Cognitive Augmentation

Why are birds so smart?

Segmenting and annotating multimodal corpus: inspirations and principles from the traditional Chinese medicine

Why do we love music? A view from cognitive neuroscience

Social and cognitive aging in nonhuman primates

Moving, mundane, beautiful, troubling, enlightening, sublime—Network Modeling and Latent class analyses of what makes aesthetic experiences unique or universal for humans… and beyond?

Brain pathways for vocal learning and spoken language

Towards a mechanistic account of speech comprehension

The evolutionary origin of corepresentation during joint action: A comparative approach

Emotion Processing in Homo and Pan

Understanding social motivation: A neuro-pharmacological and clinical account

Language from a social networks perspective

Context-dependent need for sleep in the consolidation of memory

Time for Music

From hibernation to depression: brown fat as the missing link between seasonality and affective behavior

Timely Decisions

Keynote

keynote

**Session Chair: **Helmut Leder 
**Speaker: **Onur Güntürkün, Ruhr-Universität Bochum 
![](https://s3.amazonaws.com/pf-upload-01/u-59356/0/2021-07-13/7q43jpc/onur-270x360-2.jpg) 

**Bio: **Onur is a Turkish-born Professor for Biopsychology at Bochum University (Germany). He is kept awake with questions like: “Can different kinds of brains produce the same cognition?” or “Why are brains asymmetrically organized?”. He has spent many years in different universities on five continents and work (in descending order) with pigeons, humans, dolphins, crocodiles and magpies as experimental subjects. He would call himself a Cognitive Comparative Neuroscientist, who does research that reaches from field work via single cell recordings, up to ultrahigh magnetic field imaging. He is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences and received numerous national and international scientific awards, among them both the highest German and Turkish science award.
 

**Session Description: ** Corvids and parrots have the same cognitive abilities as apes. How is it possible that these birds with their seemingly unorganized small brains of just about 12g can cognitively compete with an ape that has a 400g brain and a large, well-structured cortex? I will show that corvids increase their already high neuron numbers especially in the associative and cognition-relevant areas. In addition, bird brains have a hitherto unknown cortex-like organization that possibly gives rise to comparable computational dynamics as the mammalian cortex. Last but not least, birds manage to drastically reduce their glucose consumption per neuron, relative to mammals. Possibly, some of these similarities evolved in convergent manner during 300 million years of evolution, while others are unique avian adaptations.

**Chair:** Emanuela Cresti (Università di Firenze - Accademi
della Crusca) **Title:** Segmenting and annotating multimodal corpus: inspirations and principles from the traditional Chinese medicine (Invited Lecture) 
**Author:** Gu Yueguo (The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) 
 
**Title:** Il corpus MIDIA: concezione, realizzazione, impieghi 
**Authors:** Claudio Iacobini, Paolo D’Achille (Università di Salerno; Università Roma Tre) 
 
**Title:** IMPAQTS: un corpus di discorsi politici italiani annotato per gli impliciti linguistici 
**Author:** Federica Cominetti, Alessandro Panunzi, Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri, Lorenzo Gregori (Università Roma Tre; Università di Firenze)

SESSIONE PLENARIA 1

invited talk

**Session Chair: **Tecumseh Fitch 
**Speaker: **Robert Zatorre, McGill University 
![](https://s3.amazonaws.com/pf-upload-01/u-59356/0/2021-07-13/8d53j5v/rzatorre-270x360-2.jpg) 

**Bio: **Robert Zatorre holds a Canada Research Chair in Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience at the Montreal Neurological Institute of McGill University. He was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, studied music and psychology at Boston U, and obtained his PhD at Brown University, followed by postdoctoral work with Brenda Milner in Montreal. His laboratory studies the neural substrates of two characteristically human abilities: speech and music. Together with his many students and collaborators he has published over 300 scientific papers on topics including pitch perception, auditory imagery, music production, and brain plasticity; he is perhaps best known for discovering how the brain’s reward system results in musical pleasure. In 2006 he co-founded the international laboratory for Brain, Music, and Sound research (BRAMS), a unique multiuniversity consortium dedicated to the cognitive neuroscience of music. His work has been recognized by numerous international prizes: including the neuronal plasticity prize from the IPSEN foundation (Paris), the Knowles prize in hearing research (Northwestern U), and the deCarvalho-Heineken prize in cognitive science (Amsterdam). He tries to keep up his baroque repertoire on the organ whenever he gets a chance.
 

**Session Description: ** Music has existed in human societies since prehistory, perhaps in part because it allows expression and regulation of emotion, and evokes pleasure. In this lecture I will present findings from cognitive neuroscience that bear on the question of how we get from perception of sound patterns to pleasurable responses. I will first discuss evidence that corticocortical loops from and to the auditory cortex are responsible not only for perceptual processes but also for working memory, sensory-motor, and predictive functions that are essential to produce and perceive music. Then, I will discuss neuroimaging and brain modulation studies from our lab focusing on the dopaminergic reward system, its involvement in musical pleasure, and what happens when that system is disrupted. I propose that pleasure in music arises from interactions between cortical loops that enable expectancies to emerge from perceived sound patterns, and subcortical systems responsible for reward and valuation. This model integrates knowledge derived from basic neuroscience of reward mechanisms with independently derived concepts, such as tension and anticipation, from music theory. It may also serve as a way of thinking more broadly about aesthetic rewards.

**Session Chair: **Leonida Fusani 
**Session Chair: **Helmut Leder 
**Technical Session Chair: **Patrick Smela 
**Session Description: ** The session is comprised of 15 minute talks followed by up to 5 minutes of live Q&A time for each presenter.

Invited Panel: Towards comparative aesthetics

**Session Chair: **Kristin Tessmar-Raible 
**Speaker: **Erich Jarvis, Rockefeller University 
![](https://s3.amazonaws.com/pf-upload-01/u-59356/0/2021-07-13/6v13jht/Erich-270x360-1.jpg) 

**Bio: **Erich (who, before deciding on a career in science, was invited to audition for the prestigious Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre in Harlem) graduated from Hunter College in New York City with a bachelor’s degree in Biology and Mathematics and later earned his Ph.D. Neurobiology and Animal Behavior from Rockefeller University. At Rockefeller, he worked in lab of Fernando Nottebohm, who pioneered research on the neurobiology of song-learning in birds as a model for understanding neural plasticity in the adult brain. Using innovative research techniques that often defy convention, Erich is demonstrating what the songbird can reveal about the evolution of human language and learned behavior 

**Session Description: ** Vocal learning is the most critical behavior for spoken language. It has evolved multiple independent times among mammals and birds. Remarkably, although all vocal learning species are distantly related and have closer relatives that are non-vocal learners, humans and the vocal learning birds have evolved convergent forebrain pathways that control vocal learning. We used comparative genomics and transcriptomics to discover convergent changes in multiple genes in song learning pathways in birds and speech pathways in humans. The vocal learning brain pathways have convergent specialized changes in genes that control connectivity, neuroprotection, and synaptic plasticity. We have found that specialized regulation is associated with convergent accelerated regions in the genomes of these species, which in turn have differential epigenetic availability in enhancer regions of some of the genes, inside the neurons of the vocal learning brain regions. To explain these findings, we propose a motor theory of vocal learning origin, in which brain pathways for vocal learning evolved by brain pathway duplication of an ancestral motor learning pathway, using mostly the same genes, but with some divergences in gene regulation via sequence and epigenetic changes, that control divergent connectivity and other functions.

**Session Chair: **Nicholas Chater 
**Technical Session Chair: **Bryce Linford 
**Session Description: ** The session is comprised of 15 minute talks followed by up to 5 minutes of live Q&A time for each presenter. 

Congratulations to the winners of the Glushko Dissertation Awards!

Glushko Dissertation Talks

**Session Chair: **Claus Lamm 
**Session Chair: **Natalie Sebanz 
**Technical Session Chair: **Sean Zheng 
**Session Description: ** The session is comprised of 15 minute talks followed by up to 5 minutes of live Q&A time for each presenter.

Invited Panel: Comparative and neural approaches to social cognition

**Session Chair: **Kristin Tessmar 
**Technical Session Chair: **Sean Zheng 
**Session Description: ** The session is comprised of 15 minute talks followed by up to 5 minutes of live Q&A time for each presenter.

Psychology