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Damage to a specific part of the brain in the frontal cortex reveals its necessity in effortful actions that help other people. These findings could have implications for understanding and treating disorders of social behaviour.
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.
For patients affected by speech disorders, brain–machine-interface (BMI) devices could restore their ability to verbally communicate. In this work, we captured neural activity associated with internal speech — words said within the mind with no associated movement or audio output — and translated these cortical signals into text in real time.
The impetus behind the development of various Chinese dialects is as yet unknown. In a comprehensive quantitative coanalysis of linguistic and genetic data across China, Yang et al. find evidence to suggest that demographic diffusion, cultural diffusion and linguistic assimilation all contributed to the expansive diversity of Chinese dialects.
Humans are unusually adept at endurance running, due in part to specialized muscle fibres and heat elimination by sweating. Cost–benefit analyses and an ethnohistorical survey of hunting methods suggest that these features could have evolved through the pursuit of evasive species until they are overcome with exhaustion and easily dispatched.
Kozyreva et al. review evidence from individual-level interventions for fighting online misinformation featured in 81 scientific papers. They classify the interventions in nine different types and summarize their findings in a toolbox.
Long ties that bridge socially separate regions of networks are critical for the spread of contagions, such as innovations or adoptions of new norms. Contrary to previous thinking, long ties have now been found to accelerate social contagions, even for behaviours that involve the social reinforcement of adoption by network neighbours.
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.
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.
The past 35 years have seen Bayesian models applied to many areas of the cognitive and brain sciences, which suggests that reasoning and decision-making may be rational. Wishful thinking provides a serious challenge, as it questions a core assumption of Bayesian belief updating. Melnikoff and Strohminger develop a Bayesian model that uses affective prediction errors and meets this challenge.
Fast neuromodulator release was measured in patients undergoing awake brain surgery while they played an economic game with human and computer players. The findings show that dopamine and serotonin track social context and value statistics.
Whether conservatives or liberals have higher sensitivity towards underrepresentation depends on the target of the judgement: conservatives are shown to have higher thresholds than liberals for indicating bias against traditionally nondominant groups, whereas liberals have higher bias thresholds regarding dominant groups. However, such relationships weaken when the targets of bias are unknown or ideologically irrelevant to the observer, which emphasizes the context-dependency of such bias judgements.
In this Perspective, Fjell and Walhovd argue that, to account for considerable interindividual variability in sleep need, future research must consider environmental, individual and situational factors when studying the impact of sleep on cognitive and brain health.
Time is running out to prevent our closest living relatives—the great apes—from being driven to extinction at our own hands. Mitani et al. advocate for substantial changes to policy and research practices before it is too late.
Using large-scale global positioning system (GPS) mobility data, we examined the feasibility and societal impact of the ‘15-minute city’ model across US urban areas. Our findings highlight the environmental benefits of localized living but also its risk of intensifying socioeconomic segregation.
The sense of belonging to a larger group is a central feature of humanity but its identification in Palaeolithic societies is challenging. Baker et al. use a pan-European dataset of personal ornaments to show that these markers of group identity form distinct clusters that cannot be explained simply by geographical proximity or shared biological descent.
Leveraging over 2,000 data sessions from a citizen science website, this large-scale exploratory research study revealed demographic (age, sex and daily computer usage) and task features (task enjoyment and baseline movement times) that predicted the extent of successful sensorimotor adaptation in participants’ reaching movements after a visuomotor perturbation.
Aguinis et al. review the literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR) at the individual level of analysis and propose a framework for organizing research around three categories: CSR perceptions, CSR attitudes and CSR actions.
Rising diagnoses of depression in young people is an important concern. Remote measurement technologies are one way that practitioners can screen, monitor or support young people who are diagnosed with depression. In a realist review, Walsh and colleagues show that there is some benefit to using remote measurement technologies, but that young people express concerns about data safety and privacy.
The authors address the central criticism of latent variable models in behavioural science, which is that a wide range of causal models may account for the observed data (the factor indeterminacy problem). They review how researchers have recently started using genome-wide data to provide a source of additional information to help to overcome the factor indeterminacy problem by decomposing the genome into a set of uncorrelated units.