Despite their apparent benevolence, positive stereotypes have negative effects on person and group perception. However, little is known about how exposure can intensify these negative consequences. In two pre-registered experiments (total N = 240) we investigated the effect of exposure […]
Paul K. Feyerabend was a sceptical master and iconoclast about the philosophy of science. He denounced the break between the abstract, normative, philosophical accounts of science and the actual, complex and context-dependent scientific practice. Feyerabend’s first iconoclastic enterprise was directed […]
ABSTRACT In this report we outline the null findings of a pre-registered experiment on vaccine hesitancy in the United Kingdom. The experiment targeted vaccine misconceptions common among participants by presenting a correction to such claims endorsed by a group of […]
Scientists and medical experts are among the professionals trusted the most. Are they also the most suitable figures to convince the general public to get vaccinated? In a pre-registered experiment, we tested whether expert endorsement increases the effectiveness of debunking […]
Disinformation about science can impose enormous economic and public health burdens. A recently proposed strategy to help online users recognise false content is to follow the techniques of professional fact checkers, such as looking for information on other websites (lateral […]
This article investigates the foundation of the concept of nudge from the perspective of the new mechanical philosophy. The research program on nudges has always underappreciated the role of mechanistic explanation, favoring an evidence-based approach. We propose a taxonomy […]
Building on the notion of affordance, the article investigates the neurofunctional principles of nudges, in order to improve their understanding and provide the basis for more effective behavioral policy interventions.
Behavioural Public Policy, Cambridge University Press 2019 Behavioral economics research has helped with understanding charitable behavior and has shown that charities can encourage donations by carefully designing their pledges. However, there is still scope to extend current research on […]
Sistemi intelligenti, Il Mulino, 2017.
This contribution offers a behaviourally informed evaluation of the novel Italian crowdfunding regulation. In particular, the paper tests if, and to what extent, the strategy proposed by the Italian Financial Authority is truly effective under an investor protection perspective. Download articolo completo:
Decision making under risk entails the anticipation of prospective outcomes, typically leading to the greater sensitivity to losses than gains known as loss aversion. Previous studies on the neural bases of choice-outcome anticipation and loss aversion provided inconsistent […]
The ability to infer intentions of other agents, called theory of mind (ToM), confers strong advantages for individuals in social situations. Here, we show that ToM can also be maladaptive when people interact with complex modern institutions like financial markets. We […]
Decision-making is strongly influenced by the counterfactual anticipation of personal regret and relief, through a learning process involving the ventromedial-prefrontal cortex. We previously reported that observing the regretful outcomes of another’s choices reactivates the regret-network. Here we extend those […]
Previous studies showed that the understanding of others’ basic emotional experiences is based on a “resonant” mechanism, i.e., on the reactivation, in the observer’s brain, of the cerebral areas associated with those experiences. The present study aimed to investigate […]
Whether unique to humans or not, consciousness is a central aspect of our experience of the world. The neural fingerprint of this experience, however, remains one of the least understood aspects of the human brain. In this paper we […]
Groove is often described as a musical quality that can induce movement in a listener. This study examines the effects of listening to groove music on corticospinal excitability. Musicians and non-musicians listened to high-groove music, low-groove music, and spectrally […]
Implicating, as it is conceived in recent pragmatics, amounts to conveying a (propositional) content without saying it – a content providing no contribution to the truth-conditions of the proposition expressed by the sentence uttered. In this sense, implicating is a […]
At least since Fodor’s (1983) The Modularity of Mind, the notion of modularity has been one of the most important concepts used to articulate an account of the human cognitive architecture. An account of the human cognitive architecture provides us with an encompassing […]
The combined knowledge of word meanings and grammatical rules does not allow a listener to grasp the intended meaning of a speaker’s utterance. Pragmatic inferences on the part of the listener are also required. The present work focuses on […]
What is it like to be at the lower boundaries of consciousness? Disorders of consciousness such as coma, the vegetative state, and the minimally conscious state are among the most mysterious and least understood conditions of the human brain. Particularly […]
Joint actions require the integration of simultaneous self- and other-related behaviour. Here, we investigated whether this function is underpinned by motor simulation, that is the capacity to represent a perceived action in terms of the neural resources required to […]
Current explanatory frameworks for social norms pay little attention to why and how brains might carry out computational functions that generate norm compliance behavior. This paper expands on existing literature by laying out the beginnings of a neurocomputational framework […]
Neuroimaging techniques, such as positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging are essential tools for the analysis of organized neural systems in working and resting states, both in physiological and pathological conditions. They provide evidence of coupled […]
Syntactic operations in language and music are well established and known to be linked in cognitive and neuroanatomical terms. What remains a matter of debate is whether the notion of syntax also applies to human actions and how those […]
Group membership is a powerful determinant of social behaviour in a variety of experimental games. Its effect may be channelled primarily via the beliefs of group members, or directly change their social preferences. We report an experiment with a prisoner’s […]
The aim of my paper is to evaluate which context determines the different speech acts performed with a recording. More precisely, my paper deals with the “metaphysical” or constitutive role of context – as opposed to its epistemic or evidential […]
PG (Plural Grundgesetze) is a consistent second-order system which is aimed to derive second-order Peano arithmetic. It employs the notion of plural quantification and a few Fregean devices, among which the infamous Basic Law V. George Boolos’ plural semantics is […]
Decisions are never perfect, with confidence in one’s choices fluctuating over time. How subjective confidence and valuation of choice options interact at the level of brain and behavior is unknown. Using a dynamic model of the decision process, we […]
The capacity to distinguish between one’s own and others’ behavior is a cognitive prerequisite for successful joint action. We employed a musical joint action task to investigate how the brain achieves this distinction. Pianists performed the right-hand part of […]
It is now well established that communicators interpret others’ mental states through what has been called “Theory of Mind” (ToM). From a linguistic-pragmatics perspective, this mentalizing ability is considered critical because it is assumed that the linguistic code in all utterances […]
Most utility theories of choice assume that the introduction of an irrelevant option (called the decoy) to a choice set does not change the preference between existing options. On the contrary, a wealth of behavioral data demonstrates the dependence […]
Indispensability arguments (IA) for mathematical realism are commonly traced back to Quine. We identify two different Quinean strands in the interpretation of IA, what we label the ‘logical point of view’ and the ‘theory-contribution’ point of view. Focusing on each […]
According to a growing trend in theoretical neuroscience, the human perceptual system is akin to a Bayesian machine. The aim of this paper is to clearly articulate the claims that perception can be considered Bayesian inference and that the brain can […]
Systemic or intracerebral delivery of neural stem and progenitor cells (NSPCs) and activation of endogenous NSPCs hold much promise as potential treatments for diseases in the human CNS. Recent studies have shed new light on the interaction between the […]
Employers often make payment contingent on performance in order to motivate workers. We used fMRI with a novel incentivized skill task to examine the neural processes underlying behavioral responses to performance-based pay. We found that individuals’ performance increased with increasing incentives; however, very high […]
The present study investigates shared representations of syntactic knowledge in music and action. We examined whether expectancy violations in musical harmonic sequences are also perceived as violations of the movement sequences necessary to produce them. Pianists imitated silent videos showing […]
PG (Plural Grundgesetze) is a predicative monadic second-order system which is aimed to derive second-order Peano arithmetic. It exploits the notion of plural quantification and a few Fregean devices, among which the infamous Basic Law V. In this paper, a […]
Regenerative processes occurring under physiological (maintenance) and pathological (reparative) conditions are a fundamental part of life and vary greatly among different species, individuals, and tissues. Physiological regeneration occurs naturally as a consequence of normal cell erosion, or as an […]
Contextualism is a view about meaning, semantic content and truth-conditions, bearing significant consequences for the characterisation of explicit and implicit content, the decoding/inferring distinction and the semantics/pragmatics interface. According to the traditional perspective in semantics (called “literalism” or “semantic minimalism”), […]
This article provides an overview of the current knowledge relating to the potential use of transplanted stem cells in the treatment of patients with multiple sclerosis (MS). Two types of stem cells, CNS-derived neural stem/precursor cells (NPCs) and bone […]
Losses are a possibility in many risky decisions, and organisms have evolved mechanisms to evaluate and avoid them. Laboratory and field evidence suggests that people often avoid risks with losses even when they might earn a substantially larger gain, a […]
A key focus of current research in neuroeconomics concerns how the human brain computes value. Although, value has generally been viewed as an absolute measure (e.g., expected value, reward magnitude), much evidence suggests that value is more often computed […]
Humans tend to modify their attitudes to align with past action. For example, after choosing between similarly valued alternatives, people rate the selected option as better than they originally did, and the rejected option as worse. However, it is unknown […]
Indexicality is at the core of many major philosophical problems. In recent years, recorded messages and written notes have become a significant test and an intriguing puzzle for the semantics of indexical expressions. In this paper, I argue that […]
In the last twenty years, recorded messages and written notes have become a significant test and an intriguing puzzle for the semantics of indexical expressions (see Smith 1989, Predelli 1996, 1998a, 1998b, 2002, Corazza et al. 2002, Romdenh-Romluc 2002). In […]
The emotional responses elicited by the way options are framed often results in lack of logical consistency in human decision making. In this study, we investigated subjects with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) using a financial task in which the […]
In recent years, the study of decision making has provided a paradigmatic case of “crossbreeding” of different disciplines. The integration of economics, psychology and neurosciences within neuroeconomics calls for more accurate and comprehensive models of human rationality, which may […]
In my paper, I present two competing perspectives on the problem of quantifier domain restriction – the objective perspective on context (OPC) and the intentional perspective on context (IPC). My goal is to offer a plausible and fair reconstruction of […]
This paper deals with the semantic issues of epistemological contextualism – the doctrine according to which the truth-conditions of knowledge ascribing sentences vary depending on the context in which they are uttered. According to the contextualist, a sentence of the […]
