Volume 8 Issue 5, May 2024

We all care about effect sizes. Yet, traditional ways of evaluating them (P < 0.05 and generic benchmarks) are failing us. We propose two paths forward: setting better, contextualized benchmarks or — more radically — letting go of benchmarks altogether. Both paths point to adjusted expectations, more detailed reporting and slow science.

The combination of general anaesthesia and neuroimaging holds unique potential for catalysing integrative and translational discovery about human brains and consciousness. By spanning molecular, cognitive and clinical neuroscience, anaesthesia provides a bridge from molecules to mind across species.

Large language models can generate sophisticated text or code with little input from a user, which has the potential to impoverish our own writing and thinking skills. We need to understand the effect of this technology on our cognition and to decide whether this is what we want.

Researchers have a wide variety of choices when it comes to careers. Often, post-PhD, we leave academic research for industry. But it is also possible to transition back, when done carefully. In this how-to, I outline how to transition between industry and academic research and vice versa.

Financial incentives may be offered for risky but potentially life-saving actions, such as donating organs and participation in medical trials. It has been argued that such incentives could distort decision making and lead people to act against their own best interest. However, experimental evidence now suggests that higher financial incentives do not cause harm.

Our study successfully tracks salient distracting signals in high-frequency activity obtained from human intracranial recordings. We observed that the temporal lobe has a critical role in reacting to salient distractors, whereas the parietal and frontal cortices seem to be less important than previously thought.

Coastal communities are growing rapidly and face the challenge of climate change with its implications for resource and livelihood sustainability. Raha et al. advocate for collaboration and co-creation of solutions to mitigate these urgent issues.

Which interventions limit the spread of COVID-19 misinformation online? In an experiment on Facebook Messenger in Kenya and Nigeria, nudges to consider an information’s accuracy worked best.

Ambuehl shows that financial incentives may not be as likely to lead to distorted decision-making as commonly believed.

Measuring rhythm priors in 39 participant groups from 15 countries, the authors find that properties of rhythm representations are common across cultures, while variation from place to place related to local musical traditions exists.

The authors field test the transferability of behavioural science knowledge on promoting COVID-19 booster uptake. Interventions effective in past field work improve uptake, but those deemed effective in surveys measuring intentions or predictions do not.

Van Leeuwen and colleagues demonstrate that chimpanzees use social learning to acquire a skill they failed to innovate, supporting the hypothesis that social learning is necessary for acquiring complex skills after initial innovation.

Using survey data from over 3 million individuals, Geldsetzer et al. present evidence for cardiovascular disease risk factors among individuals living in extreme poverty in low- and middle-income countries.

A longitudinal study over 12 weeks used computational models on behavioural data from seven cognitive tasks while tracking participants’ mood, habits and activities to understand individual variability. The findings revealed that practice and emotional states significantly influenced various aspects of computational phenotypes, suggesting that apparent unreliability might actually uncover previously unnoticed patterns, supporting a dynamic perspective on cognitive diversity within individuals.

This study uses a unique dataset with intracranial electroencephalography recordings from 18 neurosurgical patients performing a visual search task to uncover neuronal network dynamics and brain regions associated with attentional capture.

We can coordinate multiple muscles for movement, but can we do the same for attention? Using human functional MRI, Ritz and Shenhav found that the frontoparietal cortex independently encodes task-relevant stimulus features, enabling coordinated cognitive control.

Developmental language disorder is a common neurodevelopmental disorder whose adverse impacts continue into adulthood, but its neural bases have been unclear. This systematic review and meta-analysis identified and synthesized neuroanatomical studies of developmental language disorder using co-localization likelihood estimation.

The authors use several computational methods to investigate genetics signatures of assortative mating across behavioural and psychiatric traits, identifying signals for traits such as alcohol consumption traits, major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder and Tourette syndrome, as well as complex interactions between assortative mating, socioeconomic status and participation bias.

In this Stage 2 Registered Report, Lin et al. report that people can learn to value effort and that this valuation can generalize to unfamiliar and unrewarded tasks.