«Our prosocial and altruistic impulses play a very important
role in sustaining complex societal
structure,» explained Giorgia Silani, the principal investigator of this research conducted at SISSA and now a researcher housed in University of Vienna, «However, studying altruism and its
neural basis in lab - based environment poses unique ethical challenges.
«Our results demonstrate that even the simplest brain
structures may play a fundamental
role in complex
neural processes of perception and attention,» said Frank Tong, professor of psychology at Vanderbilt, who conducted the study with postdoctoral fellow Michael Pratte and Sam Ling at Boston University.