SCAN Unit

Some colleagues looking through old study materials and documents while cleaning out a shelf

Our lab head Claus Lamm with a shopping cart full of old vials and some other trash ready to be disposed

Our colleague Katja Pronizius posing with her cleaning detergents

Our floor with some of the materials we cleaned out

We finally tackled our lab cleanup - turns out 15+ years of research leave a trail:
- Folders of printed papers 🗞️
- Old study materials & consent forms 📁
- Cables, phones, and chunky monitors 🖥️
- Lots of dust 🧼
Thanks to our team for the joint effort - we promise to keep it tidier now 🤞

It's about time somebody did this ⤵️

We systematically reviewed 50/2060 screened studies that looked at how changing someone's own pain experience also affects how people feel and respond to others’ emotions and pain. ⚡

Read it now in @painthejournal.bsky.social: journals.lww.com/pain/fulltex...

A new meta-analysis lead by our member @maxsteininger.bsky.social was just published, showing that nature exposure is linked to pain reductions 🤕🌳➡️🙂
See his thread below for details 👇

Another amazing year at the SCAN unit with:
30+ papers🗞️
Many new faces 🤓
Long train rides 🚂
Rejections, resubmissions 📝
Tomatoes 🍅
A lot of science 🧠
And even more teamwork and shared moments 🫶

Thanks 2025 - looking forward to 2026 ✨

We are glad to see this paper out by @markusforamitti.bsky.social in collaboration with @mauriciojdmartins.bsky.social,
@clauslamm.bsky.social and @scanunit.bsky.social! 🧠🫀🎵Read more about the shift toward music with more negative, stressful, and simpler lyrics over the past 50 years below.

🚨 New paper from the lab!

Using computational modeling we showed how people discount time and effort for self-benefitting vs pro-environmental outcomes and that the rate of discounting relates to their willignness to support costly climate policies 👇🏼

Last weekend’s lab hike came with maximum fog and minimum views of Vienna 😶‍🌫️. The company more than made up for it though 🫶

Psychological interventions that decrease psychological distance or challenge system justification increase motivation to exert effort to mitigate climate change - Communications Psychology Pro-environmental actions often require effort. Participants were less motivated to help the climate than a food charity, but two interventions removed this bias. Computational modelling linked climat...

🎉 New paper alert!

In this collaboration across 6 countries 🇧🇬🇬🇷🇳🇬🇸🇪🇬🇧🇺🇸 (n = 3,055), we developed a new pro-environmental behavior task and tested which psychological interventions actually make people more willing to put in real effort for mitigating climate change.

Fully OA: tinyurl.com/2s46fppb

3D Modell eines Hundegehirns - Somatosensorischer Kortex farblich markiert. Aus Guran et al., 2024 (Brain Structure and Function) Bildunterschrift: Location of SI in green, SII in light blue. Dark green = Postcruciate gyri. Light green = rostral suprasylvian gyri. Light Blue = rostral ectosylvian gyri (Czeibert et al. 2019).

Wer von euch hat schon Mal ein Hundegehirn gesehen?
Hier mal ein strukturelles MRT aus einem meiner Paper: link.springer.com/article/10.1... (Guran et al., 2024)

Dieses Modell basiert auf einem sogenannten Hirnatlas. Unsere funktionellen Daten sehen meist ganz anders aus ...

Bild zeigt die Aufnahme einer MRT-Frontkamera (Eyetrackingkamera). Ist aber keine gewöhnliche MRT Aufzeichnung, hier wird ein Hund gescannt, und zwar Toffee! (Labrador, hell)

Habt ihr schon mal einen Hund in einem MRT Scanner gesehen? Darf ich vorstellen, das ist Toffee, einer unserer 4-pfotigen Freiwilligen.

Our colleague @rinaguran.bsky.social is giving insights in her life as PostDoc this week. Check out @realscientists.de if you are interested in animal research or just want to see what everyday life looks like for a scientist 🤓

Investigating object orientation effects across 18 languages - Current Psychology Mental simulation theories of language comprehension propose that people automatically create mental representations of objects mentioned in sentences. Mental representation is often measured with the...

New global study lead by @psysciacc.bsky.social with @scanunit.bsky.social across 18 languages challenges a classic idea in psycholinguistics: when we read, we don’t always imagine objects in the same orientation as described. doi.org/10.1007/s121...

See below to read a short story from our member @lauragschw.bsky.social describing her research - really cool way to communicate science!

Happy #worlddogday! 🐶 👨‍🔬👩‍🔬
In this video, you will discover how dogs support us in our research at the University of Vienna and what we can learn from dogs about our own social behavior. 🧠 ⤵️

Congratulations to @madalina.bsky.social, our former member @kimdoell.bsky.social and all of the 256(!) other collaborators for winning SPSP's Robert Cialdini prize for their manylabs project on how behavioral interventions can help address climate change 🎉

Check out our new publication led by former member @clamassaccesi.bsky.social showing that individuals are equally motivated to incur effort costs to reduce pain to themselves and others 🤝

Next Gen Speaker Series - Boryana Todorova - Planetary Health Alliance Boryana Todorova is a Visiting Researcher at the Net Zero Observatory, University of Queensland, and a member of the Neuro Climate Working Group. Her research examines the two-way relationship between...

🧠🌍 Join me next week for the Planetary Health Alliance – Next Gen Speaker Series to learn why climate action is brain health action!

When? 24th of September, 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm EDT
Where? Online - register here: planetaryhealthalliance.org/events/next-...

New tutorial alert! Crowdsourcing multiverse analyses to explore the impact of different data-processing & analysis decisions published in Psychological Methods.
Full text: psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-...
Lead: Tom Heyman, @epronizius.bsky.social @slewis5920.bsky.social @aggieerin.bsky.social

Another highlight in my mentoring career- tinyurl.com/lukelikely 's stellar defense; Lukas provided plenty of evidence to radically update our priors and call him DOKTA Luke from now on. Shout-out also to great co-supervisors @predragpetrovic.bsky.social & Isa Wagner & all @scanunit.bsky.social

Our 2-day social cognition workshop "From Self-knowledge to knowing others" in Brussels on Dec1-2 now welcomes registration and abstracts for poster/talk ! Go www.self-knowing-others.org @selfknowingothers.bsky.social @escaneu.bsky.social @escop.bsky.social @scanunit.bsky.social

Congratulations to Thomas Baumgartner, Daria Knoch and their team behind this study 🥳

You can find the full publication at:
doi.org/10.1016/j.je...

A new study by our colleagues from Bern was covered as research highlight in @natclimate.nature.com: 🎉
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

They show how structural neuroscience data can be used to better understand interindividual differences in pro-environmental behavior 🧠🌳

Check our new preprint! Our systematic review of 206 reversal learning studies shows that behavioural flexibility research is heavily biased towards birds, rodents, and humans, with most animal diversity virtually untested. #Manymanys #BigTeamScience #ComparativeCognition

In case you don't want to read the full paper - it also got covered by several news outlets, including Der Standard and the New York Times: 🗞️
www.derstandard.at/story/300000...
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/c...
2/2

🚨A new multi-lab study with contributions from our head @clauslamm.bsky.social & others in our group got published in Nature Climate Change 🎉
It's about how support for climate change policies is shaped by extreme weather events:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

1/2
‪

YouTube video by Universitätsbibliothek Wien Save the Date: Open Science Festival 2025

Save the date: Nach Hannover, Köln und Mainz findet das nächste Open Science Festival im deutschsprachigen Raum erstmals in Österreich statt – und zwar am 8. und 9. September am Campus der Universität Wien @univie.ac.at. osfestival2025.univie.ac.at #osfestival2025 #openscience #opensciencefestival

Closing Rreflection. This June, I chaired #SIPS2025 in Budapest 🇭🇺, celebrating 10y of @improvingpsych.org. It was a vibrant & inspiring meeting. We hosted workshops, hackathons, lightning talks, & unconferences on topics from AI & theory building to radical transparency, detecting data fabrication.

One week left to apply for our open phd position 👇

Proud of our new PhD student @lukasmayrhofer.bsky.social for delivering a great talk at #ICEP2025 on work he did during his master’s 👏

New paper! When encountering a novel and unfamiliar situation, what mechanisms underly our ability to search and retrieve relevant past experiences? We answer this question by taking first-principles approach – allowing us to bridge between a wide range of previous models (1/16)