Psychology articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Social life requires us to store information about each person’s unique disposition. Here, the authors show that the brain represents people as the sums of the mental states that those people are believed to experience.

    • Mark A. Thornton
    • , Miriam E. Weaverdyck
    •  & Diana I. Tamir

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The perception of spatial patterns (form vision) is thought to rely on rod and cone cells in the retina. Here, the authors show that a third kind of retinal cell, melanopsin-expressing ganglion cells, can also detect form in humans, under particular conditions.

    • Annette E. Allen
    • , Franck P. Martial
    •  & Robert J. Lucas

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Episodic memory retrieval is hypothesized to rely on hippocampal reinstatement of item-context associations which drives reinstatement of item information in cortex. Here, the authors confirm this sequence of events, using iEEG recordings from the human hippocampus and lateral temporal cortex.

    • D. Pacheco Estefan
    • , M. Sánchez-Fibla
    •  & P. F. M. J. Verschure

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People vividly simulate prospective events and experience the anticipated affect—processes supported by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Here, the authors show that these mere simulations change real-life attitudes, via a value transfer between environmental representations in the vmPFC.

    • Roland G. Benoit
    • , Philipp C. Paulus
    •  & Daniel L. Schacter

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The brain can represent the mental states of others, as well as those of the self. Here, the authors show that social brain manifests more distinct activity patterns when thinking about one's own states, compared to those of others, suggesting that we represent our own mind with greater granularity.

    • Mark A. Thornton
    • , Miriam E. Weaverdyck
    •  & Diana I. Tamir

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People differ in their current levels of understanding of many complex concepts. Here, the authors show using fMRI that brain activity during a task that requires concept knowledge can be used to compute a ‘neural score’ of the participant’s understanding.

    • Joshua S. Cetron
    • , Andrew C. Connolly
    •  & David J. M. Kraemer

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In a sample of prisoners, the authors show how learning contributes to the link between exposure to violence (ETV) and maladaptive behavior. While ETV did not disrupt people's ability to learn others' propensity to harm, it did disrupt the development of subjective moral impressions and, subsequently, their ability to adjust levels of trust in others.

    • Jenifer Z. Siegel
    • , Suzanne Estrada
    •  & Arielle Baskin-Sommers

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Social groups form collective memories, but the temporal dynamics of this process are unclear. Here, the authors show that when early conversations involve individuals that bridge across clusters of a social network, the network reaches higher mnemonic convergence compared to when early conversations occur within clusters.

    • Ida Momennejad
    • , Ajua Duker
    •  & Alin Coman

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The hippocampus is involved both in episodic memory recall and scene processing. Here, the authors show that hippocampal neurons first process scene cues before coordinating memory-guided pattern completion in adjacent entorhinal cortex.

    • Bernhard P. Staresina
    • , Thomas P. Reber
    •  & Florian Mormann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The authors show that individuals apply different ‘moral strategies’ in interpersonal decision-making. These strategies are linked to distinct patterns of neural activity, even when they produce the same choice outcomes, illuminating how distinct moral principles can guide social behavior.

    • Jeroen M. van Baar
    • , Luke J. Chang
    •  & Alan G. Sanfey

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Many functions of the human brain are lateralised i.e. associated more strongly with either the left or the right hemisphere of the brain. Here, the authors report the first complete map of functional asymmetries in the human brain, and its relationship with structural inter-hemispheric connectivity.

    • Vyacheslav R. Karolis
    • , Maurizio Corbetta
    •  & Michel Thiebaut de Schotten

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have reached human-level benchmarks in classifying images, but they can be “fooled” by adversarial examples that elicit bizarre misclassifications from machines. Here, the authors show how humans can anticipate which objects CNNs will see in adversarial images.

    • Zhenglong Zhou
    •  & Chaz Firestone

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rapid arrival to hospital after stroke is critical for patients to receive effective treatment. Here, the authors examine how stroke patients’ social network structure relates to stroke arrival time, and show that small and close-knit personal networks predict delayed arrival.

    • Amar Dhand
    • , Douglas Luke
    •  & Jin-Moo Lee

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Human confidence tracks current performance, but little is known about the formation of ‘global’ self-performance estimates over longer timescales. Here, the authors show that people use local confidence to form global estimates, but tend to underestimate their performance when feedback is absent.

    • Marion Rouault
    • , Peter Dayan
    •  & Stephen M. Fleming

  • Article
    | Open Access

    When learning about rewards and threats in the environment, animals often need to learn the value associated with conjunctions of features, not just individual features. Here, the authors show that the hippocampus forms conjunctive representations that are dissociable from individual feature components.

    • Ian C. Ballard
    • , Anthony D. Wagner
    •  & Samuel M. McClure

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Resource sharing over peer-to-peer technological networks is emerging as economically important, yet little is known about how people choose to share in this context. Here, the authors introduce a new game to model sharing, and test how players form sharing strategies depending on technological constraints.

    • Hirokazu Shirado
    • , George Iosifidis
    •  & Nicholas A. Christakis

  • Article
    | Open Access

    We can recognize an object from one of its features, e.g. hearing a bark leads us to think of a dog. Here, the authors show using fMRI that the brain combines bits of information into object representations, and that presenting a few features of an object activates representations of its other attributes.

    • Sasa L. Kivisaari
    • , Marijn van Vliet
    •  & Riitta Salmelin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Social intelligence and general intelligence are two distinct cognitive abilities. Here, the authors show that groups of people with high competency in both social and general intelligence perform better in a resource-management task involving cooperation, and adjustment to unexpected ecological change.

    • Jacopo A. Baggio
    • , Jacob Freeman
    •  & David Pillow

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Neuroimaging evidence implicates basal ganglia (BG) in social decision-making, yet causal evidence remains lacking. Here, the authors show that learning in strategic (but not non-strategic) games is spared in patients with BG damage, suggesting social decision making is not fully reliant on the BG.

    • Lusha Zhu
    • , Yaomin Jiang
    •  & Ming Hsu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Group membership can inform individuals’ decisions on whether to cooperate. Here, the authors show how cooperative groups themselves can emerge and change due to use of reputation heuristics (such as “the enemy of a friend is an enemy”), and how this destabilizes cooperation over time.

    • Jörg Gross
    •  & Carsten K. W. De Dreu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The reinforcement learning literature suggests decisions are based on a model-free system, operating retrospectively, and a model-based system, operating prospectively. Here, the authors show that a model-based retrospective inference of a reward’s cause, guides model-free credit-assignment.

    • Rani Moran
    • , Mehdi Keramati
    •  & Raymond J. Dolan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Place cells and grid cells are known to encode spatial information about an animal’s location relative to the surrounding environment. Here, the authors show that place cells predominantly encode environmental sensory inputs, while grid cell activity reflects a greater influence of physical motion.

    • Guifen Chen
    • , Yi Lu
    •  & Neil Burgess

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Optimal decision-making requires integrating expectations about rewards with beliefs about reward contingencies. Here, the authors show that these aspects of reward are encoded in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex then combined in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a process that guides choice biases characteristic of human decision-making.

    • Marion Rouault
    • , Jan Drugowitsch
    •  & Etienne Koechlin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Cancer patients are at an increased risk of suicide: elderly, white, unmarried males with localized disease are at highest risk vs other cancer patients. Among those diagnosed at < 50 years of age, the plurality of suicides is from hematologic and testicular tumors; if > 50, from prostate, lung, and colorectal cancer patients.

    • Nicholas G. Zaorsky
    • , Ying Zhang
    •  & Vernon M. Chinchilli

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Motor learning is thought to be mostly procedural, but recent work has suggested that there is a strong cognitive component to it. Here, the authors show that humans use dissociable cognitive strategies, either caching successful responses or using a rule-based strategy, to solve a visuomotor learning task.

    • Samuel D. McDougle
    •  & Jordan A. Taylor

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Previous research on visual memory often relies on image recognition as a test, and the exact nature of memory when freely recalling information is not clear. Here, Bainbridge and colleagues develop a drawing-based memory recall task, and show detailed-rich, quantifiable information diagnostic of previously encountered visual scenes.

    • Wilma A. Bainbridge
    • , Elizabeth H. Hall
    •  & Chris I. Baker

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Our eyes constantly follow objects we see, but do they also move in synchrony with auditory inputs? Here, the authors show that eyelid movements track the temporal structure of speech and other sound sequences, which could reflect a role of motor systems in temporal attention and sequence processing.

    • Peiqing Jin
    • , Jiajie Zou
    •  & Nai Ding

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Human eye movements when viewing scenes can reflect overt spatial attention. Here, O’Connell and Chun predict human eye movement patterns from BOLD responses to natural scenes. Linking brain activity, convolutional neural network (CNN) models, and eye movement behavior, they show that brain activity patterns and CNN models share representations that guide eye movements to scenes.

    • Thomas P. O’Connell
    •  & Marvin M. Chun

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Early childhood educational intervention has positive outcomes in adulthood, including higher education attainment, economic status, and overall health. This study shows that adults who underwent such intervention have greater enforcement of equality norm during social decision-making, potentially motivated by future planning.

    • Yi Luo
    • , Sébastien Hétu
    •  & Craig Ramey

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Rewarding events are prioritized in memory, but to support adaptive decision-making memory should also be prioritized for the events leading up to a reward. Here, the authors show that reward retroactively prioritizes memory for proximal, neutral events that precede the reward.

    • Erin Kendall Braun
    • , G. Elliott Wimmer
    •  & Daphna Shohamy

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The sense of ownership – of which objects belong to us and which to others - is an important part of our lives, but how the brain keeps track of ownership is poorly understood. Here, the authors show that specific brain areas are involved in ownership acquisition for the self, friends, and strangers.

    • Patricia L. Lockwood
    • , Marco K. Wittmann
    •  & Matthew F. S. Rushworth

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humans can perform complex motor movements at varying speeds. Here, the authors show that a recurrent neural network can be trained to exhibit temporal scaling obeying Weber’s law as well as validate a prediction of the model of improved precision of movements at faster speeds.

    • Nicholas F. Hardy
    • , Vishwa Goudar
    •  & Dean V. Buonomano

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humans infer the trustworthiness of others based on subtle facial features such as the facial width-to-height ratio, but it is not known whether other primates are sensitive to these cues. Here, the authors show that macaque monkeys prefer to look at human faces which appear trustworthy to humans.

    • Manuela Costa
    • , Alice Gomez
    •  & Angela Sirigu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humans compensate for sensory noise by biasing sensory estimates toward prior expectations, as predicted by models of Bayesian inference. Here, the authors show that humans perform ‘late inference’ downstream of sensory processing to mitigate the effects of noisy internal mental computations.

    • Evan D. Remington
    • , Tiffany V. Parks
    •  & Mehrdad Jazayeri

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Men are often more willing to compete compared to women, which may contribute to gender differences in wages and career advancement. Here, the authors show that ‘power priming’ - encouraging people to imagine themselves in a situation of power - can close the gender gap in competitiveness.

    • Loukas Balafoutas
    • , Helena Fornwagner
    •  & Matthias Sutter

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It is believed that fast “ripple” oscillations in the hippocampus play a role in consolidation, a process by which memory traces are stabilized. Here, the authors show that ripples occuring during non-REM sleep trigger “replay” of brain activity associated with previously experienced stimuli.

    • Hui Zhang
    • , Juergen Fell
    •  & Nikolai Axmacher

  • Article
    | Open Access

    An individual’s social network—their friends, family, and acquaintances—is important for their health, but existing tools for assessing social networks have limitations. Here, the authors introduce a quantitative social network assessment tool on a secure open-source web platform and show its utility in a nation-wide study.

    • Amar Dhand
    • , Charles C. White
    •  & Philip L. De Jager

  • 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

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