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Classic avoidance learning leads to a dilemma: if an animal always avoids a cue that lead to a negative outcome, it will never learn anything new about the cue and outcome. A new study suggests that a protected childhood period helps resolve that dilemma: children actually prefer to explore aversive cues but only do so if a parent is present.

People are often told they ‘view the world through rose-coloured glasses’. But do desires in fact change perceptual representations? A new study suggests people not only report observing what they wish was true, but they are also more likely to see what they wish was true.

As the spectre of ‘post-truth’ looms over society, an important question remains: how to effectively respond to the growing climate of science denial? New research shows that leaving denial unanswered can have negative consequences. Fortunately, countering science deniers can reduce their influence, even among those most likely to hold anti-scientific beliefs.

How do we recognize the individual faces of our family members, friends and acquaintances across the variation that is common in daily life? Zhan and colleagues demonstrate the importance of three-dimensional structure in the representations of known individuals and argue that texture—the surface properties of faces—plays little role in representation.

Understanding how misconduct spreads among people in positions of public trust is an essential first step for tackling the problem. A new study of London’s Metropolitan Police finds that transferring police officers with a history of misconduct into a new work group increases the likelihood that the new peers will also engage in misconduct.

Researchers debate whether the adoption of agriculture was done at the expense of leisure time. A new study in ten camps of contemporary Agta hunter-gatherers actually finds that individuals who engage more in non-foraging activities have less leisure time. Results highlight the need to consider the evolutionary costs of the transition to agriculture.

While simple contagions spread efficiently from highly connected ‘influencers’, new research has revealed another kind of spreading process, that of complex contagions, which follows surprisingly different pathways to disperse through social networks.

Anxiety, ‘the disease of the 21st century’, is a clinical enigma. Using virtual predators to create real-world threat scenarios, two new studies build on prior rodent-based anxiety theory to map effects of personality and decision complexity in human prefrontal cortex. We may soon have coherent neural maps of these disabling and costly psychiatric disorders.

Every person develops brain regions to recognize people, places and things; these regions end up in similar locations across brains. However, people who played Pokémon extensively as children also have a region that responds more to Pokémon than anything else, and its location is likely determined by the size of the Pokémon on the video game player’s screen.

We know that curiosity is a strong driver of behaviour, but we know relatively little about its underlying motives. A new study shows that human curiosity may be driven by diverse motives. While some individuals are primarily motivated to form accurate beliefs, others rather seek information that makes them feel good.

How can we improve citizenship rates among low-income immigrants? While reducing costs helps, a new study suggests that an information nudge about eligibility for such fee waivers can result in a significant increase in naturalization applications among low-income individuals in the US.

Undoubtedly our technology surpasses anything seen in nonhumans, but is this the result of individual genius or collective learning?

Which side of the brain does what in speech and language processing is a debate that has engaged and divided the neuroscientific community for more than a century. A new study by Flinker et al. provides a more nuanced interpretation of how the left and right hemispheres of the brain process acoustic information important for speech processing.

Migration is a central feature of human behaviour, yet there is little consensus about its long-term impact on people and populations. A new study examines the records of Finnish Karelians evacuated to western Finland during World War II and suggests that integration into a host population entails a trade-off between social status and fertility.

Can the eye movements we make when there is nothing to look at shed light on our cognitive processes? A new study shows that tiny gaze shifts reveal people’s attended locations in memorized—rather than visual—space. The discovery indicates that the oculomotor system is engaged in the focusing of attention within the internal space of memory.

Behavioural neuroscience and reinforcement learning theory distinguish between ‘model-free’ and ‘model-based’ computations that can guide behaviour. A recent study demonstrates that Pavlovian learning can give rise to behavioural responses that are not well accounted for by this existing dichotomy, suggesting that there may be greater complexity to the computations that underlie Pavlovian prediction.

The causes of early marriage often remain unclear. A new study tests whether parental interests and coercion explain high rates of marriage for girls aged 15–18 in rural Tanzania. It finds that most brides choose their own partners and do not suffer harm to their physical or mental wellbeing later in life, and suggests alternative explanations.

A study finds that social norms have become weaker in the United States over the past 200 years. The changing strength of norms is linked to fluctuations in societal levels of innovation and risky behaviour.

Privacy regulations for online platforms allow users to control their personal data. But what happens when our private attributes or behaviour can be inferred without our personal data? Researchers reveal that the behaviour of individuals is predictable using only the information provided by their friends in an online social network.

A study shows that knowledge about an object’s size — how large it is in the real world — changes how people allocate attention towards the space occupied by a drawing of the object.