted the classic trivia paradigm to a naturalistic reading task: participants read 72 short, thematically diverse German texts from different domains and rated them on seven dimensions, including...
Exploration plays a central role in the interaction of organisms with their environment, and it is studied across disciplines. However, interdisciplinary exchange might be hampered by different understandings of exploration. Are researchers indeed referring to the same underlying process when investigating exploration? Differences might be due to operational versus conceptual definitions....
Mental rotation (MR) is a crucial process that underlies our ability to spatially navigate and recognize objects despite viewing them from varying distances and viewpoints. MR competence is linked to superior sport and academic performance, and deficits can impact activities of daily living like driving. Previous work using single-pulse TMS has confirmed the causal involvement of three brain...
Predictive coding theory as a unified theory of brain formulating intelligence as a hierarchical process in which the brain builds an unsupervised world model and tries to predict the next states of the world by minimising the prediction errors. This process can be implemented in a variant of artificial neural networks, called energy-based networks or predictive coding networks, trained by a...
Social interactions are crucial for individual health and ultimately fitness, making the choice of social partners particularly important. Previous research has shown that individuals who succeed in foraging tasks often receive increased affiliation from group members. Similarly, in a social learning context, individuals who possess valuable information become more attractive social partners....
When animals forage together, they should remain alert to others and environmental uncertainties. In monkeys, this commonly embodies as looking at others and around while manually foraging. We asked how do monkeys navigate the trade-off between maintaining vigilance and acquiring food? To address this question, we designed a dyadic foraging task for freely moving rhesus macaques in which they...
The illusion of explanatory depth (IOED) is a cognitive bias in which people overrate their ability to explain phenomena. It manifests as the gap between a self-rating of explanatory skill and a later self-rating of the explanation produced. Experiments show that searching the Internet for explanations increases IOED. We tested whether interacting with an AI-chatbot has the same influence....
Children learn both through exploration and by seeking guidance from more knowledgeable and helpful others, with successful learning requiring leveraging these two different ways of acquiring information. While a large body of work shows that even young children are adaptive in the way they search for information and in their decisions about whom to ask for advice, there is little work...
According to the learning progress theory of curiosity, infants’ attention is guided by information in the environment. Yet, the role of social interaction and, in particular, the caregiver’s behavior in interaction with information provided by the environment remains unclear. The aim of this combined behavioral and computational modeling project was to investigate infants’ visual attention to...
Decision making in social contexts requires integrating sensory evidence over time from both stimulus and social sources. While prior work shows social settings affect perceptual accuracy and confidence, it remains unclear how real-time social feedback modulates these factors.
We analyzed a continuous perceptual decision-making task where participants reported the perceived direction of...
Understanding how individuals recover function after stress is a central question in resilience research. From a neuroscience perspective, identifying neural circuits that promote resilience could reveal whether resilience is a universal principle across scales.
We address this question by studying spiking neural networks subject to disturbances. Prior work in similar settings has focused...
Understanding how an observer decides where to look is central to both human-vision research and machine perception. We tackle this question by training a neural network that produces artificial scan paths while performing tasks such as classification, visual search, and counting. At each fixation, the network receives a log-polar, foveated view of the image, which retains high-resolution...
Curiosity motivates to investigate, gain knowledge, and adjust to uncertain situations. Curiosity-driven learning has been associated with enhanced memory and comprehension, establishing it a vital aspect of cognitive growth. Agency, the feeling of having control over one’s learning process, might amplify curiosity advantages by enabling learners to guide their own exploration. Metacognitive...
In animal cognition research, the use of touchscreens has increased in recent years. Compared to classical tasks, computerized testing allows for high stimulus control and high temporal resolution, minimizing confounding effects that might occur during interaction with an experimenter, and enables researchers to test a large variety of cognitive tasks in standardized ways. Knowing how nonhuman...
Coordinated eye-body movements are essential for adaptive behavior, yet little is known about how multisensory input, particularly chemosensory cues, shapes this coordination. Using our enhanced Fish-on-Chips optofluidic platform, we uncovered complex dynamics in how larval zebrafish coordinate saccadic eye movements with tail flips. Under baseline conditions, spontaneous tail flips...
Prosocial behavior is defined as any behavior that is intended to benefit another individual. This behavior does not need to be costly. Results of individual studies are heterogenous, obscuring major effects. We conducted a phylogenetically controlled meta-analysis in order to investigate how much variation in non-human mammalian and avian prosocial behavior can be explained by the cooperative...
This conceptual paper examines how sacred place attachment influences sustainable climate behaviors and human interaction with the environment in South Asia. The main objective is to explore the emotional, spiritual, and cultural connections that communities form with sacred and historical landscapes, and how these attachments foster pro-environmental action. Drawing on theories from...
Foraging animals continuously assess their environment regarding types and locations of food sources. During social foraging, individuals must additionally account for the positions and potential actions of conspecifics, integrating social dynamics into their foraging decisions. Here we test how rhesus macaques (macaca mulatta) integrate information about a conspecific’s actions in their own...
Studies in nonhuman animals have shown that collective intelligence and the wisdom of the crowd are not uniquely human traits. Through social learning, animals can improve their effectiveness over time in tasks such as migration, a pattern that reflects key components of cumulative cultural evolution. However, experimental studies testing whether animals can increase effectiveness through...
Human and nonhuman primates often engage in joint activities, such as playing, hunting, and foraging, and they require the representation of both social and sensory information and their integration to guide their actions.
We present a stochastic dynamics theory and analysis framework for studying a continuous-time transparent visual game for pairs of agents we call a continuous perceptual...
Neuronal plasticity is a fundamental process in brain development. Understanding the mechanisms involved in it is crucial for finding solutions to neurodevelopmental disorders. To study plasticity in vivo, we used ocular dominance plasticity (ODP) in mouse primary visual cortex (V1) induced by monocular deprivation (MD). In standard-cage raised adult mice, 4 days of MD are not sufficient to...
Affective facial expressions are known to bias approach-avoidance tendencies. Yet in real social interactions, the affective outcomes of approaching or avoiding others are just as relevant as the emotional cues that initially bias these actions. This raises the question of whether anticipating those social-affective consequences plays a role in shaping approach-avoidance responses.
To...
Curiosity can direct children’s knowledge acquisition, learning and retention. One of infants’ information-seeking strategies is social learning. While there is a wealth of literature focusing on caregiver input, the role of peers remains understudied. There is some evidence to suggest that children pick up preferences from peers but rely on adults for learning new skills. Most social...
Individual differences in exploratory behavior shape how animals interact with their environment and conspecifics. To characterize such differences in Mongolian gerbils (Meriones unguiculatus), we assessed boldness and exploration using a series of standardized tests. With adapted versions of the open field, novel object, elevated plus maze, and dark-light box tests, we measured their...
Training artificial neural networks using local learning rules remains an ongoing challenge in biologically inspired machine learning. In contrast to standard machine learning, which typically relies on global error signals and centralized optimization, the brain operates under strong locality constraints: synaptic updates depend only on information available at the neuron or synapse. Many...
Establishing and maintaining positive interpersonal relationships play a significant role in human development and well-being. Even though ecology of human development explains the interactions between humans and changes in their immediate environments, human development is also influenced by the natural environment in which individuals interact. Ecoculture--the reciprocal interaction between...
Visually guided prey capture is an ethologically relevant behaviour that depends on the precise integration of sensory input and motor output. Postsynaptic density proteins 95 and 93 (PSD-95/93) are signalling scaffolds of the PSD of excitatory synapses with opposing function for critical period (CP) timing: PSD-95 promotes AMPA-silent synapse maturation which terminates the CP while PSD-93...
Among primates, callitrichid monkeys are the only cooperative breeders besides humans and are characterized by high social tolerance and extensive vocal behavior. In a previous study, we measured marmoset vocal activity across different contexts and observed some predictable status differences in contact and warning calls. However, results were less clear for call types used to share...
The evolution of complex communication is thought to be shaped by the cognitive demands of social living, as proposed by the Social Complexity Hypothesis for Communicative Complexity (SCHCC). While supported in a few model taxa, its generalizability as a widespread selective pressure remains unclear. To address this, we examine an understudied, highly social species—the Rüppell's vulture—to...
While many species have been shown to act prosocially by providing a benefit to conspecifics, the evolution of prosocial behaviour remains incompletely understood. Among other factors, heightened social tolerance and cooperative breeding have been proposed to facilitate prosocial behaviour. However, recent studies reported conflicting results as some cooperatively breeding species behave less...
Love, often regarded as an emotional experience, is increasingly recognized as a transformative force in shaping social cognition. This literature synthesis examines how emotionally secure, love-based environments reduce psychological threat, encourage exploratory behaviour, and promote cognitive flexibility in social contexts. Drawing on interdisciplinary research from cognitive psychology,...
