The brain encodes information collected by our senses. In order to perceive and interact with the environment, however, these sensory signals must be interpreted in the context of past experiences stored in the brain and the individual’s current aims. A team led by Prof. Dr. Johannes Letzkus, Professor at the Faculty of Medicine Faculty of […]

Even before the pandemic and the presidential election, Americans reported some of the highest perceived levels of stress in the world, according to the American Psychological Association. Not only does stress have negative effects on work and personal relationships, it also increases the risk of many chronic conditions, such as heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease, […]

Deep within the brain, a small almond-shaped region called the amygdala plays a vital role in how we exhibit emotion, behavior and motivation. Understandably, it’s also strongly implicated in alcohol abuse, making it a long-running focus of Marisa Roberto, PhD, professor in Scripps Research’s Department of Molecular Medicine. Now, for the first time, Roberto and […]

Researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus have found that many pregnant Black Americans have low levels of choline, an essential nutrient that aids in prenatal brain development. Stress caused by institutional racism may play a role. The study, out now in Schizophrenia Bulletin, also found that these low levels of choline were […]

A defendant is criminally responsible for his action only if he is shown to have engaged in a guilty act—actus reus (eg for larceny, voluntarily taking someone else’s property without permission)—while possessing a guilty mind—mens rea (eg knowing that he had taken someone else’s property without permission, intending not to return it)—and lacking affirmative defenses […]

According to philosophy of mind and neuroscientific models, the sense of agency can be defined as the sense that I am the one that is generating an action and causing its effects. Such ability to sense ourselves as causal agents is critical for the definition of intentional behavior and is a primary root for human […]

In a series of preregistered studies, we explore (a) the difference between people’s intuitions about indeterministic scenarios and their intuitions about deterministic scenarios; (b) the difference between people’s intuitions about indeterministic scenarios and their intuitions about neuro-deterministic scenarios (i.e., scenarios where the determinism is described at the neurological level); (c) the difference between people’s intuitions […]

Since its introduction, the reward prediction error theory of dopamine has explained a wealth of empirical phenomena, providing a unifying framework for understanding the representation of reward and value in the brain1,2,3. According to the now canonical theory, reward predictions are represented as a single scalar quantity, which supports learning about the expectation, or mean, […]

The capacity to predict future events permits a creature to detect, model, and manipulate the causal structure of its interactions with its environment. Behavioral experiments suggest that learning is driven by changes in the expectations about future salient events such as rewards and punishments. Physiological work has recently complemented these studies by identifying dopaminergic neurons […]