Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Comparing white matter disconnectivity across 12 psychiatric and neurological disorders, this study finds that the connections most important for global communication and network integration are particularly vulnerable to alterations across multiple brain disorders.
A study of genetic associations identifies 46 new loci associated with alcohol consumption. By assessing their function and potential pleiotropy, the authors suggest genetic mechanisms that are shared with neuropsychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia.
Do people think that behaviour is due to genetics, regardless of whether it’s good or bad? Here Lebowitz et al. find that people think prosocial behaviour is more influenced by genetics than antisocial behaviour; this asymmetry seems to be motivated by people’s desire to blame wrongdoers.
Strimling et al. propose a model that explains the connection between ideology and moral opinions, and validate it with 44 years of polling data, confirming that positions connected to harm and fairness are more popular in liberals and become more popular over time.
Neural processing of speech adapts to goal-oriented behaviour. Here, Rutten et al. show that this process already takes place in primary auditory cortex, where task-relevant acoustic information in speech sounds is selectively enhanced.
Jin et al. find that early growth patterns in substitutive systems follow power laws rather than exponentials. Big data analyses reveal key mechanisms governing substitutions, helping to explain the observed power-law early growth.
Why are people more likely to report seeing what they want to see? Leong et al. take a neurocomputational approach to demonstrate that motivational effects on perceptual judgements reflect a bias in both response and perception.
Schmid and Betsch show that countering science denialism as it happens using topic and technique rebuttal reduces the influence of science deniers on attitudes and behaviours.
Anxiety is characterized by altered responses under uncertain conditions. Aylward et al. show that these altered responses are due to anxious individuals updating their behaviour in response to negative outcomes more quickly than non-anxious individuals.
How do people know when others are part of a group? Zhou et al. describe a social interaction field model that quantifies principles governing human perceptions of others’ interactions and accurately predicts human judgements of social grouping in static and dynamic social scenes.
Ziegler et al. show that healthy young adults who used a meditation-inspired closed-loop app (MediTrain) for 6 weeks experienced gains in both sustained attention and working memory.
How does the number of connections a person has online influence how news spreads? Wang et al. show that users with few connections can sometimes spread news more effectively than well-connected users, resulting in long, dendrite-like diffusion paths and a non-Gaussian distribution of node distances.
Korn and Bach show that when humans have to trade off the opportunity to forage with the necessity of avoiding threat, they use a mix of optimal decision-making and heuristics. Hippocampal and medial prefrontal activity reflects these computations.
Early childhood experience with the visual stimulus of Pokémon leads to a new brain representation whose location in high-level visual cortex suggests that the way we look at objects as children determines the functional organization of the cortex.
Simple choices are biased by looking behaviour. This work investigates individual differences in this gaze bias across four datasets and shows that gaze biases are variable and that their strength reliably predicts differences in individuals’ choices.
Grotzinger et al. develop a multivariate method for analysing the joint genetic architectures of complex traits: genomic structural equation modelling. They provide several applications of the method, including a joint analysis of five psychiatric traits.
Zusai and Wu show that a modelling framework that treats subpopulations as the basic unit of analysis and uses a potential game approach provides a tractable way to study the evolutionary dynamics of behaviours and migration in connected populations.
People integrate information over time to make decisions, but they don’t do so optimally. Keung et al. show how distinct aspects of the pupil signal relate to distinct suboptimalities in perceptual decision-making.
While performing a visuospatial task, humans show the tendency to inhale at task onset. Neural processing of the task differs depending on whether participants inhaled or exhaled at task onset, a difference that correlates with performance.