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Bellmund et al. use immersive virtual reality combined with successor representation modelling to show that environmental geometry distorts human spatial memory consistent with deformations of grid-cell firing patterns in navigating rodents.
Journals differ in how they evaluate submissions, depending on their aims and scope. Here we share how the Nature Human Behaviour editorial team evaluates research manuscripts submitted to the journal.
Lees and Cikara show a negativity bias in group meta-perceptions—how we believe ‘they’ see ‘our’ behaviour—demonstrate how such inaccurate, pessimistic beliefs exacerbate intergroup conflict; and they provide an avenue for reducing the negative effects of inaccuracy.
Schad et al. find that, during Pavlovian conditioning, model-free striatal reward prediction errors are present in a group of sign-tracking humans, while goal-tracking humans show learning signals from a model-based system instead.
All anxiety disorders are characterized by sleep disruption. Ben Simon et al. develop a neural framework of sleep-loss-induced anxiety, one that emphasizes NREM sleep as a therapeutic target for anxiety amelioration.
Recent accounts of overconfidence suggest it helps individuals reach higher status in groups by making them seem more competent. Lyons et al. show that lobbyists with higher social status (for example, higher income) are more likely to overrate their own success.
There is a consensus that obesity and addiction are similar, showing overlap in cognition, neural activity and personality traits. A new study using a more nuanced approach for analysing traits reveals how obesity and addiction are less similar than previously thought, while the construct of uncontrolled eating is closely related to addiction.
When an automated car harms someone, who is blamed by those who hear about it? Over five studies, Awad et al. find that drivers are blamed more than their automated cars when both make mistakes.
How similar are the behavioural profiles of people with obesity, uncontrolled eating, and addiction? In a meta-analysis of facet-based phenotype profiles, Vainik et al. find that uncontrolled eating and addiction have more similarities than obesity and addiction.
Using physician stress as a model stressor, Fang et al. demonstrate that the polygenic risk score for major depressive disorder is a stronger predictor of depression under stress than under baseline conditions and may be particularly useful for identifying resilience.