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In this article, Batten and colleagues measure fast neurotransmitter release in patients undergoing awake brain surgery. As volunteers play an economic game with human and computer partners, dopamine and serotonin track social context and value statistics.
People often believe what they want to believe rather than what the evidence implies. Here Melnikoff and Strohminger find that this seemingly irrational tendency may emerge from fully rational Bayesian calculations.
In this Perspective, Fjell and Walhovd argue that, to account for considerable interindividual variability in sleep need, future research must consider environmental, individual and situational factors when studying the impact of sleep on cognitive and brain health.
Zhao et al. find that children exhibit greater honesty after having been trusted by adults. The findings validate philosophical conjectures and offer practical strategies to foster honesty in children by nurturing adult trust.
Time is running out to prevent our closest living relatives—the great apes—from being driven to extinction at our own hands. Mitani et al. advocate for substantial changes to policy and research practices before it is too late.
In 2021, the United States provided an unconditional child allowance to most families with children. Using anonymized mobile-location and debit/credit card data, the authors find that the benefits increased spending at childcare centres, health- and personal-care establishments, and grocery stores.
Using intracranial EEG in human participants, the authors identify a functionally distinct set of brain regions which exhibited characteristic signatures of decision formation independently of the motor action associated with the choice.
The authors document wide variation in information density and speed of communication across the world’s languages. They find that higher-density languages communicate information more quickly but with more sustained focus than lower-density languages.
Brus et al. show that modulation of slow oscillatory neural activity with non-invasive electrical stimulation of the prefrontal cortex can be used to modulate top-down control and behavioural performance in non-spatial attention.
The authors use several computational methods to investigate genetics signatures of assortative mating across behavioural and psychiatric traits, identifying signals for traits such as alcohol consumption traits, major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder and Tourette syndrome, as well as complex interactions between assortative mating, socioeconomic status and participation bias.
Here Shoham and colleagues use deep learning algorithms to disentangle the contributions of visual, visual–semantic and semantic information in human face and object representations. Visual–semantic and semantic algorithms improve prediction of human representations.
A longitudinal study over 12 weeks used computational models on behavioural data from seven cognitive tasks while tracking participants’ mood, habits and activities to understand individual variability. The findings revealed that practice and emotional states significantly influenced various aspects of computational phenotypes, suggesting that apparent unreliability might actually uncover previously unnoticed patterns, supporting a dynamic perspective on cognitive diversity within individuals.
Much well-designed and preregistered research is conducted but never published. The reasons for these studies ending up in the ‘file drawer’ are varied. Making this research public would help us all to do better science.
Using large-scale global positioning system (GPS) mobility data, we examined the feasibility and societal impact of the ‘15-minute city’ model across US urban areas. Our findings highlight the environmental benefits of localized living but also its risk of intensifying socioeconomic segregation.
Using mobility data, the authors quantify usage patterns of so-called ‘15-minute cities’ and uncover a worrying trade-off: increased local usage correlates with higher experienced segregation for low-income residents.
Belonging is an essential part of human identity. But with belonging comes ‘otherness’ — the tendency to label ‘others’ on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, ability or some other dimension. To advance science, we need to recognize how otherness affects research and implement interventions to overcome the biases that it creates.
This Article makes the case for moving motor learning research outside the lab. Tsay and colleagues show that a large-scale citizen science approach can replicate established findings, reconcile conflicting ideas and identify key demographic predictors of successful motor learning.