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Politicians and law enforcement officials have advocated the militarization of local law enforcement on the grounds that it promotes public and officer safety, and some early research seemingly supported those claims. Two new studies reveal limitations in the data used in this prior work. When these issues are addressed, evidence for the benefits of militarization largely vanishes.
A study in Nature Human Behaviour proposes a biologically plausible algorithm producing near-optimal behaviour in uncertain and volatile environments through computational imprecision. A complementary study in the same issue shows that, depending on context, uncertainty itself guides different decisions and is differentially represented in the brain.
From aardvark to zyzzyva, the world we live in is rich and complex. How is this diversity of objects represented in the human mind? Through an experimental and computational tour de force, Hebart et al. show that people share a mental representation of objects based on a small number of meaningful dimensions.
Perceptions of numerosity, duration and distance play fundamental roles in our behaviour and in our thinking, but how we perceive these abstract quantities is a mystery. Cheyette and Piantadosi provide a model that explains both new and long-standing experimental results on the accuracy and speed with which human subjects report the numerosity of a visible set.
Probabilistic mixture models have contributed significantly to advancements in visual working memory research in recent decades. In a new paper, Schurgin and colleagues revisit the basic assumptions of mixture models and suggest that we cannot understand memory without first considering perception.
Electrical stimulation of the human cortex, undertaken for brain surgery, triggers percepts and feelings. A new study documents an ordering principle to these effects: the farther removed from sensory input or motor output structures, the less likely it is that a region contributes to consciousness.
Stroke can lead to debilitating consequences, including loss of language. An important goal of stroke research is to use machine learning to predict outcomes and response to therapy. A new study compares different approaches to predicting post-stroke outcomes and highlights the need for systematic optimization and validation to ultimately translate scientific insights to clinical settings.
Human culture is unique. Or is it? A new study reveals unexpected cultural diversity in the fine-grained details of chimpanzee termite fishing behaviour. These novel findings shed light on the richness of chimpanzee cultural diversity and reveal a narrower gap between the cultures of humans and other apes.
How do we effectively process the information arriving to our senses to make adaptive decisions and behave appropriately, and which brain areas are responsible? A new study combines multimodal noninvasive neuroimaging in humans to reveal the anatomical locus of efficient sensory evidence accumulation.
Regular physical exercise has been proposed as a cost-effective strategy for keeping our brains sharp, but it remains unclear how we can optimise the cognitive benefits of long-term exercise. New findings inform us how exercise intensity, progression and type can increase expected cognitive gains and how this differs by sex.
Although disease dynamics of prey are influenced by predator behaviour, little is known about the potential effects of wide-ranging post-industrial hunters. Mysterud et al. describe the movement behaviour of Norwegian hunters using more than 165,000 hunting records from 2001–2017, showing that hunters migrate to and from areas of high prey density, potentially moving pathogens into previously unaffected areas.
When making economic decisions, our choices are often influenced by irrelevant information. One prominent explanation appeals to normalisation in neural circuits. A new paper by Gluth and colleagues suggests that instead, attentional processes may be responsible.
Motivated control processes help us optimize our behaviour to deal with competing task demands: seeking rewards while minimizing the associated effort. A new study in Nature Human Behaviour argues that the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, a key contributor to motivated control, tracks a computational quantity akin to surprise that is generated when events differ from our expectations.
