Biology subjects

Lamm, C.

Publications and source records attributed to Lamm, C..

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

Dog and Human Brains Represent Human Emotional Bodies with Asymmetric Encoding of Happiness and Anger

Dogs live in an environment rich in human emotional signals, yet most of what we know about their visual emotion perception comes from faces. Our study shifts this focus to the body, a central channel of emotional communication in dogs and a source of social information when they observe human emotional expressions. Here, we investigated how the brains of dogs and humans represent emotions conveyed by human bodies. Using fMRI, we examined 24 awake companion dogs and 40 humans viewing videos of bodily happiness, anger, and neutral actions, alongside phase-scrambled controls. Both dogs and humans showed occipito-temporal sensitivity to human bodies, with emotional modulation in the right caudal suprasylvian gyrus in dogs and the right extrastriate body area in humans. Multivariate response patterns also differentiated bodily happiness from anger in both dogs and humans. Emotion-specific RSA further showed a similar representational asymmetry: happiness showed consistent category-specific neural patterns, whereas anger showed no comparable category effect but could still be differentiated from happiness and neutral actions. Despite this shared representational asymmetry, the anatomical distribution differed, with happiness represented across more distributed regions in dogs, whereas anger differentiation involved a broader cortical network in humans. No corresponding effects were found for phase-scrambled controls. Together, these findings provide the first direct neural evidence of how the dog brain represents affective information conveyed by human bodies, while leaving open whether emotions expressed by conspecific bodies evoke similar neural representations. More broadly, our results suggest similar representational relationships between bodily emotions in dogs and humans, despite differences in the anatomical distribution of these effects, while highlighting the role of human bodily expressions in dogs' social cognition, and advancing our understanding of the neural basis of emotional communication across species.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2026

Breedbase 2.0 - expanding the functionality for traditional breeding and transgenics

Breedbase ( is a comprehensive, web-based, open-source breeding management and analysis software for plant breeding that was introduced to address gaps with existing software for plant breeding data. Breedbase is continually improved and developed, with new features being added as required by the breeding community. Since its inception, the capabilities of Breedbase were improved to better serve the diverse data modeling needs of additional crops beyond our original ensemble of cassava, banana, yam, sweet potato, tomato, rice, and wheat. We describe here major updates that have been made in the past 4 years, including (1) improved handling of repetitive measurements; (2) a redesigned experimental treatments interface; (3) a more fine-grained user permission system; (4) improved trial quality control workflows; (5) intercropping support; (6) the addition of a decision meeting feature that helps decision makers make the best selection with the available data; (7) transgenics and tracking tools and finally, (8) an improved field layout tool which consolidates several trials in one field. These new features integrate seamlessly with the previous feature set of Breedbase - making it one of the most feature rich breeding management softwares available.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2026

An annotated bioacoustic dataset of dog vocalizations and related sounds during dog-human social play

Dog (Canis lupus familiaris) vocal communication occurs across a wide range of social contexts, including dog-human social play, a common and dynamic interaction in which diverse vocal signals are expressed, particularly in young dogs. However, most available open datasets of dog vocalizations focus primarily on barks, leaving other sound types underrepresented. Here we present a bioacoustic dataset of dog-human social play sessions recorded under standardized laboratory conditions, comprising 30 play sessions involving 17 young dogs (6-24 months old) of different breeds playing with familiar humans. Raw audio recordings are accompanied by two layers of annotations covering the dog sounds produced during sessions. Video recordings of the sessions are provided for contextual reference, along with metadata describing each dog and the experimental sessions. Additionally, permutation-based classification analysis showed that annotated sound categories exhibit above-chance and generalizable acoustic differences across individuals. The dataset may support research on dog vocal communication and expand the range of sounds documented during positive dog-human social interactions.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2026

Alterations in amygdala function explain how aging and loneliness impair trust learning

Functional relationships are essential for healthy aging and they rely on social cognition skills such as establishing and monitoring whom to trust. However, aging and loneliness can negatively affect social brain function, potentially leading to a vicious cycle. Using functional MRI and computational modeling we investigated trust learning in a sample of neurotypical older (64-84 years, n=29f/23m) compared to younger adults (20-33 years, n=31f/31m). Older participants displayed lower initial trust and less trust learning when repeatedly interacting with a trustworthy and an untrustworthy trustee. Their basolateral and central amygdala activation was lower during trust decisions, and this was associated with less optimal trust behavior. Computational modeling also revealed that a crucial learning parameter, trust prediction error precision, was decoupled from basolateral amygdala activation, and this effect was pronounced in lonely older adults. These findings indicate that differences in amygdala function and reward signaling at older age and higher loneliness could drive detrimental effects on trust learning, leading to poorer social cognition and putting individuals sociality and well-being at risk.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2026

Good dog, bad wolf: Debunking evolutionary preparedness to fear wolves

The return of wolves to historical ranges often causes strong opposition, contrasting with widespread affection for domestic dogs. Evolutionary accounts suggest this discrepancy stems from deeply ingrained affective responses that predispose humans to fear wolves while fostering positive attachment to dogs. Using neuroimaging and self-report data from 42 participants, we investigated how defensive neural circuits linked to implicit threat detection are related to explicit threat evaluations of the two species. During functional MRI, participants viewed images of wolves, dogs, and snakes - the latter chosen for their strong engagement of predisposed threat-related responses - displaying either aggressive or non-aggressive behaviours. As predicted, aggressive displays of all species elicited stronger neural responses in threat-related brain areas. Snakes elicited stronger subcortical threat responses than wolves or dogs, while neural responses to wolves and dogs were largely indistinguishable when comparing aggressive displays. However, explicit threat evaluations strongly differed: wolves were perceived and rated as significantly more threatening than dogs, especially when the species exhibited aggressive displays. Together, these findings challenge accounts that humans are predisposed for negative responses to wolves, suggesting instead that our attitudes towards the species are shaped primarily by deliberate-evaluative processes rather than by implicit-automatic threat responses. This underscores the role of experience, knowledge, stereotypes, and socio-cultural mechanisms in shaping public perceptions of human-wildlife conflicts and conservation efforts. These results provide new insights into the cognitive and affective foundations of human-animal relationships, informing efforts to improve human-wildlife coexistence. Significance statementWhy are wolves feared while dogs are loved? One common explanation is that humans are evolutionarily predisposed to fear wolves as dangerous predators, while dogs, due to domestication, occupy a special niche in human lives. By comparing neural and behavioural responses to wolves, dogs and snakes, we show that wolves do not evoke stronger threat-related brain responses than dogs, despite being judged as the greater threat. However, wolves and dogs alike engage cortical systems associated with perception and evaluation, suggesting that cultural narratives and explicit reasoning, rather than hardwired automatic fear, underlie wolf aversion. These findings challenge evolutionary accounts of fear preparedness and suggest that negative attitudes towards wolves can be addressed through education, communication, and public engagement.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Dog brain atlas generated via spatially constrained spectral clustering

Functional parcellations enable reproducible analyses of brain organization, yet the dog fMRI field still lacks a validated, multi-scale functional atlas. We applied spatially constrained spectral clustering to a resting state fMRI dataset (n = 27 dogs) to generate whole-brain parcellations spanning 20-300 parcels. Replicability was evaluated against an independent dataset (n = 20 dogs) using Dice overlap and Adjusted Rand Index (ARI) as measures of spatial overlap and similarity; within-parcel functional coherence was assessed via homogeneity. Functional parcellations were anatomically coherent across scales, with global Dice peaking at 0.625 at N = 140 and 0.623 at N = 100, while decreasing to 0.526 at N = 300. ARI peaked at 0.48 for N = 60 and remained [≥] 0.46 through N = 180. Mean within-parcel homogeneity increased monotonically from 0.08 (N = 20) to 0.19 (N = 300). Concordance with an anatomical atlas (Johnson et al., 2020) increased at the regional level (plateau [~]0.16 for N [≥] 140) while diminishing at gyral and lobar levels as resolution increased, consistent with functionally driven sub-regional differentiation. Together, these results indicate functional segmentations that are replicable across datasets and internally coherent across scales, with intermediate resolutions (100-140 parcels) balancing specificity and reproducibility for common analyses. We introduce a comprehensive, multi-scale functional dog brain atlas derived from data-driven clustering, providing an open resource for comparative studies of brain evolution and canine cognition.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

Acute stress reduces risk-aversion by changing magnitude perception

Stress is thought to impair financial decision-making by influencing the willingness to take risks. This effect is commonly attributed to stress-related changes in affective evaluation of rewards and their associated uncertainty. However, existing research has yielded inconsistent findings, and the psychological and neural mechanisms at play remain poorly understood. Here we show that acute psychosocial stress can affect financial risk-taking by altering basic perception of payoff magnitudes, independent of subjective valuation processes. Psychophysical and fMRI modelling reveals that stress reduces risk-aversion without changing choice consistency. A Bayesian perceptual model attributes this effect to an upward shift in prior beliefs about payoff magnitude: Under stress, participants choices are guided by relatively more optimistic beliefs about the risky options. A convergent pattern emerges in parietal neural representations of the payoff magnitudes, which show a systematic upward shift in neural coding as a consequence of the stress manipulation. These findings provide converging neural and behavioral evidence that stress influences financial risk-taking by changing neurocomputational processes related to magnitude perception. This has significant implications for psychological and neuroscience theories of stress and risky behavior, with potential applications to policy and clinical interventions.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

Entorhinal grid-like codes for visual space during memory formation

Eye movements, such as saccades, allow us to gather information about the environment and, in this way, can shape memory. In non-human primates, saccades are associated with the activity of grid cells in the entorhinal cortex. Grid cells are essential for spatial navigation, but whether saccade-based grid-like signals play a role in human memory formation is currently unclear. Here, human participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and continuous eye gaze monitoring while studying scene images. Recognition memory was probed immediately thereafter. Results revealed saccade-based grid-like codes in the left entorhinal cortex while participants studied the scene images, a finding that was replicated with an independent data set reported here. The grid-related effects were time-locked to activation increases in the frontal eye fields. Most importantly, saccade-based grid-like codes were associated with recognition memory, such that grid-like codes were lower the better participants performed in subsequently recognizing the scene images. Collectively, our findings suggest an entorhinal map of visual space that is timed with neural activity in oculomotor regions, supporting memory formation.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

Comparative neuroimaging of the carnivoran brain: Neocortical sulcal anatomy

Carnivorans are an important study object for comparative neuroscience, as they exhibit a wide range of behaviours, ecological adaptations, and social structures. Previous studies have mainly examined relative brain size, but a comprehensive understanding of brain diversity requires the investigation of other aspects of their neuroanatomy. Here, we obtained primarily post-mortem brain scans from twenty-six species of the order Carnivora, spanning across eight families with diverse representatives and including additional individuals for selected species, to create the largest Carnivoran brain collection to date. We then reconstructed their cortical surfaces, and examined neocortical sulcal anatomy to establish a framework for systematic inter-species comparisons. We observed distinct regional variations in sulcal anatomy, potentially related to the species behaviour and ecology. Arctoidea species with pronounced forepaw dexterity exhibited complex sulcal configurations in the presumed somatosensory cortex but low sulcal complexity in the presumed visual and auditory occipitotemporal cortex. Canidae had the largest number of unique major sulci with a unique sulcus in the occipital cortex and highly social canids featuring an additional frontal cortex sulcus. We also observed differentially complex occipito-temporal sulcal patterns in Felidae and Canidae, indicative of changes in auditory and visual areas that may be related to foraging strategies and social behaviour. In conclusion, this study presents an inventory of the sulcal anatomy of a number of rarely studied carnivoran brains including detailed digital atlases and establishes a framework and novel avenues for further investigations employing a variety of neuroimaging modalities to reveal more about carnivoran brain diversity.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2024

Nature exposure induces hypoalgesia by acting on nociception-related neural processing

Nature exposure has numerous psychological benefits, and previous findings suggest that exposure to nature reduces self-reported acute pain. Given the multi-faceted and subjective quality of pain and methodological limitations of prior research, it is unclear whether the evidence indicates genuine hypoalgesia or results from domain-general effects and subjective reporting biases. This preregistered functional neuroimaging study aimed to identify how nature exposure modulates nociception-related and domain-general brain responses to acute pain. We compared the self-reported and neural responses of healthy neurotypical participants (N = 49) receiving painful electrical shocks while exposed to virtual nature or to closely matched urban and indoor control settings. Replicating existing behavioral evidence, pain was reported to be lower during exposure to the natural compared to the urban or indoor control settings. Crucially, machine-learning-based multi-voxel signatures of pain demonstrated that this subjective hypoalgesia was associated with reductions in nociception-related rather than domain-general cognitive-emotional neural pain processing. Preregistered region-of-interest analyses corroborated these results, highlighting reduced activation of areas connected to lower-level somatosensory aspects of pain processing (such as the thalamus, secondary somatosensory cortex, and posterior insula). These findings demonstrate that nature exposure results in genuine hypoalgesia and that neural changes in lower-level nociceptive pain processing predominantly underpin this effect. This advances our understanding of how nature may be used as a non-pharmacological pain treatment. That this hypoalgesia was achieved with brief and easy-to-administer virtual nature exposure has important practical implications and opens novel avenues for research on the precise mechanisms by which nature impacts our mind and brain.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

Functional mapping of the somatosensory cortex using noninvasive fMRI and touch in awake dogs

Dogs are increasingly used as a model for neuroscience due to their ability to undergo functional MRI fully awake and unrestrained, after extensive behavioral training. Still, we know rather little about dogs basic functional neuroanatomy, including how basic perceptual and motor functions are localized in their brains. This is a major shortcoming in interpreting activations obtained in dog fMRI. The aim of this preregistered study was to localize areas associated with somatosensory processing. To this end, we touched N = 22 dogs undergoing fMRI scanning on their left and right flanks using a wooden rod. We identified activation in anatomically defined primary and secondary somatosensory areas (SI and SII), lateralized to the contralateral hemisphere depending on the side of touch, as well as activations, beyond an anatomical mask of SI and SII, in the cingulate cortex, right cerebellum and vermis, and the Sylvian gyri. These activations may partly relate to motor control (cerebellum, cingulate), but also potentially to higher-order cognitive processing of somatosensory stimuli (rostral Sylvian gyri), and the affective aspects of the stimulation (cingulate). We also found evidence for individual side biases in a vast majority of dogs in our sample, pointing at functional lateralization of somatosensory processing. These findings not only provide further evidence that fMRI is suited to localize neuro-cognitive processing in dogs in vivo, but also expand our understanding of touch processing in mammals, beyond classically defined primary and secondary somatosensory cortices. Significance StatementTo understand brain function and evolution, it is necessary to look beyond the human lineage. This study provides insights into the engagement of brain areas related to somatosensation using whole-brain non-invasive neuroimaging of trained, non-sedated, and unrestrained pet dogs. It showcases again the usefulness of non-invasive methods, in particular fMRI, for investigating brain function and advances the mapping of brain functions in dogs; using this non-invasive approach without sedation, we are able to identify previously unknown potential higher-order processing areas and offer a quantification of touch processing lateralization.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2023

Action observation reveals a network with divergent temporal and parietal lobe engagement in dogs compared to humans

Action observation is a fundamental pillar of social cognition. Neuroimaging research has revealed a human and primate action observation network (AON) encompassing fronto-temporo-parietal areas with links to a species imitation tendencies and relative lobe expansion. Dogs (Canis familiaris) have good action perception and imitation skills and a less expanded parietal than temporal lobe, but their AON remains unexplored. We conducted a functional MRI study with 28 dogs and 40 humans and found functionally analogous involvement of somatosensory and temporal brain areas of both species AONs and responses to transitive and intransitive action observation in line with their imitative skills. However, activation and task-based functional connectivity measures suggested significantly less parietal lobe involvement in dogs than in humans. These findings advance our understanding of the neural bases of action understanding and the convergent evolution of social cognition, with analogies and differences resulting from similar social environments and divergent brain expansion, respectively.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2022

Entorhinal grid-like codes and time-locked network dynamics track others navigating through space

Navigating through crowded, dynamically changing social environments requires the ability to keep track of other individuals. Grid cells in the entorhinal cortex are a central component of self-related navigation but whether they also track others movement is unclear. Here, we propose that entorhinal grid-like codes make an essential contribution to socio-spatial navigation. Sixty human participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while observing and re-tracing different paths of a demonstrator that navigated a virtual reality environment. Results revealed that grid-like codes in the entorhinal cortex tracked the other individual navigating through space. Further, the activity of grid-like codes was time-locked to increases in co-activation and entorhinal-cortical connectivity that included the striatum, the hippocampus, parahippocampal and right posterior parietal cortices, altogether modulated by accuracy when subsequently re-tracing the paths. This suggests that network dynamics time-locked to entorhinal grid-cell-related activity might serve to distribute information about the socio-spatial map throughout the brain.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2022

Blocking D2/D3 dopamine receptors increases volatility of beliefs when we learn to trust others

The ability to flexibly adjust beliefs about other people is crucial for human social functioning. Dopamine has been proposed to regulate the precision of beliefs, but direct behavioural evidence of this is lacking. We investigated how a relatively high dose of the selective D2/D3 dopamine receptor antagonist sulpiride impacts learning about other peoples prosocial attitudes in a repeated trust game. Using a Bayesian model of belief updating, we show that sulpiride increased the volatility of beliefs, which led to higher precision-weights on prediction errors. This effect was entirely driven by participants with genetically conferring higher dopamine availability (Taq1a polymorphism). Higher precision weights were reflected in higher reciprocal behaviour in the repeated trust game but not in single-round trust games. This finding suggests that antipsychotic medication might acutely reduce rigidity of pathological beliefs.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2022

Validation of a new coil array tailored for dog functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies

Comparative neuroimaging allows for the identification of similarities and differences between species. It provides an important and promising avenue, to answer questions about the evolutionary origins of the brains organization, in terms of both structure and function. Dog fMRI has recently become one particularly promising and increasingly used approach to study brain function and coevolution. In dog neuroimaging, image acquisition has so far been mostly performed with coils originally developed for use in human MRI. Since such coils have been tailored to human anatomy, their sensitivity and data quality is likely not optimal for dog MRI. Therefore, we developed a multi-channel receive coil (K9 coil) tailored for high-resolution functional imaging in canines, optimized for dog cranial anatomy. In this paper we report structural (n = 9) as well as functional imaging data (resting-state, n = 6; simple visual paradigm, n = 9) collected with the K9 coil in comparison to reference data collected with a human knee coil. Our results show that the K9 coil significantly outperforms the human knee coil, improving the signal-to-noise ratio across the imaging modalities. We noted increases of roughly 45% signal-to-noise in the structural and functional domain. In terms of translation to functional fMRI data collected in a visual flickering checkerboard paradigm, group-level analyses show that the K9 coil performs better than the knee coil as well. These findings demonstrate how hardware improvements may be instrumental in driving data quality, and thus, quality of imaging results, for dog-human comparative neuroimaging. Significance StatementComparative neuroimaging is a powerful avenue to discover evolutionary mechanisms at the brain level. However, data quality is a major constraint in non-human functional magnetic resonance imaging. We describe a novel canine head coil for magnetic resonance imaging, designed specifically for dog cranial anatomy. Data quality performance and improvements over previously used human knee coils are described quantitatively. In brief, the canine coil improved signal quality substantially across both structural and functional imaging domains, with strongest improvements noted on the cortical surface.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2022

A causal role of the human left temporoparietal junction in computing social influence during goal-directed learning

The human temporoparietal junction (TPJ) is a brain area crucial for processing social information. Although brain stimulation studies have started to explore the causal function of TPJ under social contexts, few have explicitly considered bilateral TPJ as target regions. Here, leveraging non-invasive continuous theta-burst stimulation (cTBS) and hierarchical Bayesian computational modeling, we tested whether left or right TPJ (with vertex as control) is causally involved in how dissenting choices by others influence individuals choice adjustments in goal-directed learning. In our social learning paradigm, participants (N = 31) first made their private decision, and then were allowed to re-adjust their choices after observing choices of four other players. Behaviorally, we show that disruption of the left, but not the right TPJ, weakened participants choice adjustment and delayed their response speed when confronted with dissenting information from the other players. Computationally, disrupting activity in the left TPJ attenuated the degree of computing social influence during choice adjustment, whereas the extent to which how observational learning from others choices was integrated into direct learning remained intact. Together, our results provide evidence for the causal role of left TPJ in social influence during goal-directed learning and shed light on the relational function (with respect to oneself) of the TPJ in social cognition.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2022

Testosterone eliminates strategic prosocial behavior

Humans are strategically more prosocial when their actions are being watched by others than when they act alone. Using a psychopharmacogenetic approach, we investigated the endocrinological and computational mechanisms of such audience-driven prosociality. 192 male participants received either a single dose of testosterone (150 mg) or a placebo and performed a prosocial and self-benefitting reinforcement learning task. Crucially, the task was performed either in private or when being watched. Rival theories suggest that the hormone might either diminish or strengthen audience-dependent prosociality. We show that exogenous testosterone fully eliminated strategic, i.e., feigned, prosociality and thus decreased submission to audience expectations. We next performed reinforcement-learning drift-diffusion computational modeling to elucidate which latent aspects of decision-making testosterone acted on. The modeling revealed that testosterone compared to placebo did not deteriorate reinforcement learning per se. Rather, when being watched, the hormone altered the degree to which the learned information on choice value translated to action selection. Taken together, our study provides novel evidence of testosterones effects on implicit reward processing, through which it counteracts conformity and deceptive reputation strategies.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2022

Effects of dopamine D2 and opioid receptor antagonism on the trade-off between model-based and model-free behavior in healthy volunteers

Our daily behaviour requires a flexible arbitration between actions we do out of habit and actions that are directed towards a specific goal. Drugs that target opioid and dopamine receptors are notorious for inducing maladaptive habitual drug consumption, yet how the opioidergic and dopaminergic neurotransmitter systems contribute to the arbitration between habitual and goal-directed behaviour is poorly understood. By combining pharmacological challenges with a well-established decision-making task and a novel computational model, we show that the administration of the D2 dopamine receptor antagonist amisulpride led to an increase in goal-directed or model-based relative to habitual or model-free behaviour, whereas the non-selective opioid receptor antagonist naltrexone had no appreciable effect. These findings highlight the distinct functional contributions of dopamine and opioid receptors to goal-directed and habitual behaviour and support the notion that D2 receptor antagonists promote stabilisation of goal-relevant information.

neuroscience↗