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.
How can we help people tell truth and lies apart? Verschuere et al. find that a simple heuristic that instructs people to use only the level of detail in a message, and nothing else, increases deception detection rates.
Partners are often similar in traits, such as their education and political views, but it is unclear what exactly causes this similarity. Using Mendelian randomization and data on 50,000 partner pairs, the authors show that similarity in different traits can be explained by partner choice, confounding factors and convergence over time.
Williams et al. show that structural and functional brain asymmetry is already seen in the newborn brain, but that adult patterns of brain asymmetry are not fully developed.
Using data on roughly half a million cases and 10,000 judges from Pakistan and India, Mehmood et al. estimate the impact of the Ramadan fasting ritual on criminal sentencing decisions. They find that fasting increases judicial leniency and reduces reversals of decisions in higher courts.
Muslimova et al. examine polygenic indices (PGIs) for cardiovascular disease and education and find unstable rankings across PGIs. Rank concordance is driven by discovery sample size and is linked to the explained variance of PGIs.
The authors use three latent-state learning tasks to test how people approximate the complexities of the external world with simplified internal representations that generalize to novel examples or situations. They show that behaviour can be captured by a model combining prototype representations with goal-oriented discriminative attention.
Against the backdrop of the world expansion of education and changes in parents’ educational pairing patterns, Hu and Qian provide global evidence on the importance of gender and the mother in intergenerational educational mobility.
Can individuals be motivated to accurately identify misinformation? Across four experiments, Rathje et al. provide support for financial incentives improving accuracy, and reducing partisan bias in judgements of political news headlines.
Xie et al. combine intracranial recording, brain stimulation and lesion case study to show that the human medial temporal lobe is involved in the quality of short-term memory representation.
Temporally ordered, anatomically distributed and joint neural encoding of linguistic features reveals a cumulative mapping of sound to meaning, providing empirical evidence for validating neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic models of spoken word recognition.
Kopal and colleagues built computational bridges between rare CNVs in a clinical dataset and their deep phenotypic profiling in ~40,000 UK Biobank participants. Results show that CNVs are associated with many organ systems across the entire body.
In a study examining 24 US policy issues and 48 persuasive information treatments, the authors find no evidence that US partisans’ receptivity to persuasive information is diminished by countervailing cues from favoured party leaders.
Mathieson et al. carried out a genome-wide association study of reproductive success (number of children born) in humans, revealing the importance of diverse neuro-endocrine and behavioural factors.
Current machine learning language algorithms make adjacent word-level predictions. In this work, Caucheteux et al. show that the human brain probably uses long-range and hierarchical predictions, taking into account up to eight possible words into the future.
An analysis of 52 million births in 26 countries shows small reductions in preterm birth during the first to third months of lockdown. Further research is needed to examine causal pathways.
In a series of experiments, Jangraw et al. show that people’s mood declines over time in common psychological tasks and during rest periods, but not in freely chosen behaviours.
Silverman et al. find that Black, Latinx and Indigenous (BLI) students receive lower grades than non-BLI students with similar patterns of motivation. This inequitable motivational payoff is linked to teachers’ racially biased beliefs about students.
Yeo et al. use digital data on student behaviour (Wi-Fi connections and Learning Management System logins) to examine associations between sleep and academic outcomes.
This meta-analysis examines how genetic variation is associated with neurodevelopmental disorders, their overlap and their co-occurrence with disruptive, impulse control and conduct disorders.