How and why funders support engaged research.

Research that better aligns policy, practice, and research communities is gaining momentum around the world. This includes engaged research strategies that bring partners, and their diverse perspectives and kinds of knowledge, together to shape research agendas with on-the-ground-needs and to create dynamic problem-solving processes. These approaches aim to generate more equitable and effective solutions to societal challenges.

Intact Neural Responding to Hearing One's Own Name in Children with Autism.

Diminished responding to one's own name is one of the strongest and earliest predictors of autism. However, research on the neural correlates of this response in autism is scarce. Here we investigate neural responses to hearing the own name in school-aged children with and without autism.

Coordinated social interactions are supported by integrated neural representations.

Joint actions are defined as coordinated interactions of two or more agents toward a shared goal, often requiring different and complementary individual contributions. However, how humans can successfully act together without the interfering effects of observing incongruent movements is still largely unknown. It has been proposed that interpersonal predictive processes are at play to allow the formation of a Dyadic Motor Plan, encompassing both agents' shares.

From interoception to control over the internal body: The ideomotor hypothesis of voluntary interoaction.

When it comes to body movements in external space, people are experts in learning fine-grained voluntary control, for example, when manipulating tiny objects. Voluntarily controlling actions in the internal body (e.g.

Syncing online: A methodological investigation into movement synchrony, proxemics, and self-other blurring in virtual spaces.

A growing body of literature has found that synchronising movements with a group subsequently increases self-other blurring and social closeness with synchronised partners. However, movement synchrony has not been studied in online settings. Our study has a primarily methodological focus to investigate whether synchronous movement leads to changes in self-other blurring and proxemics in an online, desktop-mediated environment.

Defining key concepts for mental state attribution.

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 concepts and make recommendations regarding future use.

Using a Veto paradigm to investigate the decision models in explaining Libet-style experiments.

The question of whether free will exists or not has intrigued philosophers for centuries. About 40 years ago, cognitive neuroscientists such as Benjamin Libet have joined the discussion by demonstrating that an ERP component, the readiness potential (RP), precedes the reported time of decision to act by a few hundred milliseconds. Libet et al.

Concurrent response and action effect representations across the somatomotor cortices during novel task preparation.

Instructions allow us to fulfill novel and complex tasks on the first try. This skill has been linked to preparatory brain signals that encode upcoming demands in advance, facilitating novel performance. To deepen insight into these processes, we explored whether instructions pre-activated task-relevant motoric and perceptual neural states.

Anticipated imitation of multiple agents.

It is well-established that people tend to mimic one another's actions, a crucial aspect of social interactions. Anticipating imitation has been shown to boost motor activation and reaction times for congruent actions. However, prior research predominantly focused on dyads, leaving gaps in our knowledge regarding group dynamics.

Top-Down Modulation of Motor Priming by Belief About Animacy.

Research has shown that people automatically imitate others and that this tendency is stronger when the other person is a human compared with a nonhuman agent. However, a controversial question is whether automatic imitation is also modulated by whether people the other person is a human. Although early research supported this hypothesis, not all studies reached the same conclusion and a recent meta-analysis found that there is currently neither evidence in favor nor against an influence of animacy beliefs on automatic imitation.

Dynamic changes in task preparation in a multi-task environment: The task transformation paradigm.

A key element of human flexible behavior concerns the ability to continuously predict and prepare for sudden changes in tasks or actions. Here, we tested whether people can dynamically modulate task preparation processes and decision-making strategies when the identity of a to-be-performed task becomes uncertain. To this end, we developed a new paradigm where participants need to prepare for one of nine tasks on each trial.

Internal attention modulates the functional state of novel stimulus-response associations in working memory.

Information in working memory (WM) is crucial for guiding behavior. However, not all WM representations are equally relevant simultaneously. Current theoretical frameworks propose a functional dissociation between 'latent' and 'active' states, in which relevant representations are prioritized into an optimal (active) state to face current demands, while relevant information that is not immediately needed is maintained in a dormant (latent) state.

Instructing somebody else to act: motor co-representations in the instructor.

Instructions enable humans to perform novel tasks quickly. This is achieved by creating and activating the instruction representation for upcoming tasks, which can then modulate ongoing task behaviour in an almost 'reflexive' manner, an effect called instruction-based reflexivity. While most research has focused on understanding how verbal instructions are represented within the 'instructed' (i.

Associative Visuomotor Learning Using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Induces Stimulus-Response Interference.

Classical conditioning states that the systematic co-occurrence of a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus can cause the neutral stimulus to, over time, evoke the same response as the unconditioned stimulus. On a neural level, Hebbian learning suggests that this type of learning occurs through changes in synaptic plasticity when two neurons are simultaneously active, resulting in increased connectivity between them. Inspired by associative learning theories, we here investigated whether the mere co-activation of visual stimuli and stimulation of the primary motor cortex using TMS would result in stimulus-response associations that can impact future behavior.

Covert and overt automatic imitation are correlated.

Most theoretical accounts of imitation assume that covert and overt measures of automatic imitation tap into the same underlying construct. Despite this widespread assumption, it is not well supported by empirical evidence. In fact, the only study investigating the relation between covert and overt automatic imitation failed to find a correlation between them (Genschow et al.

Effects of Experiencing CS-US Pairings on Instructed Fear Reversal.

Fear learning allows us to identify and anticipate aversive events and adapt our behavior accordingly. This is often thought to rely on associative learning mechanisms where an initially neutral conditioned stimulus (CS) is repeatedly paired with an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US), eventually leading to the CS also being perceived as aversive and threatening. Importantly, however, humans also show verbal fear learning.

Adaptive coding of stimulus information in human frontoparietal cortex during visual classification.

The neural mechanisms of how frontal and parietal brain regions support flexible adaptation of behavior remain poorly understood. Here, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and representational similarity analysis (RSA) to investigate frontoparietal representations of stimulus information during visual classification under varying task demands. Based on prior research, we predicted that increasing perceptual task difficulty should lead to adaptive changes in stimulus coding: task-relevant category information should be stronger, while task-irrelevant exemplar-level stimulus information should become weaker, reflecting a focus on the behaviorally relevant category information.

EEG frequency tagging evidence of intact social interaction recognition in adults with autism.

To explain the social difficulties in autism, many studies have been conducted on social stimuli processing. However, this research has mostly used basic social stimuli (e.g.

Manipulating free will beliefs using online video games.

Research in social psychology and experimental philosophy has investigated lay people's free will beliefs (FWB). Using different approaches (i.e.

The relevance of familiarity in the context of self-related information processing.

Humans are inclined to preferentially process self-related content, referred to as the "self-bias." Different paradigms have been used to study this effect. However, not all paradigms included a familiar other condition (but rather an unfamiliar other condition), needed to differentiate self-specific effects from the impact of familiarity.

The impact of free will beliefs on implicit learning.

A growing number of studies demonstrate that belief in free will (FWB) is dynamic, and can be reduced experimentally. Most of these studies assume that doing so has beneficial effects on behavior, as FWBs are thought to subdue unwanted automatic processes (e.g.

Concurrently observed actions are represented not as compound actions but as independent actions.

Recent research suggests that we can simultaneously represent the actions of multiple agents in our motor system. However, it is unclear exactly how concurrently observed actions are represented. Here, we tested two competing hypotheses.

Evidence for a two-step model of social group influence.

Social group influence plays an important role in societally relevant phenomena such as rioting and mass panic. One way through which groups influence individuals is by directing their gaze. Evidence that gaze following increases with group size has typically been explained in terms of strategic processes.

Theta-phase connectivity between medial prefrontal and posterior areas underlies novel instructions implementation.

Implementing novel instructions is a complex and uniquely human cognitive ability, that requires the rapid and flexible conversion of symbolic content into a format that enables the execution of the instructed behavior. Preparing to implement novel instructions, as opposed to their mere maintenance, involves the activation of the instructed motor plans, and the binding of the action information to the specific context in which this should be executed. Recent evidence and prominent computational models suggest that this efficient configuration of the system might involve a central role of frontal theta oscillations in establishing top-down long-range synchronization between distant and task-relevant brain areas.