CSN Unit

ESCAN (a European-based non-profit scientific society dedicated to advancing research on how the brain supports cognition, emotion, and social behaviour) leaves X (1.919 followers)

Bluesky: @escaneu.bsky.social

Home - ESCAN 2026 ESCAN 2026 is the 9th ESCAN Conference, the biennial meeting of the European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.

📢 Deadline extended!

The submission deadline for single presentations (posters) at ESCAN 2026 has been postponed.

🗓️ New deadline: 25 February 2026
⏰ 23:59 (CET)

Take advantage of the extra time to finalize your proposal and submit your poster. We look forward to your contributions. escan2026.eu

🧠 ESCAN Pre-Conference Symposium on June 3, 13:30-17:15: Social Neuroscience: Bridging research & societal impact: AI & Human Interaction • Clinical & Health Applications
• Environmental & Climate Neuroscience • Societal & Political Applications. escan2026.eu/pre-conferen... @escaneu.bsky.social

New paper out in NYAS!
nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
We show that protecting others' from pain promotes effortful prosocial behavior 💪🧑‍🤝‍🧑🤝
w/ @clauslamm.bsky.social @silanilab.bsky.social @lei-zhang.bsky.social
(thread below)

And very proud of Raimund Bühler and Jakub Kraus for presenting their work...Jakub with a 1st prize for the best short talk 🤩

Amazing conference and time in Erice "NEUROMODULATORS OF CONNECTION: CUTTING-EDGE INSIGHTS ON OXYTOCIN AND VASOPRESSIN IN SOCIAL BEHAVIOR, COGNITION AND THERAPY". Thank you so much for organizing it!😍

Paper_summary

Autistic and neurotypical adults use different neural mechanisms to integrate AV speech, but benefit equally in word recognition 🧠

📜New paper in Autism Research (OA):📜
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/... w/
@mrgbcn.bsky.social, @sotarokita.bsky.social, & @mireiatorralba.bsky.social 🙏

1️⃣ We are excited to announce that the call for symposium proposals is extended until April 20 for our upcoming S4SN meeting in beautiful Lisbon! This is a wonderful opportunity to showcase your research and engage with a diverse community of neuroscientists. Please refer to www.s4sn2025.org/symposia

Looking for a PhD candidate to join a project at the intersection of health comms & computer science! We’ll use LLMs to create synthetic patient populations to test vaccine uptake interventions & build a training tool for better vax communication. jobs.univie.ac.at/job/Project-... Please repost!

Affective and Social Predictors of Food Consumption During the COVID-19 Lockdown COVID-19 lockdowns were linked to a surge in unhealthy food–related behaviors, potentially as an attempt to cope with disrupted social homeostasis. Here, we tested bidirectional associations between m...

Out in Biological Psychiatry
"Affective and Social Predictors of Food Consumption During the COVID-19 Lockdown"
www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S000...

Here we challenge the prominent conceptions of effort as being generally aversive, by showing that it may be rewarding on itself!

Our results suggest that building a culture that rewards effort and improvement, not only success, could help people thrive and even lead to better results all around.

NYAS Publications Effort is thought to be generally aversive but we tested the hypothesis that effort-contingent rewards in a cognitive task will induce reward-related hedonic facial responses in a subsequent non-ince...

Another new paper is out together with Veronica Job´s team!
...with implications for school & work environments 🎓💼.

Read it here:
doi.org/10.1111/nyas...

#MotivationResearch #Reward

we saw that higher autistic traits were linked to reduced reward sensitivity for wins — across conditions — pointing to general learning differences rather than exclusively social ones.

We tested this by designing a learning task using point-light displays— minimal moving dot stimuli – to compare social and non-social cues matched on low-level visual properties and applied computational modeling to analyze learning.

Autism is defined by clear social differences - but do these stem from specifically social mechanisms or from domain-general processes?

Autistic traits relate to reduced reward sensitivity in learning from point-light displays (PLDs) | Royal Society Open Science A number of studies have linked autistic traits to difficulties in learning from social (versus non-social) stimuli. However, these stimuli are often difficult to match on low-level visual properties,...

🎉New paper out in Royal Society Open Science!🎉

Our lab member Raimund Buehler has just published his second ever, first-author paper!

📄 Read it here: royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
#AutismResearch #Neuroscience

From being to identity: analysis and synthesis of the self | Royal Society Discussion meeting organised by Professor Tony Prescott, Professor Agnieszka Wykowska, Professor Sarah Garfinkel, and Professor Paul Verschure.

A stellar line-up at this @royalsociety.org event on the Self, 19-20 May : Garfinkel, Wykowska, Prescott, Verschure, Zavahi, Schectman, , Li, Southgate, Lanillos, Brugger, Addis,Vogeley, Preller,Tsakiris, Blanke. Join us! royalsociety.org/science-even...

Nature exposure induces analgesic effects by acting on nociception-related neural processing - Nature Communications Virtual nature exposure reduces self-reported pain and is associated with decreased brain responses linked to somatosensory and nociceptive processing, providing new insights into the underlying mecha...

Can nature relieve pain 🌳🧠⚡️? Our latest preregistered neuroimaging study, now out in Nature Communications, suggests it can. We find that virtual nature exposure reduces both subjective and neural pain responses, even when compared to matched control environments. A 🧵 1/6 doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Basis functions for complex social decisions in dorsomedial frontal cortex - Nature A study combining group decision-making tasks with fMRI shows that the brain’s dorsomedial prefrontal cortex uses basis functions, similar to those in the visual, motor and spatial domains, to re...

New paper from our lab now in @nature.com . We show that our brains use basis functions or "building blocks" to navigate social interactions. Rather than tracking every individual separately, social information is compressed into patterns that can be flexibly combined. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Looking for a candidate to apply to the @fondationfyssen.bsky.social Postdoctoral Fellowships 🚨

If you would like to work on social touch at INCC in Paris, contact me ! (and if you you are defending your PhD before December 25 - not in France)

www.fondationfyssen.fr/en/study-gra...

A hypothalamic circuit underlying the dynamic control of social homeostasis - Nature New data on brain-wide circuits centred around two interconnected hypothalamic neuron populations provide significant mechanistic insights into the emergence of social need during social isolation and...

Superb @nature.com study from @dulaclab.bsky.social’s lab, led by @dingliu.bsky.social, shedding light on the neural circuitry underlying social homeostasis, centred around two hypothalamic cell populations.
Deep similarities with other physiological needs 🧪🧠
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Application deadline is 7 April 2025 👇
- Thanks for reposting -

New preprint from my postdoc work @scanunit.bsky.social
osf.io/preprints/ps...
“Avoiding pain to others motivates effortful prosocial behavior reducing prosocial apathy”
w/ @clauslamm.bsky.social @lei-zhang.bsky.social @silanilab.bsky.social

‘Like it’s making my heart run’: A strengths-based understanding of the play of autistic children - Christina O’Keeffe, Sinead McNally, 2025 Play is a central feature of childhood and a fundamental right of all children. Currently, our understanding of autistic play is based on a deficit perspective,...

"how do autistic children understand and conceptualise play?"--interviews, free journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/... autistic children "described play as involving fun, friendships and engagement with meaningful materials and activities" & "deeply valued a sense of freedom and choice in play..."

What happened to cognitive science? - Nature Human Behaviour Núñez et al. use bibliometric and socio-institutional indicators to show that over the years, cognitive science has failed to transition to a mature, coherent, interdisciplinary field.

I found this to be an informative and provocative read - what happened to cognitive science? Authors argue, based on bibliometric and scientometric analysis, that cognitive science as a discipline is basically dead. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

The Predictive Coding Account of Psychosis Fueled by developments in computational neuroscience, there has been increasing interest in the underlying neurocomputational mechanisms of psychosis. One successful approach involves predictive codin...

The Predictive Coding Account of Psychosis
www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S000...

Defining key concepts for mental state attribution - Communications Psychology The terminology used in discussions on mental state attribution is extensive and lacks consistency. In the current paper, experts from various disciplines collaborate to introduce a shared set of conc...

Nita collected the opinions of experts in the field @clauslamm.bsky.social @scanunit.bsky.social, @silanilab.bsky.social, and @epronizius.bsky.social in an attempt to untangle the maze of mental states, question expert consensus, & explore the blurred lines of conceptual clarity! shorturl.at/iiKNA

Today is international hug day: a great day to hug and be hugged! We reviewed the scientific literature and were struck by how strongly such touch can improve your physical and mental health (see our meta-analysis doi.org/10.1038/s415...)! So go ahead and give a hug, and let us know how it feels!

Hello, BlueSky! 🌟 ESCAN is thrilled to join this growing platform. Follow us for updates, insights, and discussions on cognitive and affective neuroscience! 🚀 #ESCAN #BlueSky #Academia

Great place to see you again🤩