Research Highlights

++ The complete list of publications of the members of the Departments  composing the Center - Cognitive and Education Sciences (DiSCoF), Physics and Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI) - can be obtained from the archive Research Outputs of the University of Trento ++

New study on brain lateralization
On the alert or relaxed? Look at the nose - The study on dogs conducted at the universities of Bari and Trento (our own Giorgio Vallortigara) has been published on Animal Behaviour
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347211002284
Press release

Chicks Dig Certain Types of Music
For the first time, neuroscientists Cinzia Chiandetti and Giorgio Vallortigara tested the spontaneous preferences of newly hatched domestic chickens. Their concluded that chicks like consonant sounds.

Getting your secret Self out of Twitter
CIMeC reserachers created an application to study tweets according to the gender of the users and time of the day
Herdağdelen, A. and Baroni, M. (2011), Stereotypical gender actions can be extracted from web text. Journal Of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 62: n/a. doi: 10.1002/asi.21579 
Abstract 
Press release

Happy voice or smiling face? Study discovers brain areas that represent other’s emotion at an abstract level
Neural activity patterns represent emotion categories independent of modality of presentation.
An international group of neuroscientists at Trento (Marius Peelen, researcher at Center for Mind Brain Sciences – CIMeC), Geneva and Durham Universities searched for brain areas in which the pattern of neural activations to perceived emotions were independent of the modality in which the emotions were portrayed (body, face, voice).Using fMRI, the researchers analysed the neural responses to the five basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness) presented through different sensory modalities.The analysis revealed a modality-independent but emotion category-specific activity patterns in medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and left superior temporal sulcus (STS).
Marius V. Peelen, Anthony P. Atkinson, and Patrik Vuilleumier, Supramodal Representations of Perceived Emotions in the Human Brain, Journal of Neuroscience (Vol. 30, Issue 30, pp 10127-10134).
Abstract
Press release

Neuroimaging
Cattaneo L, Caruana F, Jezzini A, Rizzolatti G. Representation of goal and movements without overt motor behavior in the human motor cortex: a transcranial magnetic stimulation study. Journal of Neuroscience. 2009 Sep 9;29(36):11134-8.
http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/full/29/36/11134

Cattaneo L, Sandrini M, Schwarzbach J. State-Dependent TMS Reveals a Hierarchical Representation of Observed Acts in the Temporal, Parietal, and Premotor Cortices. Cerebral Cortex. 2010 Jan 4. [Epub ahead of print]
http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/bhp291

Lingnau A, Gesierich B, Caramazza A. Asymmetric fMRI adaptation reveals no evidence for mirror neurons in humans. PNAS June 16, 2009 vol. 106 no. 24 9925-9930
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/24/9925

Coricelli G, Nagel R. Neural correlates of depth of strategic reasoning in medial prefrontal cortex. PNAS, June 9, 2009; 106(23): 9163 - 9168
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/05/22/0807721106.short

Hasson, U., Nusbaum, H. C., & Small, S. L. (2009). Task-dependent organization of brain regions active during rest. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106. 10841-10846.
http://www.pnas.org/content/106/26/10841.short