Cooperation articles from across Nature Portfolio

Humans often interact without knowing the cooperative or competitive intentions of others. Here, the authors determined the neurocomputational mechanisms engaged in adapting to fluctuating intentions of others over repeated social interactions.

Collective cooperation is found across many social and biological systems. Here, the authors find that infrequent hub updates promote the emergence of collective cooperation and develop an algorithm that optimises collective cooperation with update rates.

Through modelling, neural recordings and behavioural experiments, a study shows that individual electric fish use electrical pulses of conspecifics to extend their electrolocation range, discriminate objects and increase information transmission.

Behavioural tracking and wireless neural and eye-tracking recordings show that freely moving macaques learn to cooprate using visually guided signals along the visual-frontal cortical network.

A new study captures nearly the full repertoire of primate natural behaviour and reveals that highly distributed cortical activity maintains multifaceted dynamic social relationships.

Through cooperation we are able to thrive, build societies, culture and technology. But history also reveals our potential for selfishness, spite and prejudice. Studying the neural processes that drive choice behaviour is essential to understand this paradox and develop means to curb greed and extend the limits of cooperation.

The coordinated action of oxytocin and serotonin systems in the nucleus accumbens encodes social reward, shedding new light on the mechanisms underlying social dysfunction.