Keynote Lecturers and Invited Speakers

Visual attention is known to be a primary neural mechanism for studying consumer behaviour. Consumers perceive, assess, and decide to buy based on the product's packaging, label, and brand. These external attributes have been shown to influence their buying decision strongly. Marketing professionals and researchers have attempted to determine the factors that trigger visual attention towards products using traditional research methods, questionnaires, observational studies, and self-reports. Neuroscientific approaches may support such research with improved understanding. It has been reported that posterior contralateral negativity (PCN) is an indicator of preference for a selected target. Using electroencephalography (EEG), we investigated whether different brands of toothpaste labels influence individual choices and whether the same is reflected in the neural activity related to visual attention. We specifically focused on assessing the utility of PCN to predict consumers' preferences for a specific product. This component is usually seen to be elicited between 175 (or much before) and 300 msec (post-stimulus presentation) when the attentional focus is on the target side, dependent on EEG lateralisation above parieto-occipital regions. We computed PCN to assess whether a specific toothpaste label caught participants' visual attention and additionally by comparing the PCN when the target was preferred vs not preferred. Our findings reveal that PCN was unrelated to the brands' choices made by participants. The external cues of the four labels shown did not modulate PCN amplitude.

Trace amines are endogenous biogenic amine compounds classically regarded as composing beta-phenylethylamine, p-tyramine, tryptamine, p-octopamine, and others. Vertebrates express a family of receptors termed trace amine-associated receptors (TAARs). Humans possess 6 functional receptors: TAAR1, TAAR2, TAAR5, TAAR6, TAAR8 and TAAR9. With the exception of TAAR1, all other TAAR are expressed in olfactory epithelium neurons, where they detect diverse innate odors, including pheromones. Outside the olfactory system, TAAR1 is the most thoroughly studied with both central and peripheral roles. TAAR1 has been already identified as a novel therapeutic target for schizophrenia. Among other TAARs, TAAR5 represents the most interest as regard to depression, since it is expressed in limbic brain areas and TAAR5 knockout mice have remarkable alterations in emotional behaviors. Thus, anxiolytic and/or antidepressant action of future TAAR5 antagonists could be predicted. Data from TAAR5 and other TAAR knockout mice indicate that TAARs are not just olfactory receptors sensing innate socially-relevant odors, but also play important neuronal functions in the limbic brain areas. In general, “olfactory” TAAR-mediated brain circuitry may represent a previously unappreciated neurotransmitter system involved in the transmission of innate odors into emotional behavioral responses.

Social psychology and social neuroscience have demonstrated the dramatic influence of social factors on individual behavior, decisions, and attitudes. Recently, neuroimaging shed new light on the neurobiological mechanisms of social influence on decision-making and attitudes. Our previous studies have demonstrated reinforcement learning-like neural activity underlying social influence of descriptive norms. However, the social norms represent a small portion of persuasive communications. Importantly, media manipulations present a growing threat to social harmony and public health. In our current projects we probed neural mechanisms of media social influence using the N400 component – an event-related brain potential, a negativity peaking at about 400 milliseconds after stimulus onset that has been used to investigate semantic processing. Nowadays media manipulations are often individualized, and therefore more efficient. It has resulted in a growing crisis of public trust. For example, euphemisms are a powerful tool that is used to persuade people or to change their reactions to an awkward situation. Our EEG study investigated the effect of euphemisms on the perceived severity of norm violations. 38 participants were exposed to 120 vignettes including vignettes with euphemisms and norm violations (40 vignettes), vignettes with no euphemisms and norm violations (40 vignettes) and control vignettes with no norm violations (40 vignettes). We observed that N400-like response to norm violations was modulated by euphemisms. At the behavioral level, vignettes of norm violation with euphemisms were perceived as more morally acceptable than the same vignettes with no euphemisms. The deepfake technology, which uses elements of artificial intelligence to synthesize video and audio narratives, has become increasingly popular and recently attracted attention of cognitive sciences. Our next project examined the cognitive processing of attitude-consistent and attitude-inconsistent audio deepfakes on the topic of vaccination against COVID-19 virus. We have analyzed behavioral and electrophysiological brain responses to two auditory deepfakes taking into account congruence or incongruence of participants’ internal attitudes and the degree of participants’ analytical thinking, need for cognition and conformity. We recorded EEG of 50 participants and found N400-like responses to deepfakes violating participants expectations. This brain activity was modulated by the participants' attitudes toward vaccination against COVID-19. Overall, our studies suggest neuroimaging tools to investigate realistic persuasive and manipulative communications.

People are often reluctant to trade, a reticence attributed to the endowment effect. The prevailing account attributes the endowment effect to valuation-related bias, manifesting as sellers valuing goods more than buyers, whereas an alternative account attributes it to response-related bias, manifesting as both buyers and sellers tending to stick to the status quo. Here, by tracking and modeling eye activity of buyers and sellers during trading, we accommodate both views within an evidence-accumulation framework. We find that valuation-related bias is indexed by asymmetric attentional allocation between buyers and sellers, whereas response-related bias is indexed by arousal-linked pupillary reactivity. A deal emerges when both buyers and sellers attend to their potential gains and dilate their pupils. Our study provides preliminary evidence for our computational framework of the dynamic processes mediating the endowment effect and identifies physiological biomarkers of deal-making.

For the last decade, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) was known as one of the brain regions mediating hedonic pleasure. Recent articles dedicated to taste perception, utilizing functional optical spectroscopy, demonstrated that sweet stimuli elicited heightened responses in the medial OFC compared to neutral stimuli. These findings were interpreted by the authors as a correlate of hedonic pleasure derived from food consumption. However, the studies employed only a single degree of sweetness, which precludes distinguishing responses to sweet taste from signals associated with high-level stimulus processing. In the present study, participants were administered sweet solutions with varying sweetener concentrations, ranging from mild to intolerably sweet (0-20 % of glucose). We anticipated observing one of two outcomes: either a scenario where OFC responses increase proportionally with concentration or the most pronounced responses corresponding to the most pleasurable degree of sweetness. Consequently, this experiment aimed to refine the interpretation of previously obtained results. Preliminary results suggest the most robust increase in oxyhemoglobin concentration at moderate sweetener concentrations, corroborating the hypothesis linking OFC responses with hedonic experience. Moreover, the proposed approach, despite its simplicity, holds potential for investigating brain activity alterations associated with eating disorders, particularly binge-eating.

As obesity rates are rising, mainly due to sugar consumption (Yu et al., 2022), it is important to understand what can influence consumers’ perception of sugar. Healthy eating calls can effectively modulate individuals’ willingness to pay (WTP) for sugar-containing food (Ntoumanis et al., 2022) and this modulation has been associated with the synchrony of neural responses to the healthy eating call in question (Ntoumanis et al., 2023). However, it remains unclear which exact brain areas are involved in the persuasion by naturalistic healthy eating calls. In this experiment, 50 healthy participants performed two blocks of a bidding task, in which they had to bid on 30 sugar-containing, 30 sugar-free and 30 non-edible products, while their brain activity was recorded using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In-between the two blocks, they listened to a 7-minute healthy eating call, by a nutritionist, emphasizing the risks of sugar consumption. The behavioral effect of the healthy eating call was quantified with the ΔWTP, i.e., the WTP for each product in the second block of the bidding task subtracted by the WTP for the corresponding product in the first block of the bidding task. Based on the median ΔWTP for sugar-free products, participants were evenly divided into two groups (influenced/not influenced), in order to identify brain areas that were differentially synchronized during listening. At the behavioral level, participants’ ΔWTP was higher for sugar-free products (Wilcoxon test statistic W = 256, p < .001, effect size r = .521) and lower for sugar-containing products (W = 336, p = .016, r = .347), compared to the ΔWTP for non-edible products. Moreover, using inter-subject correlation (ISC) analysis, we found that activity in higher-order brain regions was more synchronized among participants who were not influenced by the healthy eating call, compared to those who were influenced, especially in the precuneus (ISC difference r = .033, p = .003 after correction for multiple comparisons). Previous studies have reported that, perceiving a narrative as fictitious activates precuneus more strongly than perceiving the same narrative as factual (Altmann et al., 2012), and that precuneus is particularly synchronized when listening to a narrative that elicits negative emotions (Jääskeläinen et al., 2020). Hence, our results indicate that the participants who were not influenced by the healthy eating call may have been suspicious of the arguments expressed in it. Overall, our study illustrates that fMRI can be a powerful tool to design and assess health-related advertisements before they are released to the public.

Since its appearance in 1975, Fodor’s Language of Thought (LoT) hypothesis has been influential in cognitive psychology and linguistics, but did not gain traction in cognitive neuroscience. The reason for the scepticism lies in the perception that neural implementation of a LoT is untenable. We disagree and demonstrate that critical ingredients needed for a neural implementation of a LoT have in fact been found in the hippocampal spatial navigation system in rodents and other animals (Kazanina & Poeppel, 2023). We argue that cell types found in spatial navigation – border cells, object cells, head-direction cells, etc. – provide exactly the types of representations and computations that the LoT calls for.

Trust is an important factor of economic performance. Abundant empirical evidence shows that higher trust and cooperation are directly related to economic growth and GDP per capita in developed countries. In this paper, we measure trust using an online experiment in a large natural laboratory – Russia. Our research goals are manifold: contribute to the methodology of long-distance real-time online experiments. Second, we test the hypothesis that long geographical distance results in larger dissimilarities between social preferences of people living in different parts of the country. Third, we explore the role of beliefs in shaping individual decisions depending on one’s expected awareness about preferences of another person, thereby testing alternative theories of social preferences. We address these questions using online Trust (Investment) game (Berg et al., 1995) played in real time using strategy method by about 3,000 participants recruited from Yandex Toloka in 2020 and 2021 from 22 large cities in Russia. Results show that on the aggregate, average trust (percentage of endowment transferred) and trustworthiness (percentage of received transfer returned) over all cities amount to 58% and 42% respectively, and were quite robust across the two years (2020 and 2021). Further, we observe a significant in-city bias (Goerg e.a., 2016) and evidence in support of the false consensus hypothesis (Ellingsen e.a., 2010). Finally, we also explore the role of beliefs in determining cross-regional decisions, and estimate a structural model of the impact of valence of these beliefs on individual directed decisions.

This study investigated the relationships between metacognition and academic results in mathematics and Russian of middle school students (n = 308) between 12 and 18 years old (M = 14.76, SD = 1.42). Metacognition or metacognitive skills refer to students’ “understanding and control of their own cognition” (Sternberg, 2007, p. 18). Metacognition includes declarative, procedural, and conditional knowledge (McCormick, 2003; Pressley & Harris, 2008). Students who have well developed metacognitive skills tend to thrive academically. For example, research shows that systematic metacognitive monitoring leads to better understanding and academic performance (Zimmerman & Cleary, 2009). In this study, we used the metacognitive self-report survey which measured students’ planning, metacognitive control, and reflection skills, resulting in a high reliability estimate (α = 0.85). The variables of academic achievement were students’ self-reported scores in mathematics and Russian. The Pearson correlations indicated small yet positive and significant correlations of metacognitive skills with mathematics (r = 0.11) and Russian (r = 0.13). Also, each of the subscales (planning, metacognitive control, and reflection) had small significant positive correlations with academic results. The comparison between boys and girls indicated that girls had higher scores in metacognitive control rather than boys. These results suggest that metacognition is positively related to academic achievement in math and Russian. However, additional novel research methods should be used to develop a better understanding of metacognition of school children (Fleur et al., 2021). In this research talk, we will propose possible avenues of combining educational and neuroscience research to achieve ecological validity of research on metacognition.

Encoding and retrieving visually presented second language word or pseudoword in pairs with native language word is an ecologically valid task in the paired-associate paradigm (Tulving & Craik, 2000), as learning neologisms without context constitutes an important part in the second language acquisition process. In our previous research, cognitive strategies of vocabulary learning without context were elicited via post-hoc report, mistakes analysis and eye movement patterns (Blinnikova & Izmalkova, 2016). We also demonstrated the effect of cognitive strategy on recall: keyword method (associated with higher-level processing) yielded significantly higher recall score than rote rehearsal (associated with lower-level processing). In the current study, the effect of keyword method instruction on recall was measured. 32 participants memorized 32 pseudoword/native language word pairs, providing structured post-hoc report of the learning process after the task. Free recall and semantic matching tasks were administered after each 4 word pairs. After the first half of the trials, an excerpt from a textbook on keyword method was provided to the subjects, aimed at inducing the effective cognitive strategy of vocabulary learning – the induction was carried out using the methodology of similar research (Wyra & Lawson, 2018). The Raven's Progressive Matrices method was used to assess the participants’ intelligence. Using the keyword method both before and after instruction led to higher recall and semantic matching results (t = 9.55, p < 0.01 and χ2 = 45.35, p < 0.01, respectively). Participants with higher intelligence test score were also found to benefit more from the keyword method instruction: higher intelligence group demonstrated significantly higher shifts in recall score after the instruction as compared to the group with lower Raven score (t=3.39, p<0.01). The implications for strategy instruction in vocabulary learning task in the paired associates paradigm will be discussed, as well as the role of intelligence in cognitive strategy instruction.