Tianqiao & Chrissy Chen Institute – Change perception, change your world | Chen Institute

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 […]

Laypeople and scientists alike believe that they know anger, or sadness, or fear when they see it. These emotions and a few others are presumed to have specific causal mechanisms in the brain and properties that are observable (on the face, in the voice, in the body, or in experience)—that is, they are assumed to […]

The brain is assumed to be hypoactive during cardiac arrest. However, the neurophysiological state of the brain immediately following cardiac arrest has not been systematically investigated. In this study, the authors performed continuous electroencephalography in rats undergoing experimental cardiac arrest and analyzed changes in power density, coherence, directed connectivity, and cross-frequency coupling. We identified a […]

This paper states that it is inappropriate to build any implications for the free will and by extension to legal definition of criminal responsibility from the famous Libet’s experiment. However, even if we could take Libet’s results at face value, the paper shows that at least in the context of German law, the change in […]

The seminal Libet experiments proposed that consciousness may not be part of the causal role leading to action, and thus that humans might generally make decisions unconsciously. However, the Libet experiments were carried out on arbitrary decisions (e.g., raising the left or right hand for no reason or purpose). This paper demonstrates that the Libet […]

The field of neuroaesthetics has gained in popularity in recent years but also attracted criticism from the perspectives both of the humanities and the sciences. In an effort to consolidate research in the field, we characterize neuroaesthetics as the cognitive neuroscience of aesthetic experience, drawing on long traditions of research in empirical aesthetics on the […]

In recent years, the scientific study of meditation and psychedelic drugs has seen remarkable developments. The increased focus on meditation in cognitive neuroscience has led to a cross-cultural classification of standard meditation styles validated by functional and structural neuroanatomical data. Meanwhile, the renaissance of psychedelic research has shed light on the neurophysiology of altered states […]

Much human behavior is driven by rewards. Preclinical neurophysiological and clinical positron emission tomography (PET) studies have implicated striatal phasic dopamine (DA) release as a primary modulator of reward processing. However, the relationship between experimental reward-induced striatal DA release and responsiveness to naturalistic rewards, and therefore functional relevance of these findings, has been elusive. The […]