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The corpus of Old English poetry is sparse and fragmented, making its study challenging. Neidorf et al. analyse the whole corpus quantitatively, providing answers to two longstanding questions of English literary history: most likely, a single author composed Beowulf and the anonymous poem Andreas was written by Cynewulf.
Behavioural interventions leverage knowledge from basic research to improve important aspects of life, such as healthy eating. Nature Human Behaviour is committed to working with researchers to disseminate the findings from such important intervention studies as broadly as possible.
Open educational resources enable the effective use and sharing of knowledge with those who have been denied an education due to economic or social circumstances. Sarita Kumar outlines how open educational resources can benefit education systems across the Global South by opening up an entire generation to new ideas, technologies and advancements.
There has been a divide between scientists making recommendations for sustainable natural resource development and the community living around those resources. Masami Nakagawa argues that the community should be considered first, as the successful development of sustainable natural resources requires their cooperation and trust.
Antibiotic resistance is an emerging global danger. Reaching responsible prescribing decisions requires the integration of broad and complex information. Artificial intelligence tools could support decision-making at multiple levels, but building them needs a transparent co-development approach to ensure their adoption upon implementation.
We know that curiosity is a strong driver of behaviour, but we know relatively little about its underlying motives. A new study shows that human curiosity may be driven by diverse motives. While some individuals are primarily motivated to form accurate beliefs, others rather seek information that makes them feel good.
Every person develops brain regions to recognize people, places and things; these regions end up in similar locations across brains. However, people who played Pokémon extensively as children also have a region that responds more to Pokémon than anything else, and its location is likely determined by the size of the Pokémon on the video game player’s screen.
Why do people engage in collective decisions? El Zein, Bahrami & Hertwig argue that—through sharing responsibility—joint decisions protect individuals from possible negative consequences of difficult decisions by reducing regret and stress and helping avoid punishment.
Neidorf et al. analyse the style of all surviving Old English poetry. They find quantitative evidence that a single author composed Beowulf and that the poem Andreas was written by Cynewulf—two longstanding questions of English literary history.
Data-driven analysis of 156,558 papers uncovers universal patterns in the selection of citations across paper sections, as well as important differences in micro-level citation patterns that reveal the ultimate impact of the citing paper itself.
Data from a cohort of US and UK adolescents reveal that genetic and neighbourhood risks for early pregnancy and educational attainment are correlated, but find a weak or no correlation between risks for obesity or schizophrenia.
Kobayashi et al. show that when options are defined by multiple attributes, people are curious about individual attributes regardless of the uncertainty of the total outcome, revealing a distinct type of anticipatory utility that shapes curiosity.
A values-alignment intervention taught eighth graders about how junk food marketing subverts the core adolescent values of autonomy and social justice. This shifted adolescents’ dietary preferences away from unhealthy choices and towards healthy choices.
Zusai and Wu show that a modelling framework that treats subpopulations as the basic unit of analysis and uses a potential game approach provides a tractable way to study the evolutionary dynamics of behaviours and migration in connected populations.
Early childhood experience with the visual stimulus of Pokémon leads to a new brain representation whose location in high-level visual cortex suggests that the way we look at objects as children determines the functional organization of the cortex.
Simple choices are biased by looking behaviour. This work investigates individual differences in this gaze bias across four datasets and shows that gaze biases are variable and that their strength reliably predicts differences in individuals’ choices.
People integrate information over time to make decisions, but they don’t do so optimally. Keung et al. show how distinct aspects of the pupil signal relate to distinct suboptimalities in perceptual decision-making.