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Human behaviour and physiology show cycles of variation. Here, using 241 million observations from 3.3 million women across 109 countries, the authors show that, out of the daily, weekly, seasonal and menstrual cycles, the menstrual cycle had the greatest magnitude for most dimensions of mood, behaviour and vital signs.
Studying behaviour in a decision-making task with multiple features and changing reward functions, Tomov et al. find that a strategy that combines successor features with generalized policy iteration predicts behaviour best.
Using an agent-based model, Tiokhin, Yan and Morgan find that competition for priority harms the reliability of science. Their model highlights several potential solutions, including scoop protection and larger start-up costs for research.
Aydogan and colleagues investigate the association between polygenic risk scores for risky behaviour with variation in grey-matter volume across multiple brain areas.
There is currently a lack of consensus as to why women’s ovulation is concealed. Using an agent-based model, Krems et al. support a female rivalry hypothesis: concealed ovulation may have allowed women to avoid same-sex aggression.
Combining mobile tracking data and a survey experiment, Munzert et al. show that Germany’s contact tracing app is underused by those who socially distance less; however, even small cash incentives increased app uptake in the cohort.
When generating an informal shortlist for a role in a male-dominant domain (for example, technology executive), making the shortlist longer increases the inclusion of female candidates on the list.
Using data from a large UK police force, Vomfell and Stewart examine ethnic bias in decisions to stop and search individuals. They find that both officer bias and biased patrolling decisions contribute to the over-searching of ethnic minorities.
Bahrami et al. identify substantial polygenic overlap between major depressive disorder and general intelligence. Despite low genetic correlation, the authors singled out 92 genomic loci shared by the two phenotypes, with a mixture of allelic effect directions.
By varying the presence of different building blocks in a computational model, Jackson et al. reverse-engineer the architecture for controlled semantic cognition and test this model against evidence from anatomy, neuropsychology and functional imaging.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, suicide rates in Japan declined by 14% during the initial wave (February to June 2020) but increased by 16% in the second wave (July to October 2020), with a larger increase (37%) among females.
Herle et al. provide evidence that common genetic variants associated with BMI are also associated with eating behaviour trajectories in childhood, supporting the behavioural susceptibility theory of obesity.
Stein and Peelen show that discrimination performance can be used to dissociate conscious and unconscious contributions to detection effects in face perception and attention tasks.
Ma et al. examine why and how crowd synchronization forms spontaneously under different density conditions and what functional benefit synchronization offers for the collective motion of humans.
Wood et al. examine gender differences in Hadza hunter-gatherer spatial behaviour using 2,078 days of GPS-recorded travel. As predicted from principles of foraging ecology, Hadza men walked further per day, explored more land, followed more sinuous paths and were much more likely to be alone.
Alvarez-Rodriguez et al. examine group interactions by means of higher-order social networks. They propose a theoretical framework for studying real-world interactions and provide a case study of collaboration in science and technology.
Models indicate that reciprocity cannot evolve when errors lead to frequent misunderstanding between cooperators. Boyd and Mathew show that third-party arbitration allows reciprocity to thrive even when errors are common and arbitration is imperfect.
Deco et al. use multimodal neuroimaging data to quantify the global workspace as the common ‘functional rich club’ of regions intersecting across seven tasks as well as rest.
Zhang et al. build a cultural phylogeny of historical Islamic sects and schools from the seventh to twentieth centuries and use phylogenetic comparative methods to show that apocalyptic and reincarnation beliefs display distinct relationships with intergroup violence.
Integrating human mobility and activity data with ground-level measurements and air quality models, Shen et al. find that despite a reduction in outdoor PM2.5 during the COVID-19 quarantine in China, overall population exposure to PM2.5 increased.