Articles in 2018

We rapidly make inferences about the moral character of others. Observing a single immoral behaviour is often sufficient to make us think of them as morally ‘unworthy’. But our beliefs about others’ ‘badness’ (as opposed to ‘goodness’) are more uncertain. That is, we allow ourselves more space to re-assess and, if needed, rectify these beliefs.

In 2017, Catalonia unilaterally declared independence from Spain. The independence push was not simply a bottom-up process wherein citizens increasingly demanded independence. Catalan political elites were more radical than voters and competitive outbidding to win hegemony in the pro-independence camp fuelled the independence push.

Analyses of data from 211 independent, randomized controlled trials (N = 16,198,595) show that second-order normative beliefs—community members’ belief that saving energy helps the environment—play a critical role in promoting energy conservation.

Siegel et al. describe an asymmetric Bayesian updating mechanism for moral impression formation, which shows that beliefs about badly behaved agents are more uncertain and therefore more flexible than beliefs about well-behaved agents.

Gerlach and colleagues harness the power of big data to address the question of whether individuals can be reliably classified into personality types and how many types exist. The authors identify four different personality types, which surface across data sets.

Replication studies determine both the validity of scientific conclusions and provide insights into the type of methods and reporting that are necessary for robust results.

How the brain processes parallel streams of information has been widely researched, yet remains unsolved. A new study shows that the brain processes informative cues in serial even when they are presented simultaneously, and that patterns of cortical activity shift under the constraints of rapid decisions to optimize processing.

Years of research has shown that children do not learn words at random, but in distinct patterns. Why do we observe the patterns that we do? By using network science and investigating the words that children don’t learn, researchers have potentially uncovered a general property of word learning as a process of gap forming and filling.

In line with the principle of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’, advantaged individuals recognize their privileged position and work to avoid collapsing a common pool resource, but they will not accept excessive free-riding by poorer individuals.

Thomas and colleagues show that toddlers preferred a puppet that had won a conflict against another puppet—but only when it won without using force. This suggests that toddlers consider social status when making social evaluations.

As children grow, so does their knowledge of language. Sizemore et al. describe knowledge gaps, manifesting as topological cavities, in toddlers’ growing semantic network. These gaps progress similarly, independent of the order in which children learn words.

In a compound climate change dilemma that allows some to earn a pre-game advantage, advantaged participants act prosocially later to maintain a public good, but the disadvantaged act antisocially, creating conflict that reduces cooperative success.

People differ in how they cope with task complexity and time constraints. Eldar et al. use magnetoencephalography to show that these differences can be explained by the temporal organization of a neural information integration process.

Network neuroscience has begun to generate fundamental insights into the structures and dynamics that lie beneath human cognition. Targeting the question what creates differences between humans, a study finds that individual differences in connectivity patterns in brain networks underlie individual differences in task performance.

Mental effort is traditionally a subject of psychological research. Kool and Botvinick discuss how recent attempts to study mental effort using concepts from behavioural economics have allowed researchers to better understand how costs and benefits drive when people invest mental effort.

Brain networks are characterized by nodes and hubs that determine information flow within and between areas. Bertolero et al. show that task-driven changes to hub and node connectivity increase modularity and improve cognitive performance.