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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.
By linking data from a 40-year birth cohort study with multiple administrative databases, the authors show that 20% of the population accounts for close to 80% of economic burden. Strikingly, this group can be predicted with high accuracy from as early as 3 years old.
Confronting fears is a core component of cognitive behavioural therapies for anxiety disorders, but also a major hurdle for patients. A new study introduces a method for reducing defensive responses without consciously confronting the threatening cues, paving the way for fear-reducing therapies via unconscious processing.
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.
Every time we make a choice, we maintain an explicit representation of our confidence in that choice. Using eye-tracking and behavioural measures, the authors show that tracking decision uncertainty is helpful in guiding future behaviour.
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.
