Research articles

Category learning has been traditionally viewed as a high-level cognitive process independent of sensory systems. Rosedahl and colleagues demonstrate that procedural category learning is in fact dependent on low-level visual representations.

Through mathematical analysis, simulations and examples from real-world social networks, Fotouhi et al. demonstrate how establishing sparse interconnections between previously segregated, uncooperative societies can support the evolution of cooperation globally.

Analysing high-resolution mobility traces from almost 40,000 individuals reveals that people typically revisit a set of 25 familiar locations day-to-day, but that this set evolves over time and is proportional to the size of their social sphere.

Kaplan and colleagues find that, in virtual foraging environments in which resource availability is variable, over time, tolerated theft of the resources of others declines, as participants endogenously develop reciprocal exchange relationships to buffer risk.

Kavanagh and colleagues model global human population densities between 21,000 and 4,000 years ago and find that improved environmental conditions and increased potential for population growth facilitated the emergence of agricultural domestication.

Nowak and colleagues present a game theoretic model that explains how behaviours like subtlety, modesty and anonymous good deeds can be maintained under the standard model of reputation building and indirect reciprocity.

Analytis et al. study social learning strategies for matters of taste and test their performance on a large-scale dataset. They show why a strategy’s success depends both on people’s level of experience and how their tastes relate to those of others.

Lindström and Tobler find that ostracism of individuals can emerge incidentally, based on initial group structure, and is propagated by a simple reinforcement learning mechanism. The same mechanism can be used to reduce incidental ostracism.

By analysing the language of tweets around protests in Baltimore in 2015 and through behavioural laboratory experiments, Dehghani and colleagues find that moralization of protest issues leads to greater support for violence and increased incidence of violent protest.

Aral and Dhillon specify a class of empirically motivated influence maximization models that incorporate more realistic features of real-world social networks and predict substantially greater influence propagation compared with traditional models.

High arousal enables young people to better detect salient stimuli. In older people, arousal leads to increased processing of all stimuli. This difference can be explained by age-related changes in how the locus coeruleus–noradrenaline system interacts with cortical attention networks.

A personalized letter intervention that corrected parents’ misbeliefs about their child’s absences reduced chronic absenteeism by 10% and is significantly more cost effective than alternative current best practices.

Contest experiments among natural groups demonstrate that unequal sharing of contest spoils can override the effects of preexisting intergroup relations, prompting privileged individuals to choose considerably more offensive strategies, whereas disadvantaged group members resort to defensive strategies.

In the United States and India, people's folk conceptions of nationality are flexible, seeing it as more biological and fixed at birth or cultural and fluid, depending on the scenario. Belief in fluidity predicts positive attitudes to immigration.

In a common-pool resource experiment, Koomen and Herrmann show that six-year-old children are collectively able to avoid collapsing a shared resource and use similar strategies to adults.

An analysis of genetic influences on educational attainment and occupation in pre- versus post-Soviet-era Estonia shows that genetics has a much greater influence on social outcomes in a meritocratic society.

A linguistic analysis of nearly 44,000 responses to the Washington University Sentence Completion Test elucidates the construct of ego development (personality development through adulthood) and identifies unique linguistic markers of each level of development.

Different parts of tools are often handled in different ways. This study presents a computational model explaining how humans build separate motor memories for different parts of the same objects.

Altenburger and Ugander identify ‘monophily’ or the overdispersion of attribute preferences in a social network and show that it can be used to predict otherwise hidden attribute information about an individual.

An analysis of more than 30,000 national polls from 351 general elections in 45 countries over the period between 1942 and 2017 shows that, contrary to popular belief, election polling misses have not become more prevalent.