Our recent study published in Psychoneuroendocrinology examined how acute stress influences empathy using a new online stress test, the TSST-OL.

Making decisions and investing effort to obtain rewards may depend on various factors, such as the delay to reward, the probability of its occurrence, and the information that can be collected about it. As predicted by various theories, pigeons and other animals indeed mind these factors when deciding.

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The distinction between extrinsic and intrinsic rewards and their related motivations (exploitation and exploration, respectively) has been a major concern in educational psychology for decades.

Gesa Berretz was a cornerstone of the lab and an iconic image with her colorful hairs, her Halloween outfits, and her witty charm. But at the same time, Gesa is an incredibly successful young scientist with close to 20 papers in top international journals that collect heaps of citations. Now she received a DFG grant to join the lab of Bernhard Englitz as a postdoc at Donders (Radboud University, Netherlands).

Many cognitive neuroscientists believe that both a large brain and an isocortex are crucial for complex cognition. Yet corvids and parrots possess non-cortical brains of just 1–25 g, and these birds exhibit cognitive abilities comparable with chimpanzees, which have brains of about 400 g.

Invasive neuronal tract tracing is prohibited in very large or endangered animals, particularly marine mammals like dolphins. Scientists from Germany and Italy propose diffusion-weighted imaging as a feasible alternative, even in brains fixed in formalin for extended periods.

Pigeons can categorize innumerable naturalistic and artificial visual stimuli they encounter. Computational models suggest that elementary associative learning lies at the root of the pigeon’s category learning and generalization.

How is intelligence related to the dynamic interaction of billions of neurons in the human brain? A prominent hypothesis posits that general intelligence is related to the efficiency of the brain’s global functional network. But some publications question this link.

When well-known food resources are running out, animals extinguish their foraging behavior in that food patch and increasingly work for reward-related information. This re-orientation serves to decrease outcome uncertainty of foraging.