Welcome to SFB 1528 - Cognition of Interaction
Competence Pays – but Only Briefly
Eight months of preparation culminated in the first Göttingen In a new study published in Animal Cognition we demonstrate that wild red-fronted lemurs (Eulemur rufifrons) socially reward competent foragers – but only as long as they can benefit from them. In the experiment conducted by SFB PhD students Elif Karacoc and Richard Vogg at the Kirindy Forest Field site in Madagascar, the animals learned to obtain rewards from feeding dispensers. Two different open techniques were available; not all animals opened the boxes themselves – others tried to scrounge from successful box openers. Individuals who successfully opened the boxes received more grooming and affiliative attention from group members. Yet, once the experiments ended, this extra social attention quickly faded, returning to baseline levels.
New publication: When social meaning comes first
A new study by Anna Fischer, Danilo Postin, Lina Meiners, Louisa Kulke, Pascal Vrtička, and Anne Schacht, published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, examines how emotional and social information jointly shape visual perception. Using EEG and eye-tracking, the researchers investigated how people view complex emotional scenes that either include humans or contain no human presence. The results show that scenes with people capture attention faster and more strongly than non-social ones such as landscapes or animals. In particular, positive scenes with people evoked the strongest early brain responses — suggesting that social relevance can reduce the typical early focus on negative information. These findings challenge the idea of a universal “negativity bias” and highlight that the human brain rapidly prioritizes social meaning when making sense of the visual world.
Read the full open-access article in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
5th Göttingen Networking Day
We are excited to support again the 5th Neural Networking Day, organised by SFB postdoctoral researcher Ayuno Nakahashi and featuring SFB PIs Fred Wolf; Micahel Wibral, Julia Fischer and associate PI Raymundo Baez-Mendoza. Join us for a day full of neuroscience in a causual and friendly atmosphere at the German Primate Center. We invite you to sign up to present your work in poster or as a blitz talk. We look forward to seeing you!
Anne Schacht in the Forum Wissen Podcast "Wissen to listen"
SFB-PI Anne Schacht joined the Forum Wissen Team for a new episode of their podcast Wissen to Listen". Anne explains how we perceive and respond to emotional signals in our environment — in faces, voices, or language — and how these emotions shape our interactions with others. In her work, Anne combines controlled lab experiments with real-world data collection via smartphone apps to explore how we recognize emotions, make decisions, and build trust. What do our eye movements, facial expressions, or brain activity reveal about what’s going on inside us? And how can this knowledge help design technologies like social robots that flexibly adapt to human users?
Prof. Alexander Gail
Sensorimotor Neuroscience & Neuroprosthetics
University of Göttingen & German Primate Center Göttingen
Kellnerweg 4,
37077 Göttingen
Tel.: +49-551-3851-358 ContactDr. Christian Schloegl
Kellnerweg 4,
37077 Göttingen
Tel.: +49-551-3851-480
Contact