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Vassiliadis et al. use transcranial temporal interference stimulation—a non-invasive deep brain stimulation technique—to show that stimulation of the striatum applied at 80 Hz disrupts the ability to learn from reinforcement feedback.
Genome-wide analyses reveal a deep history of musical instruments and specialized vocabulary among Central African hunter-gatherers and the long-term cultural interconnectivity of these groups before and after the Bantu expansion.
By combining advanced mathematical modelling with data from a rare sample of patients with brain damage, the authors show that a specific part of the brain in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is associated with putting in effort to help other people.
A mathematical model of the evolution and development of hominin brain size suggests that the evolution of a larger brain size in humans may have been driven by changes in developmental constraints rather than selection for brain size.
A randomized controlled trial of a nurse-led 911 triage programme in Washington, DC, by Wilson et al. finds that the programme improves the use of ambulance services and helps connect non-emergency callers with primary care.
Testing two families of large language models (LLMs) (GPT and LLaMA2) on a battery of measurements spanning different theory of mind abilities, Strachan et al. find that the performance of LLMs can mirror that of humans on most of these tasks. The authors explored potential reasons for this.
Using foraging theory and ethnohistoric data, the authors’ analysis supports the hypothesis that the human ability to sweat while running long distances evolved in the context of persistent, endurance-based pursuits of game.
Wandelt et al. describe a brain–machine interface that captures intracortical neural activity during internal speech (words said within the mind with no associated movement or audio output) and translates those cortical signals into real-time text.
By digitizing a large lexical dataset of Chinese dialects and comparing it to genetic profiles, Yang et al. reveal a hybrid model of language diffusion, consisting of both population migrations and social learning across different regions of China.
Using a computational model to quantify difficulty in reconstructing images from compressed codes, Lin et al. show that reconstruction errors interface perception and memory by modulating how well images are encoded.
How do we orient ourselves in space? Using electroencephalography and intracranial electroencephalography, Griffiths et al. identify a complex network of brain regions that track head direction in free-moving human participants.
This study examines individuals with autoimmune limbic encephalitis, a condition that impairs the hippocampus, to understand how they evaluate rewards and efforts in uncertain scenarios compared to healthy controls. The findings reveal that while patients with autoimmune limbic encephalitis retain their sensitivity to uncertainty, their capability to assess rewards and efforts is notably diminished when uncertainty is a factor.
The authors introduce Ouvrai, an open-source solution that facilitates the design and execution of remote virtual reality studies, capitalizing on the surge in virtual reality headset ownership.
How is contagion affected by changes to network structure? Recent work has claimed a ‘weakness of long ties’ for complex contagions that rely on social reinforcement, unlike biological contagions. Eckles et al. substantially revise this conclusion.
In this Article, Ma et al. show, across a series of experiments, that time and memorability (the probability of recalling a visual stimulus) mutually influence one another, suggesting that time is a feature of visual processing that is intrinsic to perceptual experience.
In support of an evolutionary model that links distaste, disgust and socio-moral processes, Gan et al. use functional magnetic resonance imaging to develop a neuromarker for subjective core disgust that generalizes to oral distaste and unfairness.
In 653,790 individuals, this multi-ancestral meta-analysis of tobacco use disorder finds 461 potential risk genes and hundreds of associations with health outcomes, showcasing the utility of electronic health records for genetic research.
This pre-registered systematic review and multilevel meta-analysis examined the effects of receiving touch for promoting mental and physical well-being, quantifying the efficacy of touch interventions for different ways of administration.