Browse Articles

The authors field test the transferability of behavioural science knowledge on promoting COVID-19 booster uptake. Interventions effective in past field work improve uptake, but those deemed effective in surveys measuring intentions or predictions do not.

Huabing Liu is a counselling psychologist who has worked in universities in the USA and China. She is concerned that students’ worries about mental health stigma stop them from seeking help.

Using survey data from over 3 million individuals, Geldsetzer et al. present evidence for cardiovascular disease risk factors among individuals living in extreme poverty in low- and middle-income countries.

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.

Ambuehl shows that financial incentives may not be as likely to lead to distorted decision-making as commonly believed.

How does the brain support a wide range of behaviours? Mohan et al. examine how the direction of travelling waves of neural oscillations coordinates interactions between brain regions to support different functional processes in memory.

We can coordinate multiple muscles for movement, but can we do the same for attention? Using human functional MRI, Ritz and Shenhav found that the frontoparietal cortex independently encodes task-relevant stimulus features, enabling coordinated cognitive control.

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.