Articles in 2018

There is a widespread misconception that drug use is rife in the US–Mexico border area, particularly in Mexican states. But with a dirth of available epidemiological data, we have to be careful about the conclusions we draw, argues Guilherme Borges.

How to establish causal links is a central question across scientific disciplines. Marinescu and colleagues describe methods from empirical economics and how they could be adapted across fields, for example, to psychology and neuroscience, to test causality.

A century after being predicted by theory, the authors detect and quantify the genomic signature of assortative mating in ~400,000 contemporary human genomes, and report new genetic evidence for assortative mating on height and educational attainment.

Learning analytics is a novel educational research approach that uses data to help us understand and improve the learning process. Xavier Ochoa explains how Latin America is the perfect showcase for all that learning analytics has to offer in the arena of education.

McGovern and co-workers combine human brain signal measurements underlying decision formation with computational modelling to probe age-related differences in perceptual decision-making.

When searching for rewards in complex, unfamiliar environments, it is often impossible to explore all options. Wu et al. show how a combination of generalization and optimistic sampling guides efficient human exploration in complex environments.

As adoption of registered reports is growing, two pieces in this issue take stock, providing recommendations and outlining next steps. We complement these pieces with practical advice on how to prepare a successful stage 1 submission.

Sequence learning — how we learn that one event or item follows another — has been studied mostly focusing on the effects of relatively simple relationships between elements. Using network science, a new study shows that in complex probabilistic sequences, some relationships are more easily learned than others.

Bentz et al. estimate the phylogenetic signals of environmental factors and population size on more than 6,000 phylogenetic trees of 46 language families and find that environment influences the evolution of language families beyond neutral drift.

The field of behaviour change suffers from significant fragmentation and poor reporting. Here, we describe two large-scale initiatives — the Human Behaviour Change Project and Science of Behavior Change programme — that aim to introduce complementary systematic and rigorous methods to advance the science of behaviour change.

Kahn et al. show that learners capitalize on higher-order topological properties when they learn a probabilistic motor sequence based on a network traversal.

Smithers et al. find that, although there is some evidence that non-cognitive skills are associated with improved academic, psychosocial and health outcomes, the evidence is weak and heterogeneous. More rigorous research is required in this field.

It is a general principle that we learn from experience, building expectations about the future that then affect perception. A new study focuses on how expectations influence learning about pain and shows that we prioritize information that confirms our prior expectations, leading to a self-perpetuating bias in judging the intensity of pain.

A new study demonstrates a novel research strategy for studying juries, moving inquiry forward more rapidly and efficiently.