Publications related to Behavioural sciences

Uncovering interactions between Descending Neurons as a functional principle of behavioural control

Animals, including humans, exhibit a remarkable variety of complex behaviours. How the nervous system controls all these behaviours ranging from simple, stereotyped movements to flexible, adaptive actions is a central questions of neuroscience. One of the ...

EPFL2024

Non-invasive stimulation of the human striatum disrupts reinforcement learning of motor skills

Friedhelm Christoph Hummel, Takuya Morishita, Pierre Theopistos Vassiliadis, Elena Beanato, Esra Neufeld, Fabienne Windel, Maximilian Jonas Wessel, Traian Popa, Julie Duqué

Reinforcement feedback can improve motor learning, but the underlying brain mechanisms remain underexplored. In particular, the causal contribution of specific patterns of oscillatory activity within the human striatum is unknown. To address this question, ...

Nature Portfolio2024

Powering the social brain: Mitochondria in social behaviour

Maria del Carmen Sandi Perez, Dogukan Hazar Ülgen, Silvie Rosalie Ruigrok

A central role of brain mitochondria in regulating and influencing social behaviour is emerging. In addition to its important roles as the "powerhouses" of the cell, mitochondria possess a plethora of cellular functions, such as regulating ion homeostasis, ...

2023

Learnable latent embeddings for joint behavioural and neural analysis

Mackenzie Mathis, Steffen Schneider, Jin Hwa Lee

Mapping behavioural actions to neural activity is a fundamental goal of neuroscience. As our ability to record large neural and behavioural data increases, there is growing interest in modelling neural dynamics during adaptive behaviours to probe neural re ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2023

PEACOK: Persona Commonsense Knowledge for Consistent and Engaging Narratives

Antoine Bosselut, Beatriz Maria Borges Ribeiro, Silin Gao, Deniz Bayazit, Soyoung Oh

Sustaining coherent and engaging narratives requires dialogue or storytelling agents to understand how the personas of speakers or listeners ground the narrative. Specifically, these agents must infer personas of their listeners to produce statements that ...

Assoc Computational Linguistics-Acl2023

Perceived impacts of the Fridays for Future climate movement on environmental concern and behaviour in Switzerland

Claudia Rebeca Binder Signer, Livia Bianca Fritz, Ralph Hansmann

Calling for increased action on climate change, Fridays for Future (FFF) quickly gained momentum around the world and became highly visible through strikes and protests in more than 150 countries. Considering its scale and magnitude, questions about the im ...

2023

Governance framework for autonomous and cognitive digital twins in agile supply chains

Dimitrios Kyritsis

Cognitive Digital twins (CDT) are Digital Twins with cognition capabilities and ensure a proper monitoring and optimization of a specific asset's behaviour. In the context of supply chains, there are different entities involved from assets, processes, up t ...

ELSEVIER2023

Brain dynamics uncovered using a machine-learning algorithm

Mackenzie Mathis

CEBRA is a machine-learning method that can be used to compress time series in a way that reveals otherwise hidden structures in the variability of the data. It excels at processing behavioural and neural data recorded simultaneously, and it can decode act ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2023

Impact of adherence to a lifestyle-integrated programme on physical function and behavioural complexity in young older adults at risk of functional decline: a multicentre RCT secondary analysis

Kamiar Aminian, Anisoara Ionescu

Context Long-term adherence to physical activity (PA) interventions is challenging. The Lifestyle-integrated Functional Exercise programmes were adapted Lifestyle-integrated Functional Exercise (aLiFE) to include more challenging activities and a behaviour ...

BMJ PUBLISHING GROUP2022

Foot-Interfaces Control and Human-Robot Interaction in Four-Handed Manipulation

Jacob Hernandez Sanchez

Humans have a great capacity to perform complex manipulations. However, there are many tasks for which two hands are not enough, such as in surgery. For such tasks, a dyad of people is required. However, when not used to work together, a dyad collaboration ...

EPFL2022

Volume change response and fabric evolution of granular MX80 bentonite along different hydro-mechanical stress paths

Alessio Ferrari, Jose Antonio Bosch Llufriu, Patrycja Ewelina Baryla

Despite the increasing understanding of bentonite behaviour, there is still missing evidence on how different hydro-mechanical loadings, including sequences of hydration and compression, affect the fabric and the volume change behaviour of the material. It ...

Springer Nature2022

A new perspective on the punching resistance of edge columns with and without shear reinforcement applying refined measurement techniques

Aurelio Muttoni, Diego Hernández Fraile

Despite edge columns being instrumental components of flat slabs, most punching research has focused on internal connections. Several particularities of edge columns, such as load eccentricity and moment transfer, require additional experimental investigat ...

Fédération Internationale du Béton (fib)2022

L'évaporation du trafic, opportunités et défis pour la mobilité d'aujourd'hui et demain

Pauline Geneviève Thérèse Hosotte

This research is the result of four years of practical and scientific investigation of the phenomenon of traffic evaporation, which was considered and then demonstrated to be the opposite of traffic induction. It has anchored, in practice and in time, an o ...

EPFL2022

Coupled hydro-mechanical analysis of compacted bentonite behaviour during hydration

Lyesse Laloui, Alessio Ferrari, Jose Antonio Bosch Llufriu

This study analyses the response of compacted bentonites upon hydration based on a coupled hydro-mechanical elasto-plastic framework. As an alternative to multi-porosity interpretation, the framework was selected based on the experimental evidence of adsor ...

2021

Experimental and numerical investigation of the thermo-mechanical behaviour of an energy sheet pile wall

Lyesse Laloui, Alessandro Francesco Rotta Loria, Marianna Adinolfi

One-of-a-kind experimental and numerical investigation is provided in this paper about energy sheet pile walls: earth retaining structures that embed heat exchanger probes within piles for the exploitation of shallow geothermal energy. The study resorts to ...

2021

Surprise-based model estimation in reinforcement learning: algorithms and brain signatures

Vasiliki Liakoni

Learning how to act and adapting to unexpected changes are remarkable capabilities of humans and other animals. In the absence of a direct recipe to follow in life, behaviour is often guided by rewarding and by surprising events. A positive or a negative o ...

EPFL2021

A systems perspective for residential preferences and dwellings: housing functions and their role in Swiss residential mobility

Claudia Rebeca Binder Signer, Anna Pagani

Worldwide, there is an urgent imperative to provide a housing supply that is environmentally sustainable as well as acceptable and desirable for its users. A holistic and integrative understanding of the relationship between households’ residential prefere ...

2021

Kleptoplast distribution, photosynthetic efficiency and sequestration mechanisms in intertidal benthic foraminifera

Anders Meibom, Charlotte Madeleine Nicole Lekieffre, Emmanuelle Geslin, Michael Kühl

Foraminifera are ubiquitously distributed in marine habitats, playing a major role in marine sediment carbon sequestration and the nitrogen cycle. They exhibit a wide diversity of feeding and behavioural strategies (heterotrophy, autotrophy and mixotrophy) ...

SPRINGERNATURE2022

Predicting learners' effortful behaviour in adaptive assessment using multimodal data

Kshitij Sharma, Jennifer Kaitlyn Olsen

Many factors influence learners' performance on an activity beyond the knowledge required. Learners' on-task effort has been acknowledged for strongly relating to their educational outcomes, reflecting how actively they are engaged in that activity. Howeve ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2020

From human action understanding to robot action execution: how the physical properties of handled objects modulate non-verbal cues

Aude Billard, Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis, Nuno Ricardo Ferreira Duarte, José Santos-Victor

Humans manage to communicate action intentions in a non-verbal way, through body posture and movement. We start from this observation to investigate how a robot can decode a human's non-verbal cues during the manipulation of an object, with specific physic ...

IEEE2020