ESCAN 2026
3 - 6 June 2026 | Rome, Italy
Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
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Daily Overview |
| 8:30am - 4:00pm |
Registration Location: Registration Desk and Secretariat |
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| 9:00am - 10:00am |
Keynote Lecture 3: Ewelina Knapska: Emotional echoes: how the brain uses others’ emotions to guide adaptive behavior Location: Plenary Room |
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| 10:00am - 10:30am |
Coffee Break Location: Catering Areas |
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| 10:30am - 12:00pm |
O3-6: Social Cognition Too close? How conversational context and social anxiety shape dynamic coordination of social behavior in naturalistic dyadic interaction Comprehensive assessment of social cognition in Parkinson's disease: the distinct roles of cognitive and motor status Neurocomputational mechanisms of social threat avoidance under distinct sources of uncertainty Selective amplification of emotional-affective representations during observed touch in individuals with high vicarious touch propensity Early neural attunement to peer status predicts future social network position and popularity in adolescents |
O3-7: Interpersonal Synchrony Computational insights on interbrain synchrony from biophysically constrained Kuramoto models Are we really synchronous? Multiverse-Based Validation of Windowed Cross-Correlation Parameter Space with Synthetic and Human Cardiac Dyadic Data The multimodal propagation of smiles in free social interactions Audience gaze reflects felt social connection with individual performers in live dance. EEG of the dancing brain: Decoding sensory, motor, and social processes during dyadic dance |
S6-1: Multimodal coordination in naturalistic dyadic social interactions Multimodal coordination in naturalistic dyadic social interactions Presentations of the Symposium Using embodied social neuroscience to understand mechanisms of interactive social learning Coordinating conversation with the face What makes us “click”? Predicting rapport in neurodiverse online interactions Individual differences in conversation: Insights from autism and non-native speakers |
| S6-2: Moral behaviour: from social learning to real-life decision-making Moral behaviour: from social learning to real-life decision-making Presentations of the Symposium In Amygdala we trust: How the amygdala influences trust learning A distributed fMRI-based signature of graded moral wrongness in the human brain From isolation to interaction: rethinking moral decision in real-life social contexts Multiple motivations in moral choice: a decision neuroscience approach How external goals shape prosocial learning under moral conflict |
S6-3: Peripersonal and interpersonal spaces of interaction: from individual sensorimotor control to social interaction dynamics Peripersonal and interpersonal spaces of interaction: from individual sensorimotor control to social interaction dynamics Presentations of the Symposium Nearby in the dark: multisensory coding of objects permanence in peripersonal space during navigation Neural dynamics of integrating space and ownership information during object processing Embodied process, interoceptive activation, and interpersonal dynamics in online vocal conversations across levels of abstractness and age groups Attuned minds: how reciprocity, cooperation, and friendship shape real-time social interaction |
S6-4: Artificial emotion: affective responses and interaction with artificial intelligence Artificial emotion: affective responses and interaction with artificial intelligence Presentations of the Symposium The effect of AI-beliefs and personality on the appraisal of evolutionary salient stimuli Cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the bias toward AI in aesthetic experience From disclosure to cooperation: Mapping the boundaries of affective engagement with social robots Social engagement with artificial agents: Multimodal physiological and neural signatures of natural interaction |
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| S6-5: Identifying the unifying principles governing endogenous opioid regulation of human behaviour Identifying the unifying principles governing endogenous opioid regulation of human behaviour Presentations of the Symposium Facts and myths about how opioids shape human behaviour, an introduction Endocannabinoid and endogenous opioid contributions to placebo hypoalgesia The impact of opioids on curiosity and information seeking: the case of music enjoyment The neurochemical basis of social connectedness |
S6-6: From bodily signals to emotional meaning and social understanding From bodily signals to emotional meaning and social understanding Presentations of the Symposium From heartbeats to breathing: linking individual differences in interoception to social and spatial cognition One step closer to my heart: cardiac cycle is coupled with footsteps in typical but not in Depersonalisation individuals How interoceptive signals shape emotional meaning during aesthetic chills Communicating and recognising emotion by hand |
S6-7: The neuroscience of real-world social dynamics of strangers, friends, and families The neuroscience of real-world social dynamics of strangers, friends, and families Presentations of the Symposium Affect during Social Interactions in Infancy Where is the synchrony? a multiverse test of mother–child physiological coupling Using neurocognition-at-home to understand social dynamics of families The Empathy Factory: a community science social biofeedback initiative to study multigenerational communication |
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| 12:00pm - 1:00pm |
GA: ESCAN General Assembly |
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| 1:00pm - 3:00pm |
Lunch Break Location: Catering Areas |
P3: Poster session Location: Catering Areas Do bilateral saccadic eye movements enhance memory retrieval of emotion-related words? FOCAL tDCS TO THE LEFT DLPFC IMPROVES SOCIAL BELIEF UPDATING IN INDIVIDUALS WITH SOCIAL ANXIETY Graded motor recruitment in literal and metaphorical Language: an fMRI representational similarity study The answer is blowin’ in the brain: early oscillatory dynamics of moral decision-making I see you! Performer gaze conveys levels of acting during live performances The music of the skin: An objective quantification of the sounds produced by skins’ hydration Altered affective–attentional coupling in social touch perception after amputation Rhythm drives early auditory processing: evidence from an event-related potential study Impact of incidental anxiety and inter-individual strategies on Visuo-Spatial Perspective-Taking Robust circular cluster-based statistics for respiration-brain coupling Magnetoencephalographic mapping of cross-modal fear conditioning and generalization Multisensory reciprocity: Dissociating visual and auditory pathways to interpersonal coordination Probing the relationship between midfrontal theta oscillations and autonomic responses to errors and conflict during the Flanker task Awareness of developmental prosopagnosia counters the negative effects of facenormativity Sentience-like processes are revealed in low arousal by employing interoceptive stimulation Periodic and aperiodic electroencephalographic markers in Lewy body and Alzheimer’s diseases with cognitive decline Interoceptive integration modulates body representations in anorexia nervosa Schizotypal traits are associated with affective sound evaluation and increased thalamo-amygdala structural connectivity Independent effects of cardiac phase and spatial attention on early visual processing in humans Enhancing imagery rescripting for pathological guilt and disgust through non-invasive neuromodulation: a transdiagnostic study protocol Encoding others’ attention as an implied motion signal: A novel mechanism underlying implicit and explicit theory of mind (ToM) Deep-body correlates of gut feelings: gastric activity during emotional experience Neuromodulation of visceral signals and interoceptive neural representations: a systematic review Inside and out: how tactile stimulation and Heart Rate Variability impact autobiographical memory retrieval The influence of cardiac changes on error awareness and decision confidence in a perceptual judgment task START project: temporal dynamics of cognitive–motor integration under dual-task conditions in neurological populations Effects of Zen meditation on inhibitory control: An Electroencephalography study with experienced meditators and non-meditators Confidence updating of visual information gathering in difficult and costly situations "Can we Prime Disobedience?" The role of arousal and attentional narrowing in emotional memory trade-offs: links with individual differences Perceptual audiovisual inference in interpersonal motor contexts The plasticity of interoceptive grounding: how pregnancy modulates conceptual knowledge Respect my space: investigating interpersonal space and multisensory integration with autistic and social anxiety traits using fNIRS. Socioeconomic influences on vicarious reward processing across adolescence Social touch as an observer: Somatosensory processing during vicarious social touch perception Co-developing a novel computational modelling peer-feedback task for adolescent using Patient and Public Involvement An investigation of the somatosensory engagement during autonomous sensory meridian response: An ERP study Altered modulation of body perception and affect through movement sonification in individuals with depressive symptoms Do gender stereotypes shape emotion? Evidence from self-report and autonomic measures Seeing emotions through social categories: ethnicity and legal status shape emotion recognition in the context of migration Dissociating multisensory binding from socio-affective appraisal in a virtual kissing paradigm When other minds reshape agency perception: selective social updating of chasing judgments Enhancing Performance Monitoring abilities in Parkinson’s Disease through transcranial alternating current stimulation Sleep electroencephalography biomarkers as trait indicators across psychiatric disorders: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Neural correlates of rule-following Enhancing motivational drive: effects of transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation on reward-based behavior Modulation of auditory-sensorimotor brain connectivity in Autism Spectrum Disorder through music-based intervention: A crossover RCT Dogs are not for Eating: Attributing Affective Abilities to Animals Embodied attunement: Affective touch and inter-brain synchrony in mother-infant dyads Do negative Expectations become biologically embedded? Investigating CRP DNA methylation in Major Depressive Disorder Dynamic action-based markers in immersive XR for computational phenotyping in precision psychiatry Effect of asymmetric noise on interpersonal coordination dynamics during verbal interactions Neurocognition under acute stress: the relative contribution of dopamine and noradrenaline to the shift from contextual to stimulus-response memory Observational learning in humans and artificial agents: A mouse-tracking study Body budget co-regulation as organisational semiosis: field evidence from multi-stakeholder coordination Exploring Mindless and Mindful Reactions to Robots in EEG Thermoregulation and mental health in Parkinson’s Disease: uncovering an under-explored connection Neuromodulating moral emotions: the effect of tDCS on disgust, morality and their physiological underpinnings A novel virtual environment rt-fMRI neurofeedback paradigm to improve resilience and well-being Learning and Decision-Making in a Social World: A Scoping Review of Social Influences in Reinforcement Learning Gravity-dependent modulation of time perception: behavioural and computational evidence Beyond morphing: photorealistic graded facial expressions using Facial Action Coding and GANs Neural and autonomic signatures of emotion recognition under varying expressive intentions Comparing the Self and Co-Regulation in low and high stakes moments in Autistic and Neurotypical Child-Caregiver Dyads. Is social cognition structurally coherent? Empirical comparison of competing theoretical models Does music therapy enhance action prediction in autistic children? Do dyads synchronize or are we just imagining it? Novel pipeline for dyadic movement analysis The subjective cost of cognitive flexibility The psychometric structure and neuromodulation of inhibitory control functions Interpersonal neural synchrony analysis for fNIRS: A signal processing perspective Emotional Egocentricity Bias is modulated by implicit expectations of interpersonal emotional contingencies How prison settings impact empathy for pain: An EEG study A double-blinded real-time fMRI neurofeedback study of supplementary motor-cortex modulation in healthy controls and patients with major depressive disorder Comparison of visual P300 event-related potentials: cognitive impairment due to Parkinson’s disease and prodromal dementia with Lewy Bodies Functional neuroimaging evidence supports norm-based coding of human-like timing in artificial speech Exploration of the link between attentional bias, interoception, and autonomic reactivity in the general population: a planned study Decoding deep sampled brains: high-accuracy binary emotion classification from audiovisual stimuli Letting thoughts go: Cognitive mechanisms in rumination The Impact of Affective Appraisals on the Desire to Eat How empathy beliefs shape intergroup relations via empathy regulation strategies How do acoustic features predict somatosensory and emotional responses in ASMR and misophonia? Subcortical thalamo-amygdala structural connectivity predicts sensitivity to temporal acoustic modulation during aversive sound perception Older adults with subjective memory complaints and brain amyloidosis show stable electroencephalographic rhythms, cortical structure, and cognition over 2 years Neural correlates of implicit sustainability attitudes in a modified stroop task Measuring prosocial behaviour: the roles of empathy, morality and social reward When others move differently: alpha-band sensory gating and conflict-monitoring networks track kinematic dissimilarity Early neural differentiation of visual task-irrelevant alcohol content is associated with subjective craving levels in severe alcohol use disorder Noisy galvanic vestibular stimulation impairs source and reality monitoring Emotional response and regulation in BD, TUD and their comorbidity: a fear conditioning study Automatic imitation and interoceptive processes. Hypnosis and fear extinction in immersive virtual reality: preliminary evidence from a conditioning paradigm Contextual cues shape facial emotion recognition: a combined behavioral and ERP study Effects of repetitive negative thinking on neural and behavioral correlates of anhedonia in depressive symptomatology Does eco-anxiety disrupt cognitive control? Neurophysiological insights into behavioral adaptation in the context of climate crisis. Electric field modelling of the insular cortex in DLPFC-Targeted rTMS for depression Effects of autistic and alexithymic traits on neural responses to emotional faces Dissociable neural pathways for accuracy and confidence in emotion discrimination Trauma under psychedelics: How peritraumatic substance use during the Oct 7 attacks shaped posttraumatic affective and social responses Expecting the worst: the brain’s costs of dysfunctional expectations Multidimensional representations of dynamic facial expressions in the right superior temporal sulcus The relationship between ongoing pain and cognitive effort in fibromyalgia: a brain-spinal fMRI study A novel measure to high-order functional connectivity: application in Autism reveals imbalance between redundancy and synergy Stress reactivity in Virtual Scenarios is differentially modulated following a Mindfulness vs a Cognitive training: Cardiac, Gastric, and Interoceptive markers Delusion-like thinking is associated with lower individual alpha peak frequency ACT2: Exploring kinematic profiles in autism Behavioral and cortical characterization of Moral Decision-Making: evidence from a multimodal approach Competing to Win, Collaborating to Explore: Strategic versus Exploratory Risk-Taking in Human-Robot Interaction Effects of oxytocin in brain activity during naturalistic social-affective processing Closing the loop: developing adaptive biofeedback systems for stress management in Virtual Reality Using virtual reality to explore children’s empathy: Combining emotional self-report and heart-rate as physiological indicator of cognitive and affective empathy State-dependent changes in Gut–Brain coupling: Mapping gastric sensations before and after a meal Lone actor terrorism revisited: Comparative predictors and ideological heterogeneity in the United States Reducing the harmful effects of stress on decision-making: effects of non-invasive electrical brain stimulation The effects of loving-kindness meditation and psilocybin on heart rate variability and affective outcomes Changing the experienced past and expected future: the role of executive abilities and depressive symptoms in counterfactual thinking The Relationship between subjective Quality of Sleep, cognitive Performance, and structural MRI in Major Depressive Disorder Face identity recognition ability stratifies the neural dynamics of familiar and unfamiliar face processing in autism Cross-task computational phenotyping of motivation predicts daily-life affect How do social contexts influence audience engagement Modulating interoception through brain stimulation: a systematic review of invasive and non-invasive approaches Can musical training protect cognitive function in later life? Be-Flex: Neurobehavioral correlates of cognitive flexibility A naturalistic multimodal observation of lifestyle modulation of temporal stress persistence in day and night shift workers Heider and Simmel revisited: the grammar of nonverbal trust in borderline personality disorder Practice makes cohesion: longitudinal multi-brain EEG study in a newly formed musical ensemble Interacting with a robotic wheelchair: Associations with subjective embodiment and body representation Psychophysiological and subjective correlates of cognitive load during arithmetic and reading tasks Hypersexuality across neurological disorders: a systematic review of aetiologies, clinical manifestations, assessment methods, and management strategies Group-Specific Pupillary Responses to Social and Non-Social Stimuli in infants at elevated likelihood of atypical neurodevelopmental conditions Motivational effects on decision noise Neural dynamics of respiratory interoception From perception to emotion: CFS breakthrough predicts anger reactivity beyond trait anger Using computational modelling and fMRI to study peer influences on empathy formation A pupillometric and oculometric analysis of painting perception in autistic, artist, and neurotypical adults. Comparing the Effectiveness of Cognitive-Fatigue-Inducing Tasks Cognitive control dysfunction under sleep loss: Neurophysiological evidence of attention and error monitoring Dissociations between objective and subjective reports suggest a common post-perceptual basis for valence and conscious awareness Social prediction error processing and associated cerebellar-cerebral connectivity changes in patients with cerebellar neurodegeneration. From facial expressions to empathy for pain: preliminary validation of a set of face stimuli depicting varying pain intensities Beyond the session: Wearable monitoring of autonomic and circadian dynamics in psychedelic-assisted therapy Analyzing lead-lag movement dynamics in autistic and neurotypical mother-child dyads using cross-recurrence quantification Computational mechanisms of mentalization across large language models and humans Growing bigger than the gap: Investigating body-space interactions during a haptic illusion altering perceived body size The role of motor and contextual information in the creation of (predictable) false memories for actions How normal are depressive brains? Combining normative, network and predictive modelling Motivational determinants of effort-based choice across reward context and time Dissociating periodic and aperiodic EEG components under prolonged war-related stress: insights from spectral parameterization Effects of neuromodulation on mental state recognition: unveiling the cerebellar role Who trusts prior expectations? A Bayesian approach to age, gender, and personality differences in decision-making Phenomenological control of bodily sensations and heart rate variability Neural markers of occupational burnout: ERP correlates and moderating role of depression Avoiding fear keeps it alive: how avoidance of learned fear shapes extinction learning and fear retention Turning a blind eye: self-report, immersive virtual reality (IVR), and neurophysiology to investigate bystander intervention when prison officers witness misconduct Tobacco smoking is associated with impaired error-related cardiac slowing How does Alexithymia modulate electrophysiological and physiological responses to emotional stimuli? Exploration-exploitation trade-offs in uncertain aversive contexts: The role of threat proximity Interoceptive modulation of mirror-induced dissociation Parental interoceptive inferences: reading children’s cardiac states and links to interoception Stress and cardiorespiratory cycle effects on behavioral and electrophysiological correlates of threat processing in an affectively primed weapon identification task. Reward prediction errors drive emotional valence Combined Reduction of the Sense of Ownership and Agency Decreases Dishonesty: Behavioral and Physiological Evidence from a Virtual Reality Study Divergent Gaze Strategies in Decisions from Experience and Description PreSMA rTMS interacts with Need for Cognitive Closure to impact strategy use in multi-attribute choice Neurodevelopment of social and asocial emotion regulation Neural signatures of trust: tracking attention allocation in human–AI collaboration How parents and peers shape self-esteem in depressed and healthy adolescents Oscillatory motor dynamics reveal correlates of implicit error processing The human affectome: a philosophical odyssey Disorientation assessment using accelerometric and spatial gait features in healthy older adults navigating in a virtually enriched environment Addressing biases in emotional stimuli: toward an inclusive database of facial and whole-body expressions The social brain in context: integrating affective and cognitive processes across scales Salivary lactoferrin as a new Alzheimer’s disease non-invasive biomarker: link between oral dysbiosis and infective hypothesis Does cognitive fatigue disrupt the theta gamma code? An electroencephalography test of the Missing Link hypothesis |
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| 3:00pm - 4:30pm |
O3-1: Clinical Psychology/Neuroscience Rethinking flexibility: Valence-specific emotional shifting as a transdiagnostic mechanism Modulating pain through the embodiment of interoceptive signals: The contribution of virtual vicarious affective touch and breathing in fibromyalgia. Domain-specific impairments in self–other distinction in borderline personality disorder: Evidence from a multi-center study Towards a better understanding of impulsivity in adolescents with ADHD by dissociating the expression and inhibition of impulsive responses |
O3-2: Decision-making The Neurobiological Craving Signature (NCS) predicts social craving and responds to social isolation A body worth the effort: Reduced effort discounting in individuals with greater body image disturbance Is democracy worth the effort? The Role of Stress-Driven Multivariate Associations Between Brain Networks and Gut Microbiota on value-based (food) decision-making |
O3-3: Social interaction Inside the frontal face network: multimodal evidence for distinct emotional and motor resonance circuits Time-frequency coordination in plant dyads: a non-neural model of synchrony From inter-brain synchrony to generalized empathy: the effects of inter-brain plasticity through dyadic neurofeedback Why do we laugh when we get tickled? - Emotionally ambivalent responses to ticklish touch on the foot soles |
| O3-4: Social Cognition How social can robots be perceived? Disentangling context- and appearance-dependent dimensions of social competence in human-robot interaction conversations using fMRI. Beyond mirroring: goal-dependent somatosensory dynamics in emotion and social perception When AI sounds human: discriminating human and AI-generated emotional vocalizations in autistic and non-autistic adults |
O3-5: Touch Social touch in adolescence: Heightened sensitivity and stress regulation. Threat, agency, tactile feedback: behavioral, cardiac and cortical determinants of self-related processing in self-touch What makes a touch feel ticklish? Investigating the emotional responses elicited by the sounds of affective touch “Mom, is that you?” Mother-infant behavioral synchrony predicts 6-month-olds’ somatosensory discrimination of maternal versus unfamiliar woman’s touch |
S7-1: Neural alignment and synchronization in real-time social interaction Neural alignment and synchronization in real-time social interaction Presentations of the Symposium Multi-brain neuroscience of inter-brain synchronization: theory, methods, and applications Exploring interbrain alignment using two-brain eeg microstates Interbrain synchrony during small and large group interactions Interpersonal dynamics of mitigating loneliness using intergenerational creative art-making |
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| S7-3: Social and cognitive perspectives on AI, conspiracy beliefs, and public health Social and cognitive perspectives on AI, conspiracy beliefs, and public health Presentations of the Symposium Debunking anti-LGBTQ+ conspiracies with AI: limited belief change, clear emotional shifts Prosociality, anxiety and hesitancy: understanding COVID-19 vaccination intention in India When artificial faces feel real: memory and confidence in the recognition of GAN-generated faces |
S7-4: From self to social: neural and behavioral signatures of multisensory perception and social interaction From self to social: neural and behavioral signatures of multisensory perception and social interaction Presentations of the Symposium Growing in interaction: the role of social interactions in modulating the effects of rubber hand illusion in adolescents and adults The plasticity of the bodily self in interactions: investigating the neurophysiological interplay between interpersonal motor interactions and the body schema The microstructure of intra- and interpersonal coordination Self-other body boundaries in the healthy and pathological brain |
S7-5: Crossmodal Remapping in Sensory and Motor Cortices: evidence from “Touch to See” PRIN project Crossmodal Remapping in Sensory and Motor Cortices: evidence from “Touch to See” PRIN project Presentations of the Symposium Developmental timing constrains modality-specific cortical plasticity Shared Neural Codes for Touch and Vision: Inter-subject correlation revealed crossmodal remapping of visual input in primary somatosensory cortex Body ownership gates tactile awareness by reshaping somatosensory functional connectivity Crossmodal modulations of the motor system by action observation and non-invasive brain stimulation: evidence from the healthy and injured brain |
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| 4:30pm - 5:00pm |
Best Poster Awards Location: Plenary Room |
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