Humans underestimate the movement range of their own hands.

Motor planning and motor imagery are assumed to use veridical internal representations of the biomechanical properties of our limbs. Here, we report that people underestimate their hands' range of motion. We used two tasks probing representations of own motion range, estimation and imagery, in which participants were supposed to judge their rotational hand movement ranges.

Human-Robot Intimacy: Acceptance of Robots as Intimate Companions.

Depictions of robots as romantic partners for humans are frequent in popular culture. As robots become part of human society, they will gradually assume the role of partners for humans whenever necessary, as assistants, collaborators, or companions. Companion robots are supposed to provide social contact to those who would not have it otherwise.

Phantom touch illusion, an unexpected phenomenological effect of tactile gating in the absence of tactile stimulation.

We report the presence of a tingling sensation perceived during self-touch without physical stimulation. We used immersive virtual reality scenarios in which subjects touched their body using a virtual object. This touch resulted in a tingling sensation corresponding to the location touched on the virtual body.

The robot eyes don't have it. The presence of eyes on collaborative robots yields marginally higher user trust but lower performance.

Eye gaze is a prominent feature of human social lives, but little is known on whether fitting eyes on machines makes humans trust them more. In this study we compared subjective and objective markers of human trust when collaborating with eyed and non-eyed robots of the same type. We used virtual reality scenes in which we manipulated distance and the presence of eyes on a robot's display during simple collaboration scenes.

Neural representations of economic decision variables in human posterior parietal cortex.

Decision making has been intensively studied in the posterior parietal cortex in non-human primates on a single neuron level. In humans decision making has mainly been studied with psychophysical tools or with fMRI. Here, we investigated how single neurons from human posterior parietal cortex represent numeric values informing future decisions during a complex two-player game.

Beware 'persuasive communication devices' when writing and reading scientific articles.

Authors rely on a range of devices and techniques to attract and maintain the interest of readers, and to convince them of the merits of the author's point of view. However, when writing a scientific article, authors must use these 'persuasive communication devices' carefully. In particular, they must be explicit about the limitations of their work, avoid obfuscation, and resist the temptation to oversell their results.

Handwriting in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Literature Review.

Handwriting is linked to a variety of systems in the human brain and has been likewise demonstrated to be affected by a variety of neurological and developmental disorders. In this paper we provide a narrative review of recent findings regarding the quantitative evaluation of handwriting product in people with autism spectrum disorder. We summarize the experimental approaches and variables measured by most representative studies, such as handwriting speed and quality.

Optimistic Youth: Young Adults Predicted a Faster Decrease in Risk during COVID-19 Emergency State in Portugal.

Perception of risk is known to change throughout the lifespan. Previous studies showed that younger adults are more prone to risk behaviours than older adults. Do these age-related differences influence risk perception during a pandemic crisis? Here, we investigated how age influenced predicted risk during the COVID-19 emergency state in Portugal.

Tool heads prime saccades.

Tools are wielded by their handles, but a lot of information about their function comes from their heads (the action-ends). Here we investigated whether eye saccadic movements are primed by tool handles, or whether they are primed by tool heads. We measured human saccadic reaction times while subjects were performing an attentional task.

Remember how to use it: Effector-dependent modulation of spatial working memory activity in posterior parietal cortex.

Working memory (WM) is the key process linking perception to action. Several lines of research have, accordingly, highlighted WM's engagement in sensori-motor associations between retrospective stimuli and future behavior. Using human fMRI we investigated whether prior information about the effector used to respond in a WM task would have an impact on the way the same sensory stimulus is maintained in memory despite a behavioral response could not be readily planned.

Distinct contributions of human posterior parietal and dorsal premotor cortex to reach trajectory planning.

Goal-directed hand movements are usually directed straight at the target, e.g. when swatting a fly.

Human posterior parietal and dorsal premotor cortex encode the visual properties of an upcoming action.

Behavioral studies show that motor actions are planned by adapting motor programs to produce desired visual consequences. Does this mean that the brain plans these visual consequences independent of the motor actions required to obtain them? Here we addressed this question by investigating planning-related fMRI activity in human posterior parietal (PPC) and dorsal premotor (PMd) cortex. By manipulating visual movement of a virtual end-effector controlled via button presses we could dissociate motor actions from their sensory outcome.

The neural correlates of specific executive dysfunctions in Parkinson's disease.

Several functional neuroimaging studies in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) have suggested that changes in the fronto-parietal-striatal networks are associated with deficits in executive functioning. However, executive functions (EF) are multifaceted and include three dissociable components: working memory, response inhibition, and task-switching. This study investigated which component of executive functioning is most strongly associated with fronto-parietal-striatal efficiency in PD.