Volume 5 Issue 3, March 2021

The pandemic is causing prolonged stress to our social connections, with major adverse consequences to individual and societal health. As a group-living, cooperative species, we need policies of communal care for a more equitable, resilient future, argues Robin Nelson.

Conferences are a pivotal part of the scientific enterprise, but large in-person meetings have several disadvantages. As the pandemic experience has shown, online meetings are a viable alternative. Accelerating efforts to improve conferences in virtual formats can lead to a more equitable and sustainable conference culture.

Obtaining accurate dates for rock art is important to both archaeologists and Aboriginal Traditional Owners, but a lack of organic material associated with rock art can make this challenging. Using radiocarbon dating of mud wasp nests, Finch et al. show that naturalistic depictions of animals in the Kimberley region of northern Australia date to between 13,000 and 17,000 years ago.

To date, studies of gambling harms have been limited by reliance on small samples and self-reports of behaviour. Analysis of banking transactions provides unique insights into the scope and sequencing of gambling harms at the individual and population levels, with implications for gambling policy, regulation, and harm minimization.

Radiocarbon dating of mud wasp nests in the Kimberley region of Western Australia has established ages of up to 17,000 years for rock art from the earliest known, naturalistic, period of Australian Aboriginal figurative paintings.

Using financial data from 6.5 million individuals, Muggleton et al. find that gambling, at all levels, is associated with financial distress, unemployment, disability and higher mortality, with stronger associations amongst the heaviest gamblers.

Lydon-Staley and colleagues examine intrinsic information seeking and find that individuals who tend to seek information that eliminates knowledge gaps move between similar concepts and tend to return to previously visited concepts.

A randomized controlled trial reveals that exposure to recent online misinformation around a COVID-19 vaccine induces a decline in intent to vaccinate among adults in the UK and the USA.

Dietze and Craig find that framing economic inequality as group disadvantages (versus advantages) increases Americans’ engagement with the issue and support for mitigating action. This is partly driven by perceptions of disadvantages as more unjust.

Individuals are willing to punish antisocial others even at a personal cost. Marshall et al. examine the motivational basis of this behaviour from a developmental standpoint, showing that children—like adults—punish others for both retributive and consequentialist reasons.

Thoret and colleagues present a re-analysis of past research to identify the multiple acoustical facets of musical instrument timbre perception, capitalizing on spectrotemporal modulations models and metric learning.

How does the ventral striatum encode value and effort? Here Suzuki et al. use functional magnetic resonance imaging with a naturalistic maze-navigation paradigm to reveal functionally segregated regions of the ventral striatum encoding effort activation, movement initiation and effort discounting.

Using intracranial recordings and stimulation, Woolnough et al. map in space and time the neural systems that enable us to read efficiently.

The authors investigated over 100 human complex traits in 80,889 couples from UK Biobank, finding evidence that the genotype of one person explains trait variation in another person. The genotypes of those around us are an important part of our environment.