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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.
Whether emotions are universal across cultures is a central question in psychological research. In this study, Cowen et al. show that speech prosody can communicate at least 12 emotions that are recognized across two different cultures.
Holbein et al. report an observational study, a natural experiment and a randomized experiment showing that insufficient sleep reduces prosocial behaviours such as voter turnout, donating to charity and signing petitions.
Flinker and colleagues describe a framework for auditory cortical asymmetries that capitalizes on spectrotemporal modulation space. Data from psychophysics, magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electrocorticography (ECoG) inform a signal processing-based view on lateralization.
Amasino et al. show that when humans decide between earlier or later monetary pay-outs of smaller or larger amounts, patient choices result from processing the information about amount and time successively, focussing first on amounts to be gained.
Pool and colleagues show that Pavlovian conditioning involves learning of different classes of responses: some flexibly adapt to changes in outcome value, whereas others persist even when the outcome is no longer valuable for the individual.
When do groups exhibit collective ‘wisdom’ vs maladaptive ‘herding’? Toyokawa et al. use modelling and experimentation to show that crowd intelligence versus herding can be predicted on the basis of the task and the social learning strategies used.