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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.
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.
