Reviews & Analysis

Our study successfully tracks salient distracting signals in high-frequency activity obtained from human intracranial recordings. We observed that the temporal lobe has a critical role in reacting to salient distractors, whereas the parietal and frontal cortices seem to be less important than previously thought.

Financial incentives may be offered for risky but potentially life-saving actions, such as donating organs and participation in medical trials. It has been argued that such incentives could distort decision making and lead people to act against their own best interest. However, experimental evidence now suggests that higher financial incentives do not cause harm.

The past 35 years have seen Bayesian models applied to many areas of the cognitive and brain sciences, which suggests that reasoning and decision-making may be rational. Wishful thinking provides a serious challenge, as it questions a core assumption of Bayesian belief updating. Melnikoff and Strohminger develop a Bayesian model that uses affective prediction errors and meets this challenge.

Fast neuromodulator release was measured in patients undergoing awake brain surgery while they played an economic game with human and computer players. The findings show that dopamine and serotonin track social context and value statistics.

Whether conservatives or liberals have higher sensitivity towards underrepresentation depends on the target of the judgement: conservatives are shown to have higher thresholds than liberals for indicating bias against traditionally nondominant groups, whereas liberals have higher bias thresholds regarding dominant groups. However, such relationships weaken when the targets of bias are unknown or ideologically irrelevant to the observer, which emphasizes the context-dependency of such bias judgements.

In this Perspective, Fjell and Walhovd argue that, to account for considerable interindividual variability in sleep need, future research must consider environmental, individual and situational factors when studying the impact of sleep on cognitive and brain health.

Time is running out to prevent our closest living relatives—the great apes—from being driven to extinction at our own hands. Mitani et al. advocate for substantial changes to policy and research practices before it is too late.

Using large-scale global positioning system (GPS) mobility data, we examined the feasibility and societal impact of the ‘15-minute city’ model across US urban areas. Our findings highlight the environmental benefits of localized living but also its risk of intensifying socioeconomic segregation.

The sense of belonging to a larger group is a central feature of humanity but its identification in Palaeolithic societies is challenging. Baker et al. use a pan-European dataset of personal ornaments to show that these markers of group identity form distinct clusters that cannot be explained simply by geographical proximity or shared biological descent.

Leveraging over 2,000 data sessions from a citizen science website, this large-scale exploratory research study revealed demographic (age, sex and daily computer usage) and task features (task enjoyment and baseline movement times) that predicted the extent of successful sensorimotor adaptation in participants’ reaching movements after a visuomotor perturbation.

Aguinis et al. review the literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR) at the individual level of analysis and propose a framework for organizing research around three categories: CSR perceptions, CSR attitudes and CSR actions.

Rising diagnoses of depression in young people is an important concern. Remote measurement technologies are one way that practitioners can screen, monitor or support young people who are diagnosed with depression. In a realist review, Walsh and colleagues show that there is some benefit to using remote measurement technologies, but that young people express concerns about data safety and privacy.

The authors address the central criticism of latent variable models in behavioural science, which is that a wide range of causal models may account for the observed data (the factor indeterminacy problem). They review how researchers have recently started using genome-wide data to provide a source of additional information to help to overcome the factor indeterminacy problem by decomposing the genome into a set of uncorrelated units.

Aggregate demand for interpersonal skills in the Australian labour market has accelerated since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, there has been a high degree of complementarity between remote work and demand for interpersonal skills during this period.

Hatzenbuehler et al. argue that cognitive neuroscience should take more interest in the consequences of social inequality, and discuss various research methods for accomplishing this goal.

Policy proposals with the most votes may not always be the most informative. A research paper now makes the case that divisive issues — those that receive much support but also much opposition — provide valuable information in democratic deliberative processes, as they help to detect relevant demands that would not emerge via agreement rankings.

Using a large dataset of individuals from Early Neolithic Europe, we analysed DNA, diet and pathology to determine which factors most affected skeletal height. We found that the male–female height differences in north-central Europe were exceptionally large, and that the short stature of female individuals in this region possibly reflects a cultural preference to support male individuals. By contrast, in the Mediterranean, it is male individuals who were short, probably as a consequence of environmental stress.

Air pollution is a leading cause of death in the USA, with substantial disparities in its effect on different racial and ethnic groups. Ma et al. used nationwide data on air pollution and cardiovascular-disease mortality rates, and find that air pollution disproportionately effects non-Hispanic Black people compared to non-Hispanic white people.

In this Perspective, the authors examine the psychological factors that shape attitudes towards AI tools, while also investigating strategies to overcome resistance when AI systems offer clear benefits.

Artificial intelligence tools and systems are increasingly influencing human culture. Brinkmann et al. argue that these ‘intelligent machines’ are transforming the fundamental processes of cultural evolution: variation, transmission and selection.