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Gomez-Lievano and colleagues develop a new theory of scaling in cities — how the prevalence of phenomena such as education and crime changes with population size — by unifying models of economic complexity and cultural evolution.
He and colleagues show that attention plays a key role in anchoring visual orientation in 3D space. The effect of attention was contingent on the ground being visible, suggesting our terrestrial visual system is best served by its ecological niche.
The authors asked human participants to listen to and imitate randomly generated drumming sequences from each other. Participants turned initially random sequences into rhythmically structured patterns that are characterized by all six statistical universals found in world music.
Koizumi and colleagues show that it is possible to reduce fear without explicit representations of feared objects by pairing rewards with activation patterns in the visual cortex that represent a conditioned stimulus, while participants remain unaware of the purpose of the procedure.
Decreases in pathogen prevalence in the US and the UK over the past several decades are linked to reduced gender inequality. These shifts in rates of infectious disease precede shifts in gender inequality, suggesting a causal link.
Faces are positioned in a statistical distribution of faces extracted from the environment. Social inferences from faces (for example, trustworthiness) arise from the statistical position of faces in this learned distribution.
