Psychology articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    People vary in the extent to which they feel better after taking an inert, placebo, treatment, but the basis for individual placebo response is unclear. Here, the authors show how brain structural and functional variables, as well as personality traits, predict placebo response in those with chronic back pain.

    • Etienne Vachon-Presseau
    • , Sara E. Berger
    •  & A. Vania Apkarian

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The presence of opposite horizontal motion in the two eyes is a cue for perceiving motion-in-depth, but also leads to suppressed motion sensitivity. Here, the authors address this paradox and show that spatial and interocular integration mechanisms, distinct from the extraction of motion-in-depth, drive suppression.

    • Peter J. Kohler
    • , Wesley J. Meredith
    •  & Anthony M. Norcia

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Sleep is important for memory consolidation but its role in reconsolidation is not known. Here, the authors show in starlings that an auditory memory consolidated by sleep can be destabilized by retrieval and impaired by subsequent interference, but the memory recovers and stabilizes after a night of sleep-dependent reconsolidation.

    • Timothy P. Brawn
    • , Howard C. Nusbaum
    •  & Daniel Margoliash

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The decoy effect refers to the fact that the presence of a third option can shift people’s preferences between two other options even though the third option is inferior to both. Here, the authors show how the decoy effect can enhance cooperation in a social dilemma, the repeated prisoner’s dilemma.

    • Zhen Wang
    • , Marko Jusup
    •  & Stefano Boccaletti

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Economists have observed that many people seem unwilling to save for the future. Here, the authors show that earning and saving are subject to a basic asymmetry in attentional choice, such that cues that are associated with saving are perceived as occurring later than cues associated with earning.

    • Kesong Hu
    • , Eve De Rosa
    •  & Adam K. Anderson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humans give and receive social influence—e.g. advice—in many situations, but it is not known whether social influence is a reciprocal process, like trade. Here, the authors show that people are more likely to follow a partner's advice if that partner has previously complied with their advice.

    • Ali Mahmoodi
    • , Bahador Bahrami
    •  & Carsten Mehring

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Strong positive and strong negative reciprocators reward cooperation and punish defection, respectively, regardless of future benefits. Here, Weber and colleagues demonstrate that dispositions towards strong positive and strong negative reciprocity are not correlated within individuals.

    • Till O. Weber
    • , Ori Weisel
    •  & Simon Gächter

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The cumulative development of culture has proven difficult to study in the laboratory. Here, the authors examine entries to a series of large programming contests to show that successful entries are usually ‘tweaks’ of existing solutions, but occasional ‘leaps’ can bring larger benefits.

    • Elena Miu
    • , Ned Gulley
    •  & Luke Rendell

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Ambiguous uncertainty refers to situations where the likelihood of specific outcomes are not known. Here, the authors show that people tolerant to ambiguous uncertainty are more likely to make costly decisions to cooperate with or trust others.

    • Marc-Lluís Vives
    •  & Oriel FeldmanHall

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Early childhood deprivation such as institutionalization can greatly affect early development. Here, the authors study children who were raised in institutions but later randomly placed in foster care vs. not, to understand how early-life deprivation affects associative learning in adolescence.

    • Margaret A. Sheridan
    • , Katie A. McLaughlin
    •  & Charles A. Nelson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humans are known to use social heuristics to make intuitive decisions on whether to cooperate. Here, the authors show with evolutionary simulations that social heuristics can be an adaptive solution to uncertainties about the consequences of cooperation and can greatly increase cooperation levels.

    • Pieter van den Berg
    •  & Tom Wenseleers

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Harmonicity is associated with a single sound source and may be a useful cue with which to segregate the speech of multiple talkers. Here the authors introduce a method for perturbing the constituent frequencies of speech and show that violating harmonicity degrades intelligibility of speech mixtures.

    • Sara Popham
    • , Dana Boebinger
    •  & Josh H. McDermott

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Social learning is a crucial human ability. Here, the authors examined children in 7 cultures and show that children’s reliance on social information and their preference to follow the majority vary across societies. However, the ontogeny of majority preference follows the same, U-shaped pattern across all societies.

    • Edwin J. C. van Leeuwen
    • , Emma Cohen
    •  & Daniel B. M. Haun

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Trial and error learning requires the brain to generate expectations and match them to outcomes, yet whether this occurs for semantic learning is unclear. Here, authors show that the brain encodes the degree to which new factual information violates expectations, which in turn determines whether information is encoded in long-term memory.

    • Alex Pine
    • , Noa Sadeh
    •  & Avi Mendelsohn

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Forward models predict and attenuate the sensory feedback of voluntary movement yet their involvement in motor imagery has only been theorized. Here the authors show that motor imagery recruits forward models to elicit sensory attenuation to the same extent as real movements.

    • Konstantina Kilteni
    • , Benjamin Jan Andersson
    •  & H. Henrik Ehrsson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Emotional memory can change when retrieved, yet the conditions under which this can occur are not fully described. Here, authors show that taking a pill of propranolol taken during a specific time window can change the expression of fear memory in a person, and that sleep is necessary to forget learned fear.

    • Merel Kindt
    •  & Marieke Soeter

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The unique contributions of different frontoparietal networks (FPNs) in cognition remains unclear. Here, authors use neuroadaptive Bayesian optimization to identify cognitive tasks that segregate dorsal and ventral FPNs and reveal complex many-to-many mappings between cognitive tasks and FPNs.

    • Romy Lorenz
    • , Ines R. Violante
    •  & Robert Leech

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Detailed memories are transformed into gist-like memories over time. Here, the authors report that this change is linked to a time-dependent reorganization within the hippocampus, such that anterior activity supporting memory specificity declines over time while posterior activity patterns carrying gist representations remain more stable.

    • Lisa C. Dandolo
    •  & Lars Schwabe

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Temporal changes in brain dynamics are linked with cognitive abilities, but neither their stability nor relationship to psychosis is clear. Here, authors describe the dynamic neural architecture in healthy controls and patients with psychosis and find that they are stable over time and can predict psychotic symptoms.

    • Jenna M. Reinen
    • , Oliver Y. Chén
    •  & Avram J. Holmes

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Though adults’ brains process the internal states of others’ bodies versus others’ minds in distinct brain regions, it is not clear when this functional dissociation emerges. Here, authors study 3–12 year olds and show that these networks are distinct by age 3 and become even more distinct with age.

    • Hilary Richardson
    • , Grace Lisandrelli
    •  & Rebecca Saxe

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Data sharing is an important component of reproducible research, but meaningful data sharing can be difficult. Here authors describe a new open source tool, AFQ-Browser, that builds an interactive website allowing visualization and exploratory data analysis of published diffusion MRI data.

    • Jason D. Yeatman
    • , Adam Richie-Halford
    •  & Ariel Rokem

  • Review Article
    | Open Access

    This review summarizes how predictive modeling, a method that uses brain features to predict individual differences in behavior, is used to understand developmental periods. Rosenberg et al focus specifically on adolescence and examples of characteristic adolescent behaviors such as risk-taking.

    • Monica D. Rosenberg
    • , B. J. Casey
    •  & Avram J. Holmes

  • Review Article
    | Open Access

    The current generation of adolescents grows up in a media-saturated world. Here, Crone and Konijn review the neural development in adolescence and show how neuroscience can provide a deeper understanding of developmental sensitivities related to adolescents’ media use.

    • Eveline A. Crone
    •  & Elly A. Konijn

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Memory lapses can occur due to ineffective encoding, but it is unclear if targeted brain stimulation can improve memory performance. Here, authors use a closed-loop system to decode and stimulate periods of ineffective encoding, showing that stimulation of lateral temporal cortex can enhance memory.

    • Youssef Ezzyat
    • , Paul A. Wanda
    •  & Michael J. Kahana

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Human timing behavior is biased towards previously encountered intervals and is predicted by Bayesian models. Here, the authors develop a computational model based in properties of the cerebellum to show how we might encode time estimates based on prior experience.

    • Devika Narain
    • , Evan D. Remington
    •  & Mehrdad Jazayeri

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Though we are often friends with people similar to ourselves, it is unclear if neural responses to perceptual stimuli are also similar. Here, authors show that the similarity of neural responses evoked by a range of videos was highest for close friends and decreased with increasing social distance.

    • Carolyn Parkinson
    • , Adam M. Kleinbaum
    •  & Thalia Wheatley

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cross-cultural interactions can cause cultural change, a process known as acculturation. Here, Erten et al. develop a model of cultural change under immigration, considering individuals’ orientations towards acculturation, and find that willingness to interact cross-culturally and resident cultural conservatism favour cultural coexistence.

    • E. Yagmur Erten
    • , Pieter van den Berg
    •  & Franz J. Weissing

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humans can identify a target picture even when presented within a rapid stream of stimuli. Here the authors report that the neural activity initially supports parallel processing of multiple stimuli around the target in ventral visual areas followed later by isolated activation of reported images in parietal areas.

    • Sébastien Marti
    •  & Stanislas Dehaene

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Synchronous neural activity is related with memory encoding and retrieval, but it is not clear whether this happens across the whole brain. Here, authors use intracranial recordings to show that gamma networks are largely asynchronous, desynchronizing while theta synchronizes during memory encoding and retrieval.

    • E. A. Solomon
    • , J. E. Kragel
    •  & M. J. Kahana

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People often assume that other people share their preferences, but how exactly this bias manifests itself in learning and decision-making is unclear. Here, authors show that a person's own preferences influence learning in both social and non-social situations, and that this bias improves performance.

    • Tor Tarantola
    • , Dharshan Kumaran
    •  & Benedetto De Martino

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Non-human animals are known to exhibit behaviours suggestive of empathy, but the development and maintenance of these traits is unexplored. Here, Webb and colleagues quantify individual consolation tendencies over 10 years across two chimpanzee groups and show evidence of consistent ‘empathetic personalities’.

    • Christine E. Webb
    • , Teresa Romero
    •  & Frans B. M. de Waal

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Though memory and sleep are related, it is still unclear whether new memories can be formed during sleep. Here, authors show that people could learn new sounds during REM or light non-REM sleep, but that learning was suppressed when sounds were played during deep NREM sleep.

    • Thomas Andrillon
    • , Daniel Pressnitzer
    •  & Sid Kouider

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Generous behaviour increases happiness, but the neural underpinnings of this link are unknown. Here, authors show that promising to be generous changes the neural response in the temporo-parietal junction, and that the connection between this region and the ventral striatum was related to happiness.

    • Soyoung Q. Park
    • , Thorsten Kahnt
    •  & Philippe N. Tobler

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Previous work has shown that learning models based on running averages of received rewards can account for sequential choices in value based decisions. Here the authors show that such choices can also be influenced by a process of sampling memories for individual past outcomes, and that the sampled memories are episodic in nature.

    • Aaron M. Bornstein
    • , Mel W. Khaw
    •  & Nathaniel D. Daw

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Parietal and prefrontal cortices gather information to make perceptual decisions, but it is not known if the same is true for value-based choices. Here, authors use simultaneous EEG-fMRI and modelling to show that during value- and reward-based decisions this evidence is accumulated in the posterior medial frontal cortex.

    • M. Andrea Pisauro
    • , Elsa Fouragnan
    •  & Marios G. Philiastides

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Though humans often learn about negative outcomes from observing the response of others, the neurochemistry underlying this learning is unknown. Here, authors show that blocking opioid receptors enhances social threat learning and describe the brain regions underlying this effect.

    • Jan Haaker
    • , Jonathan Yi
    •  & Andreas Olsson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Neuronal learning activity is reactivated during sleep but the dynamics of this reactivation in humans are still poorly understood. Here the authors show that memory processing occurs during all stages of sleep in humans but that reprocessing of memory content in REM and non-REM sleep has different effects on later memory performance.

    • M. Schönauer
    • , S. Alizadeh
    •  & S. Gais

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Perception can be swayed by prior context. Here the authors report an auditory illusion in which sounds with ambiguous pitch shifts are perceived as shifting upward or downward based on the preceding contextual sounds, explore the neural correlates, and propose a probabilistic model based on temporal binding.

    • Claire Chambers
    • , Sahar Akram
    •  & Daniel Pressnitzer

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