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Publication Metadata only Are signals of aggressive intent less honest in urban habitats?(Oxford Univ Press Inc, 2020) Beck, Michelle L.; Sewall, Kendra B.; Department of Psychology; Akçay, Çağlar; Faculty Member; Department of Psychology; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 272053How anthropogenic change affects animal social behavior, including communication is an important question. Urban noise often drives shifts in acoustic properties of signals but the consequences of noise for the honesty of signals-that is, how well they predict signaler behavior-is unclear. Here we examine whether honesty of aggressive signaling is compromised in male urban song sparrows (Melospiza melodia). Song sparrows have two honest close-range signals: the low amplitude soft songs (an acoustic signal) and wing waves (a visual signal), but whether the honesty of these signals is affected by urbanization has not been examined. If soft songs are less effective in urban noise, we predict that they should predict attacks less reliably in urban habitats compared to rural habitats. We confirmed earlier findings that urban birds were more aggressive than rural birds and found that acoustic noise was higher in urban habitats. Urban birds still sang more soft songs than rural birds. High rates of soft songs and low rates of loud songs predicted attacks in both habitats. Thus, while urbanization has a significant effect on aggressive behaviors, it might have a limited effect on the overall honesty of aggressive signals in song sparrows. We also found evidence for a multimodal shift: urban birds tended to give proportionally more wing waves than soft songs than rural birds, although whether that shift is due to noise-dependent plasticity is unclear. These findings encourage further experimental study of the specific variables that are responsible for behavioral change due to urbanization.Publication Metadata only Audible pain squeaks can mediate emotional contagion across pre-exposed rats with a potential effect of auto-conditioning(Nature Portfolio, 2023) Packheiser, Julian; Paradiso, Enrica; Michon, Frederic; Ramaaker, Eline; Sahin, Neslihan; Muralidharan, Sharmistha; Woehr, Markus; Gazzola, Valeria; Keysers, Christian; Department of Psychology; Soyman, Efe; Department of Psychology; College of Social Sciences and HumanitiesFootshock self-experience enhances rodents' reactions to the distress of others. Here, we tested one potential mechanism supporting this phenomenon, namely that animals auto-condition to their own pain squeaks during shock pre-exposure. In Experiment 1, shock pre-exposure increased freezing and 22 kHz distress vocalizations while animals listened to the audible pain-squeaks of others. In Experiment 2 and 3, to test the auto-conditioning theory, we weakened the noxious pre-exposure stimulus not to trigger pain squeaks, and compared pre-exposure protocols in which we paired it with squeak playback against unpaired control conditions. Although all animals later showed fear responses to squeak playbacks, these were weaker than following typical pre-exposure (Experiment 1) and not stronger following paired than unpaired pre-exposure. Experiment 1 thus demonstrates the relevance of audible pain squeaks in the transmission of distress but Experiment 2 and 3 highlight the difficulty to test auto-conditioning: stimuli weak enough to decouple pain experience from hearing self-emitted squeaks are too weak to trigger the experience-dependent increase in fear transmission that we aimed to study. Although our results do not contradict the auto-conditioning hypothesis, they fail to disentangle it from sensitization effects. Future studies could temporarily deafen animals during pre-exposure to further test this hypothesis. While audible pain squeaks among rats are relevant in the transmission of distress, it is difficult to disentangle whether animals can be auto-conditioned to the sound of their own pain squeaks.Publication Metadata only Interval timing: stopping the internal stopwatch by photostimulation(Cell Press, 2017) Department of Psychology; Balcı, Fuat; Faculty Member; Department of Psychology; Koç University Research Center for Translational Medicine (KUTTAM) / Koç Üniversitesi Translasyonel Tıp Araştırma Merkezi (KUTTAM); College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 51269Animals use estimates of time intervals to adaptively guide their anticipatory actions. New research on mice shows that photostimulation of the neural pathway that coordinates drinking behavior delays subsequent anticipatory responses by pausing/resetting the internal stopwatch.Publication Metadata only Intracranial human recordings reveal association between neural activity and perceived intensity for the pain of others in the insula(eLife Sciences Publications, 2022) Bruls, Rune; Ioumpa, Kalliopi; Mueller-Pinzler, Laura; Gallo, Selene; Qin, Chaoyi; van Straaten, Elisabeth C. W.; Self, Matthew W.; Peters, Judith C.; Possel, Jessy K.; Onuki, Yoshiyuki; Baayen, Johannes C.; Idema, Sander; Keysers, Christian; Gazzola, Valeria; Department of Psychology; Soyman, Efe; Faculty Member; Department of Psychology; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 326947Based on neuroimaging data, the insula is considered important for people to empathize with the pain of others. Here, we present intracranial electroencephalographic (iEEG) recordings and single-cell recordings from the human insula while seven epilepsy patients rated the intensity of a woman's painful experiences seen in short movie clips. Pain had to be deduced from seeing facial expressions or a hand being slapped by a belt. We found activity in the broadband 20-190 Hz range correlated with the trial-by-trial perceived intensity in the insula for both types of stimuli. Within the insula, some locations had activity correlating with perceived intensity for our facial expressions but not for our hand stimuli, others only for our hand but not our face stimuli, and others for both. The timing of responses to the sight of the hand being hit is best explained by kinematic information; that for our facial expressions, by shape information. Comparing the broadband activity in the iEEG signal with spiking activity from a small number of neurons and an fMRI experiment with similar stimuli revealed a consistent spatial organization, with stronger associations with intensity more anteriorly, while viewing the hand being slapped.Publication Open Access Multi-modal communication: song sparrows increase signal redundancy in noise(The Royal Society, 2019) Beecher, Michael D.; Department of Psychology; Akçay, Çağlar; Faculty Member; Department of Psychology; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 272053Although the effects of anthropogenic noise on animal communication have been studied widely, most research on the effect of noise in communication has focused on signals in a single modality. Consequently, how multi-modal communication is affected by anthropogenic noise is relatively poorly understood. Here, we ask whether song sparrows (Melospiza melodia) show evidence of plasticity in response to noise in two aggressive signals in acoustic and visual modalities. We test two hypotheses: (i) that song sparrows will shift signalling effort to the visual modality (the multi-modal shift hypothesis) and (ii) that they will increase redundancy of their multi-modal signalling (the back-up signal hypothesis). We presented male song sparrows with song playback and a taxidermic mount with or without a low-frequency acoustic noise from a nearby speaker. We found that males did not switch their signalling effort to visual modality (i.e. wing waves) in response to the noise. However, the correlation between warbled soft songs and wing waves increased in the noise treatment, i.e. signals became more redundant. These results suggest that when faced with anthropogenic noise, song sparrows can increase the redundancy of their multi-modal signals, which may aid in the robustness of the communication system.Publication Open Access Song overlapping, noise, and territorial aggression in great tits(Oxford University Press (OUP), 2020) Avşar, Alican; Bilgin, C. Can; Department of Psychology; Akçay, Çağlar; Porsuk, Yasin Kağan; Çabuk, Dilan; Faculty Member; Teaching Faculty; Department of Psychology; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities; 272053; N/A; N/ACommunication often happens in noisy environments where interference from the ambient noise and other signalers may reduce the effectiveness of signals which may lead to more conflict between interacting individuals. Signalers may also evolve behaviors to interfere with signals of opponents, for example, by temporally overlapping them with their own, such as the song overlapping behavior that is seen in some songbirds during aggressive interactions. Song overlapping has been proposed to be a signal of aggressive intent, but few studies directly examined the association between song overlapping and aggressive behaviors of the sender. In the present paper, we examined whether song overlapping and ambient noise are associated positively with aggressive behaviors. We carried out simulated territorial intrusions in a population of great tits (Pares major) living in an urban-rural gradient to assess signaling and aggressive behaviors. Song overlapping was associated negatively with aggressive behaviors males displayed against a simulated intruder. This result is inconsistent with the hypothesis that song overlapping is an aggressive signal in this species. Ambient noise levels were associated positively with aggressive behaviors but did not correlate with song rate, song duration, or song overlapping. Great tits in noisy urban habitats may display higher levels of aggressive behaviors due to either interference of noise in aggressive communication or another indirect effect of noise.Publication Metadata only The cultural contagion of conflict(The Royal Society, 2012) Gelfand, Michele; Shteynberg, Garriy; Lee, Tiane; Lun, Janetta; Lyons, Sarah; Bell, Chris; Chiao, Joan Y.; Bruss, C. Bayan; Al Dabbagh, May; Abdel-Latif, Abdel-Hamid; Dagher, Munqith; Khashan, Hilal; Soomro, Nazar; Department of Psychology; Aycan, Zeynep; Faculty Member; Department of Psychology; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 5798Anecdotal evidence abounds that conflicts between two individuals can spread across networks to involve a multitude of others. We advance a cultural transmission model of intergroup conflict where conflict contagion is seen as a consequence of universal human traits (ingroup preference, outgroup hostility; i.e. parochial altruism) which give their strongest expression in particular cultural contexts. Qualitative interviews conducted in the Middle East, USA and Canada suggest that parochial altruism processes vary across cultural groups and are most likely to occur in collectivistic cultural contexts that have high ingroup loyalty. Implications for future neuroscience and computational research needed to understand the emergence of intergroup conflict are discussed.Publication Metadata only The negative association between religiousness and children's altruism across the world(Cell Press, 2015) Decety, Jean; Cowel, Jason M.; Lee, Kang; Mahasneh, Randa; Malcolm-Smith, Susan; Zhou, Xinyue; Department of Psychology; Selçuk, Bilge; Faculty Member; Department of Psychology; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 52913In our paper, we reported cross-cultural differences in how the religious environment of a child negatively impacted their sharing, their judgments of the actions of others, and how their parents evaluated them. An error in this article, our incorrect inclusion of country of origin as a covariate in many analyses, was pointed out in a correspondence from Shariff, Willard, Muthukrishna, Kramer, and Henrich (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2016.06.031). When we reanalyzed these data to correct this error, we found that country of origin, rather than religious affiliation, is the primary predictor of several of the outcomes. While our title finding that increased household religiousness predicts less sharing in children remains significant, we feel it necessary to explicitly correct the scientific record, and we are therefore retracting the article. We apologize to the scientific community for any inconvenience caused.Publication Metadata only The peak interval procedure in rodents: a tool for studying the neurobiological basis of interval timing and its alterations in models of human disease(Bio-Protocol, 2020) Freestone, David; Department of Psychology; Balcı, Fuat; Faculty Member; Department of Psychology; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 51269Animals keep track of time intervals in the seconds to minutes range with, on average, high accuracy but substantial trial-to-trial variability. The ability to detect the statistical signatures of such timing behavior is an indispensable feature of a good and theoretically-tractable testing procedure. A widely used interval timing procedure is the peak interval (PI) procedure, where animals learn to anticipate rewards that become available after a fixed delay. After learning, they cluster their responses around that reward-availability time. The in-depth analysis of such timed anticipatory responses leads to the understanding of an internal timing mechanism, that is, the processing dynamics and systematic biases of the brain's clock. This protocol explains in detail how the PI procedure can be implemented in rodents, from training through testing to analysis. We showcase both trial-by-trial and trial-averaged analytical methods as a window into these internal processes. This protocol has the advantages of capturing timing behavior in its full-complexity in a fashion that allows for a theoretical treatment of the data.Publication Open Access The scent of a handshake(eLife Sciences Publications, 2015) Farias, Ana Rita; Department of Psychology; Semin, Gün Refik; Researcher; Department of Psychology; College of Social Sciences and Humanities; 58066Sniffing our hand after a handshake may allow us to detect chemical signals produced by others.