Psychology articles within Nature Communications

Featured

• Article
  01 November 2016 | Open Access

  Altruistic punishment does not increase with the severity of norm violations in the field

  Lab experiments have shown that people will punish violators of social norms, with the severity of punishment increasing with the degree of violation. Here, Balafoutas et al. show that, outside of the lab, larger violations are not punished more severely and are associated with a greater risk of reprisal.

  • Loukas Balafoutas
  • , Nikos Nikiforakis
  •  & Bettina Rockenbach

• Article
  07 October 2016 | Open Access

  Social learning strategies modify the effect of network structure on group performance

  Previous studies have disagreed over whether efficient or inefficient network structures should be more effective in promoting group performance. Here, Barkoczi and Galesic demonstrate that which structure is superior depends on the social learning strategy used by individuals in the network.

  • Daniel Barkoczi
  •  & Mirta Galesic

• Article
  07 October 2016 | Open Access

  Striatal prediction errors support dynamic control of declarative memory decisions

  The human brain can efficiently retrieve information from long-term memory and use it to guide action but how the brain selects the most useful information in each case is unclear. Here the authors show that reinforcement learning mechanisms, based on expected value and prediction error fMRI signals in striatum, play a role in memory control processes guiding behavior.

  • Jason M. Scimeca
  • , Perri L. Katzman
  •  & David Badre

• Article
  07 October 2016 | Open Access

  Motor cortex activity predicts response alternation during sensorimotor decisions

  The motor cortex executes responses based on sensory choices, but it is unknown whether it also impacts response selection. Here, Pape and Siegel show that motor cortex activity present before decision making predicts responses and that this activity is influenced by previous button-presses.

  • Anna-Antonia Pape
  •  & Markus Siegel

• Article
  03 October 2016 | Open Access

  Ageing increases reliance on sensorimotor prediction through structural and functional differences in frontostriatal circuits

  Decline in sensorimotor skills with age may be due to an overreliance on the prediction of the sensory consequences of one’s actions. Here the authors show that sensorimotor attenuation increases with age, and that this is associated with structural and functional changes in frontostriatal circuits.

  • Noham Wolpe
  • , James N. Ingram
  •  & James B. Rowe

• Article
  24 August 2016 | Open Access

  Spontaneous perception of numerosity in humans

  Humans as well as many other species have the ability to perceive the number of items, numerosity, but the mechanism by which this is achieved is unclear. Here the authors provide strong evidence in support of a spontaneous perception of numerosity without reliance on density and area estimation.

  • Guido Marco Cicchini
  • , Giovanni Anobile
  •  & David C. Burr

• Article
  01 August 2016 | Open Access

  Predictive decision making driven by multiple time-linked reward representations in the anterior cingulate cortex

  Past experiences and future predictions both shape our decisions. Here, the authors trained participants in a foraging task in which reward rates varied systematically over time and find the dACC tracks both recent and past reward rates, leading to opposing effects on decisions about whether to stay or leave a reward environment.

  • Marco K. Wittmann
  • , Nils Kolling
  •  & Matthew F. S. Rushworth

• Article
  19 October 2015 | Open Access

  Cooperation is related to dispersal patterns in Sino-Tibetan populations

  Dispersal is key to establishing patterns of cooperation. Here, the authors show that social organization is associated with levels of cooperation in Sino-Tibetan populations with strikingly different dispersal patterns.

  • Jia-Jia Wu
  • , Ting Ji
  •  & Ruth Mace

• Article | 08 April 2015

  A causal role of the right inferior frontal cortex in implementing strategies for multi-component behaviour

  Complex behaviours, such as driving a car, require the organization and processing of several individual actions. Here, the authors use transcranial magnetic stimulation to demonstrate that the right inferior frontal gyrus determines the strategy used to sequence actions during complex behaviours.

  • Gabriel Dippel
  •  & Christian Beste

• Article | 20 January 2015

  Reputation can enhance or suppress cooperation through positive feedback

  When individuals differ in their cooperative behaviour, it pays to take a partner’s reputation into account when deciding one's own levels of cooperation. Here the authors use game theory to analyse how this feeds back to change levels of cooperation as individuals change their reputation so as to change the behaviour of future partners.

  • John M. McNamara
  •  & Polly Doodson

• Article | 29 July 2014

  Prefrontal cortex reactivity underlies trait vulnerability to chronic social defeat stress

  Connectivity between the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the amygdala (AMY) is implicated in responses to stress and regulation of affect. Here, the authors show that stress is regulated by changes in PFC–AMY coherence, PFC oscillatory activity and AMY oscillatory activity across the 2–7 Hz frequency band.

  • Sunil Kumar
  • , Rainbo Hultman
  •  & Kafui Dzirasa