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The authors use a computational data-driven approach to study the determinants of conscious processing of human faces. They show that the speed at which a face reaches conscious awareness depends on its perceived power or dominance.
The authors use large, real-world guessing competition datasets to test whether accuracy can be improved by aggregating repeated estimates by the same individual. They find that estimates do improve, but substantially less than with between-person aggregation.
Two surveys of a large cohort of US parents find that concerns about purity and liberty are strongly associated with vaccine hesitancy. This suggests that vaccination campaigns may be more effective by targeting these moral values.
In two neuroimaging studies, Nam et al. find that amygdala volume is associated with individual preferences to maintain (versus change) the societal status quo.
Personality traits differ across geographical regions, suggesting a role for environmental factors. Wei, Lu, and colleagues show an association between regional ambient temperature and personality in two large studies conducted in China and the United States.
Nook et al. show that emotion concept representations develop from a monodimensional focus on positive versus negative valence in childhood to multidimensional organization in adulthood. This expansion is facilitated by increasing verbal knowledge.
By alternately exciting and inhibiting fronto-striatal pathways in the brain as participants listen to music, the authors are able to show causal evidence that this system mediates both affective and motivational responses to music.
Nielsen and colleagues’ analysis of a large database of medical research papers shows a correlation between women’s authorship and the likelihood of a study including gender and sex analysis.
Cao et al. demonstrate that people systematically rely on social base rates when making judgements about individuals, even when these base rates are statistically irrelevant. The authors show that multiple remedies are required to eliminate this bias of base rate intrusion.
Interpreting complex scenes requires selective filtering of visual information. Using ‘meaning maps’, Henderson and Hayes demonstrate that meaning, rather than salience, primarily guides visual attention within a scene.
Using the 2014 New York Police Department slowdown as a natural experiment, the authors show that civilian complaints of major crime decreased during and after reductions in proactive policing, which challenges existing research on the topic.
There are striking similarities among creole languages. Blasi et al. show that these similarities can in fact be explained by the same processes as for non-creole languages, the difference being that creoles have more than one language in their ancestry.
Gächter et al. use experiments and simulations to show that low levels of cooperation (the ‘tragedy of the commons’) are systematically more likely in maintaining a public good than in providing a new one, even under identical incentives.
Testolin et al. develop a computational model of letter perception based on deep learning and show that domain-general visual knowledge extracted from natural scenes is recycled for learning domain-specific cultural artefacts, such as printed letters.
Global groundwater resources are threatened by over-extraction. An agent-based model is presented, incorporating cooperative and collective action theory that reveals tipping points in social attitudes toward conservation in three at-risk regions.
Gervais et al. present evidence from 13 different countries that shows intuitive moral distrust of atheists is pervasive, even among atheists themselves.
In a model that varies the cost of deliberation, a range of cooperative strategies involving strategic ignorance and Bayesian learning can evolve, including dual-process defectors, who intuitively defect, but may choose to cooperate.
Using resting-state fMRI, Marquand et al. estimate striatal connection topographies in humans and find correspondence with those predicted from primate tracing studies. Individual variation in connectivity is predictive of several goal-directed behaviours.
How does the neurotransmitter dopamine and Parkinson’s disease (PD) affect decision-making under uncertainty? Vilares and Kording find that dopamine levels, which are affected by PD and the drugs used for its treatment, influence reliance on new versus prior information in decision-making.
Spitzer et al. investigate the neural and computational mechanisms involved in weighting, integrating and comparing numbers. They find systematic overweighting of larger numbers, which is reflected in stronger neural signals over the parietal cortex.