Ricerc@Sapienza

It has been proposed that not completely overlapping brain networks support interval timing depending on whether or not an external, predictable temporal cue is provided during the task, aiding time estimation. Here we tested this hypothesis in a neuropsychological study, using both a topological approach – through voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM), that assesses the relation between continuous behavioral scores and lesion information on a voxel-by-voxel basis – and a hodological approach, using an atlas-based tractography.

Both scholars and practitioners acknowledge that the major factors explaining behavior are cognition, emotion, and context. However, existing theories tend to only focus on a combination of two. Furthermore, not all models are rooted in a specific theory of mind. Finally, there is no consistent definition of ‘mind.’ To address these issues, we review the major models explaining behavior.

Awareness of psychophysiological changes has been proposed to play a role in duration perception; however, evidence on whether interoceptive awareness affects timing is mixed, and it is not clear which task features favor the reliance on bodily changes to track time. Here we tested the hypothesis that interoceptive awareness is selectively involved in timing when the context does not provide reliable cues on elapsed time.

Previous studies have shown that individuals with heroin and cocaine addiction prefer to use these drugs in distinct settings: mostly at home in the case of heroin and mostly outside the home in the case of cocaine. Here we investigated whether the context would modulate the affective and neural responses to these drugs in a similar way. First, we used a novel emotional task to assess the affective state produced by heroin or cocaine in different settings, based on the recollections of male and female drug users.

The outcome of an action plays a crucial role in decision-making and reinforcement learning processes. Indeed, both human and animal behavioural studies have shown that different expected reward values, either quantitatively or qualitatively, modulate the motivation of subjects to perform an action and, as a consequence, affect their behavioural performance. Here, we investigated the effect of different amounts of reward on the learning of macaque monkeys using a modified version of the object-in-place task.

Previous studies have shown that rats trained to self-administer heroin and cocaine exhibit opposite preferences, as a function of setting, when tested in a choice paradigm. Rats tested at home prefer heroin to cocaine, whereas rats tested outside the home prefer cocaine to heroin. Here, we investigated whether drug history would influence subsequent drug preference in distinct settings. Based on a theoretical model of drug-setting interaction, we predicted that regardless of drug history rats would prefer heroin at home and cocaine outside the home.

In rats trained to self-administer methamphetamine, extinction responding in the presence of drug-associated contextual and discrete cues progressively increases after withdrawal (incubation of methamphetamine craving). The conditioning factors underlying this incubation are unknown. Here, we studied incubation of methamphetamine craving under different experimental conditions to identify factors contributing to this incubation. We also determined whether the rats' response to methamphetamine priming incubates after withdrawal.

This article addresses postcritique as a novel epistemological and methodological attitude that invites to get closer to how social actors put the social together. It first discusses the break with critical scholarship by juxtaposing alternative conceptions of what guides people’s conduct. While most critical approaches concern themselves with the invisible mechanisms governing social action, postcritique is more attuned to how people’s doings produce effects of connection. The article goes on to discuss the notion of theory postcritique entails.

The problem I address is: how are cogent inferences possible? In § 1 I distinguish three senses in which we say that one is “compelled” by an inference: automatic, seductive-rhetorical and epistemic compulsion. Cogency (in my sense) is epistemic compulsion: a cogent inference compels us to accept its conclusion, if we accept its premises and we aim at truth.

We target the maximization of the operator profitability in a LTE cellular network with e-NodeBs (eNBs) exploiting Sleep Mode (SM) power states. The profitability is composed of different terms, namely: the electricity bill due to the eNBs energy consumption, the maintenance costs due to the application of power states to the eNBs, and the revenues from providing a given throughput to users. After showing that all these components are strictly interdependent, we formulate the problem of maximizing the profitability for a set of eNBs.