Volume 3 Issue 2, February 2019

Scientific research on consciousness is critical to multiple scientific, clinical, and ethical issues. The growth of the field could also be beneficial to several areas including neurology and mental health research. To achieve this goal, we need to set funding priorities carefully and address problems such as job creation and potential media misrepresentation.

Privacy regulations for online platforms allow users to control their personal data. But what happens when our private attributes or behaviour can be inferred without our personal data? Researchers reveal that the behaviour of individuals is predictable using only the information provided by their friends in an online social network.

Paranoia is not only a symptom of mental disorder, but may also function as part of normal human psychology. Raihani and Bell review the evidence for an evolutionary account of paranoia in which between-group competition favours the development of psychological mechanisms to avoid social threat.

An individual’s social ties contain up to 95% of the potential predictive accuracy achievable about that individual. In principle, a social platform may therefore profile an individual from their ties only, without access to their data.

Data from three diverse post-conflict societies show that individuals with greater war exposure, several years later, were more likely to participate in religious groups and rituals. This reveals a link from violent conflict to religiosity.

Bocanegra and colleagues present a new variation of the Raven intelligence test, an established measure of cognitive function; better performance on this new version, which allows problem-solving to be externalized, is associated with students’ success in exams.

Michelmann and colleagues investigated how humans search for information in episodic memory. Using MEG, the authors show fast, forward-directed memory replay, with speed changing flexibly depending on the task.

An analysis of all Wikimedia projects shows that a small number of editors have a disproportionately large influence in the formation of collective knowledge.

This scoping review identified, summarized and critiqued 15 ontologies related to human behaviour change. The review finds that no existing ontology covers the breadth of human behaviour change and identifies the need for an intervention ontology.

Adolescents regularly use digital technology, but its impact on their psychological well-being is unclear. Here, the authors examine three large datasets and find only a small negative association: digital technology use explains at most 0.4% of well-being.

When do groups exhibit collective ‘wisdom’ vs maladaptive ‘herding’? Toyokawa et al. use modelling and experimentation to show that crowd intelligence versus herding can be predicted on the basis of the task and the social learning strategies used.