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The authors use a computational model of word recognition to show that adults’ interpretation of young children’s speech depends heavily on beliefs about what children are likely to say.
A genome-wide association study of cerebral ventricle phenotypes finds 62 unique loci and reveals a genetic overlap between ventricular and neuropsychiatric traits.
Hardy and co-authors present a resampling strategy in social networks that is effective at reducing bias amplification while maintaining the benefits of information sharing.
Tu et al. show that the medial-dorsal thalamic nucleus and its connectivity with the anterior cingulate cortex preferentially encode pain in humans and rats.
Using data on violence-related injuries in more than 3,500 excavated skeletons, Baten et al. reconstruct violence trends in the ancient Middle East from 12,000 to 400 bce, expanding the early history of conflict.
Fjell et al. analysed multiple large-scale longitudinal MRI datasets and found no evidence for an association of sleep duration and brain atrophy, suggesting that normal brains promote adequate sleep.
Kutter et al. show that neurons in the human brain encode small numbers (up to 4) more precisely than large numbers, indicating a distinction between a small-number subitizing system and a large-number estimation system.
The authors find that psychological responses towards representations of robots fall into three dimensions: positive, negative and competence. They also examine their individual difference predictors.
By examining patterns in public-facing communications of US politicians, the authors identify two honesty-related concepts: belief speaking and fact speaking. They find that for Republicans, but not Democrats, an increase of belief speaking is associated with a decrease in the quality of the shared content sources.
Using a set of experiments, the authors show that discrimination reduces work effort of those who are disadvantaged and those who are advantaged by it.
In a series of human functional MRI studies, Zhang et al. find that the activation of two brain areas typically involved in language comprehension reflects working memory of social semantics rather than general semantic or syntactic processing.
Ferguson et al. test the effectiveness of messages designed to increase rates of repeat blood donation and find that warm-glow feelings as a motivation for cooperation cool over time but can be reactivated.
Lackner et al. show that individuals with an intermediate level of science knowledge tend to have overconfidence in their own knowledge and negative attitudes to science.
In this study of bird biodiversity data from across 195 US cities, Ellis-Soto et al. show that historical redlining is associated with increasing inequality in sampling. Historically redlined neighbourhoods remain the most undersampled areas.
McKee et al. show that deep reinforcement learning can be used to learn a new and effective strategy for encouraging mutually beneficial cooperation in a network game.
Hopp et al. probe the neural (dis)unity of moral foundations theory and report that each moral foundation recruits domain-general mechanisms of social cognition but also has a dissociable neural signature malleable by sociomoral experience.
In a study of 28 European Union member states, Wolfowicz et al. found that increased levels of terrorism-related arrests and convictions are associated with decreases in terrorism. However, evidence concerning the role of more severe punishment was mixed.
This study of monthly mortality records in the United States during 2001–2016 shows that Black people shouldered a higher mortality burden from PM2.5-related heart disease than non-Hispanic white people despite overall reductions in pollution levels.