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Humans use supernatural beliefs as tools for explanation. These explanations are more likely to focus on natural phenomena than social phenomena, according to this quantitative analysis of ethnographic text across 114 societies.
Vives et al. show that uncertainty-averse individuals represent semantic concepts in a more separated form at both psychological and neural levels. As a consequence, uncertainty-averse individuals exhibit reduced semantic interference but also poorer generalization.
This umbrella review of meta-analytic evidence reveals that previously reported benefits of physical exercise on cognitive function may have been exaggerated. The authors emphasize the importance of obtaining stronger evidence to confirm the causal relationship between regular physical exercise and enhancements in cognitive functioning.
Aquino et al. show using human brain recordings that the pre-supplementary motor area encodes an integrated utility signal for each choice option and, subsequently, the decision itself.
In a preregistered experiment, participants were randomly assigned to receive information about the endorsement of Joe Biden by the scientific journal Nature during the COVID-19 pandemic. The results suggest that this endorsement affected polarized trust in scientific expertise and caused large reductions in stated trust in Nature among Trump supporters.
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.
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.
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.
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.