Social & Cognitive Neuroscience Lab

About

Mentalizing and communication

Throughout our social life, we seek understanding and being understood. What’s happening in our brains when that connection clicks? Scientists have discovered certain brain regions — just behind the forehead and above the ears — that light up when we interpret the intention of a character in a story or a movie clip. Such a capability is called Mentalizing or Theory of Mind and is believed to be a key ingredient of human communication. Our research extends the investigation of mentalizing beyond traditional individual-based paradigms into a real-time interactive context. Specifically, we employ a two-person communication game to examine how dyads establish mutual understanding from scratch. During the interaction, we simultaneously record neural activity from both interlocutors using EEG hyperscanning, allowing us to capture the dynamic, interdependent neural processes that support joint meaning-making processes.

About

Interpersonal adjustment and autism

Individuals with Autism have been frequently portrayed as lacking social motivation in both scientific research and mass media coverage. However, emerging perspectives suggest that differences in how individuals with Autism and the neurotypical perceive and respond to the world may contribute to a mutual misunderstanding across neurotypes. This bidirectional mismatch can result in communication challenges for both parties. To explore these dynamics, we adopt an interdisciplinary approach that integrates information-theoretic metrics, deep learning models, and neuroimaging techniques. Our research aims to characterize individual variability and how interlocutors across and within neurotypes dynamically adjust to one another during communication. By investigating these processes, we seek to advance a more nuanced understanding of neurodiversity in social cognition and communication.

About

How envioromental cues influence our behavior?

Environmental cues play a powerful role in shaping our behavior. These cues can guide our decisions in adaptive ways—for example, a fast-food advertisement might trigger hunger and influence our food choices. However, in some cases, such as in addiction, this influence becomes maladaptive. Drug-related cues can evoke intense cravings and even provoke relapse, despite a person’s intention to avoid substance use. In this project, we focus on investigating the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying cue-triggered decision-making, with a focus on how environmental cues can influence actions, sometimes outside of conscious control, and the role of our motor system. Understanding these mechanisms is crucial not only for advancing basic science but also for informing clinical approaches to treating addiction and other compulsive behaviors.

Using a series of experiments inspired by the Pavlovian-to-Instrumental Transfer (PIT) paradigm, this research aims to: 1) Test the hypothesis that the motor system plays a central role in cue-triggered decision-making. Through functional MRI (fMRI), we investigate whether cues can directly activate neural motor networks involved in action preparation and execution. 2) Explore physiological markers such as pupil dilation and attentional bias to assess whether they can predict individual susceptibility to Pavlovian bias. 3) Examine the persistence of cue effects over time, using a longitudinal approach to understand how environmental cues continue to shape behavior beyond immediate contexts.

Together, these studies aim to deepen our understanding of how cues in our environment trigger behaviors—sometimes helpfully, sometimes harmfully—and to shed light on the neural systems that support these processes, particularly those related to motor control.

Finotti, G., Degni, L. A., Badioli, M., Dalbagno, D., Starita, F., Bardi, L., Huang, Y., … & Garofalo, S. (2025). Cortical beta power reflects the influence of Pavlovian cues on human decision-making. Journal of Neuroscience, 45(6). https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0414-24.2024