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Flickering lenses enhance reading performance through placebo effect

A new study conducted by researchers from the Department of General Psychology at the University of Padua and the University of Bergamo, published in “Psychological Research”, demonstrated that the placebo effect—induced by inactive “flickering” glasses—significantly improves reading abilities in

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Artificial intelligence can emulate human normative judgments on emotional visual scenes

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is learning more than just words—it’s picking up on our feelings, too. In this study, multimodal large language models were tested to see if they could match human emotional reactions to a variety of visual scenes. The AI ratings correlated surprisingly well with the

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Sizing up competition with strigolactones: the case of pea plants

Plants, often perceived as static and passive organisms, are in fact capable of movement, communication, and complex social interactions. The Mind(the)Plant laboratory, based at the Department of General Psychology at the University of Padua, investigates precisely these phenomena, with a particular

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The impact of auditory distraction on visual memory encoding in older adults

In everyday life, we are constantly required to manage multiple tasks at once. Stimulus-rich environments force us to process diverse streams of information in parallel, putting our cognitive resources to the test. However, the natural cognitive decline associated with aging can reduce the ability

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European Mathematical Psychology Group Meeting (EMPG) 2025

You have time until May 22, 2025 to submit your abstract for the European Mathematical Psychology Group Meeting (EMPG) 2025, which will be held at the University of Padua from September 3 to 5, 2025.The EMPG is an annual event that brings together researchers working in mathematical modeling of

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