Articles in 2024

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.

Generative AI tools can quickly translate or summarize large volumes of complex information. This technology could revolutionize the way that we communicate science, but there are many reasons for caution. We asked six experts about the potential and pitfalls of generative AI for science communication.

Effectively engaging with large language models is becoming increasingly vital as they proliferate across research landscapes. This Comment presents a practical guide for understanding their capabilities and limitations, along with strategies for crafting well-structured queries, to extract maximum utility from these artificial intelligence tools.

Being able to deliver a persuasive and informative talk is an essential skill for academics, whether speaking to students, experts, grant funders or the public. Yet formal training on how to structure and deliver an effective talk is rare. In this Comment, we give practical tips to help academics to give great talks to a range of different audiences.

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.

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.

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.

Our understanding of the human past is changing rapidly, and this does not come from new evidence alone. We are seeing an increasing diversity of perspectives among archaeologists, and they are asking new and important questions. But the field still has a long way to go.

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.

Conservatives show higher bias thresholds towards underrepresentation of non-dominant groups, while liberals do for dominant ones. This relationship weakens if bias targets are unknown or irrelevant, highlighting context-dependency in bias judgements.

In this article, Batten and colleagues measure fast neurotransmitter release in patients undergoing awake brain surgery. As volunteers play an economic game with human and computer partners, dopamine and serotonin track social context and value statistics.

People often believe what they want to believe rather than what the evidence implies. Here Melnikoff and Strohminger find that this seemingly irrational tendency may emerge from fully rational Bayesian calculations.

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.

Zhao et al. find that children exhibit greater honesty after having been trusted by adults. The findings validate philosophical conjectures and offer practical strategies to foster honesty in children by nurturing adult trust.

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.

In 2021, the United States provided an unconditional child allowance to most families with children. Using anonymized mobile-location and debit/credit card data, the authors find that the benefits increased spending at childcare centres, health- and personal-care establishments, and grocery stores.

Using intracranial EEG in human participants, the authors identify a functionally distinct set of brain regions which exhibited characteristic signatures of decision formation independently of the motor action associated with the choice.

The authors document wide variation in information density and speed of communication across the world’s languages. They find that higher-density languages communicate information more quickly but with more sustained focus than lower-density languages.