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This study demonstrates the decomposition of an odour compound in olfactory perception and central neural representation and establishes a direct correspondence between the coding of submolecular chemical features and odour quality.
Which interventions limit the spread of COVID-19 misinformation online? In an experiment on Facebook Messenger in Kenya and Nigeria, nudges to consider an information’s accuracy worked best.
Challenging long-held assumptions, this research reveals that people can learn to control bionic hands just as effectively, and in some ways better, using arbitrary control strategies compared with control strategies that mimic the human body.
Developmental language disorder is a common neurodevelopmental disorder whose adverse impacts continue into adulthood, but its neural bases have been unclear. This systematic review and meta-analysis identified and synthesized neuroanatomical studies of developmental language disorder using co-localization likelihood estimation.
The authors field test the transferability of behavioural science knowledge on promoting COVID-19 booster uptake. Interventions effective in past field work improve uptake, but those deemed effective in surveys measuring intentions or predictions do not.
Using survey data from over 3 million individuals, Geldsetzer et al. present evidence for cardiovascular disease risk factors among individuals living in extreme poverty in low- and middle-income countries.
How does the brain support a wide range of behaviours? Mohan et al. examine how the direction of travelling waves of neural oscillations coordinates interactions between brain regions to support different functional processes in memory.
We can coordinate multiple muscles for movement, but can we do the same for attention? Using human functional MRI, Ritz and Shenhav found that the frontoparietal cortex independently encodes task-relevant stimulus features, enabling coordinated cognitive control.
Van Leeuwen and colleagues demonstrate that chimpanzees use social learning to acquire a skill they failed to innovate, supporting the hypothesis that social learning is necessary for acquiring complex skills after initial innovation.
Measuring rhythm priors in 39 participant groups from 15 countries, the authors find that properties of rhythm representations are common across cultures, while variation from place to place related to local musical traditions exists.
Conservatives show higher bias thresholds towards underrepresentation of non-dominant groups, while liberals do for dominant ones. This relationship weakens if bias targets are unknown or irrelevant, highlighting context-dependency in bias judgements.
In this article, Batten and colleagues measure fast neurotransmitter release in patients undergoing awake brain surgery. As volunteers play an economic game with human and computer partners, dopamine and serotonin track social context and value statistics.
People often believe what they want to believe rather than what the evidence implies. Here Melnikoff and Strohminger find that this seemingly irrational tendency may emerge from fully rational Bayesian calculations.
Zhao et al. find that children exhibit greater honesty after having been trusted by adults. The findings validate philosophical conjectures and offer practical strategies to foster honesty in children by nurturing adult trust.
In 2021, the United States provided an unconditional child allowance to most families with children. Using anonymized mobile-location and debit/credit card data, the authors find that the benefits increased spending at childcare centres, health- and personal-care establishments, and grocery stores.
Using intracranial EEG in human participants, the authors identify a functionally distinct set of brain regions which exhibited characteristic signatures of decision formation independently of the motor action associated with the choice.
The authors document wide variation in information density and speed of communication across the world’s languages. They find that higher-density languages communicate information more quickly but with more sustained focus than lower-density languages.
Brus et al. show that modulation of slow oscillatory neural activity with non-invasive electrical stimulation of the prefrontal cortex can be used to modulate top-down control and behavioural performance in non-spatial attention.
The authors use several computational methods to investigate genetics signatures of assortative mating across behavioural and psychiatric traits, identifying signals for traits such as alcohol consumption traits, major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder and Tourette syndrome, as well as complex interactions between assortative mating, socioeconomic status and participation bias.