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Fjell et al. analysed multiple large-scale longitudinal MRI datasets and found no evidence for an association of sleep duration and brain atrophy, suggesting that normal brains promote adequate sleep.
Kutter et al. show that neurons in the human brain encode small numbers (up to 4) more precisely than large numbers, indicating a distinction between a small-number subitizing system and a large-number estimation system.
The authors find that psychological responses towards representations of robots fall into three dimensions: positive, negative and competence. They also examine their individual difference predictors.
Academic freedom is increasingly threatened by homophobic legislation. Stella Nyanzi describes how this affects queer African scholars, and calls for resistance.
We identified two components of honesty — ‘belief speaking’ and ‘fact speaking’ — in public-facing communication by US politicians. For Republicans, belief speaking is strongly associated with the sharing of untrustworthy information. Fact speaking is associated with the sharing of more reliable information, irrespective of party affiliation.
By examining patterns in public-facing communications of US politicians, the authors identify two honesty-related concepts: belief speaking and fact speaking. They find that for Republicans, but not Democrats, an increase of belief speaking is associated with a decrease in the quality of the shared content sources.
Using a set of experiments, the authors show that discrimination reduces work effort of those who are disadvantaged and those who are advantaged by it.
In a series of human functional MRI studies, Zhang et al. find that the activation of two brain areas typically involved in language comprehension reflects working memory of social semantics rather than general semantic or syntactic processing.
We proposed a confidence metric and analysed data from five large surveys that spanned 30 years in Europe and the USA. We found that both overconfidence and negative attitudes towards science peak at intermediate knowledge levels.
Ferguson et al. test the effectiveness of messages designed to increase rates of repeat blood donation and find that warm-glow feelings as a motivation for cooperation cool over time but can be reactivated.
Lackner et al. show that individuals with an intermediate level of science knowledge tend to have overconfidence in their own knowledge and negative attitudes to science.
We trained an artificial intelligence (AI) system to recommend different interactions and connections between humans playing a group game together. Through trial and error, the AI system learned to take an encouraging approach to uncooperative individuals, keeping them engaged with the group and boosting cooperation levels for everyone.
In this study of bird biodiversity data from across 195 US cities, Ellis-Soto et al. show that historical redlining is associated with increasing inequality in sampling. Historically redlined neighbourhoods remain the most undersampled areas.
McKee et al. show that deep reinforcement learning can be used to learn a new and effective strategy for encouraging mutually beneficial cooperation in a network game.
Hopp et al. probe the neural (dis)unity of moral foundations theory and report that each moral foundation recruits domain-general mechanisms of social cognition but also has a dissociable neural signature malleable by sociomoral experience.
Producing a high-resolution global net migration dataset for 2000–2019, Niva et al. analyse how migration affects urban and rural population growth and show that socioeconomic factors are more strongly associated with migration than climatic ones.
In a study of 28 European Union member states, Wolfowicz et al. found that increased levels of terrorism-related arrests and convictions are associated with decreases in terrorism. However, evidence concerning the role of more severe punishment was mixed.
Zero-COVID-19 strategies used hard lockdown to save human lives. Our study used modern policy evaluation tools and high-quality longitudinal, nationally representative data and found that the lives saved during Melbourne’s hard 111-day lockdown came at a high cost to parents of young dependent children, and in particular mothers, as the lockdown continued.