Volume 8 Issue 3, March 2024

We need human behavioural change to decarbonize our buildings. This requirement arises from our needs, lifestyle energy choices and interactions with buildings, and is an underexploited, yet essential demand-side opportunity for rapid and sustainable decarbonization. We propose a sufficiency-oriented approach that fosters equitable building decarbonization, while maintaining planetary boundaries.

The importance of reproducible scientific practices is widely acknowledged. However, limited resources and lack of external incentives have hindered their adoption. Here, we explore ways to promote reproducible science in practice.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The study of personal ornaments worn by Ice Age European hunter-gatherers between 34,000 and 24,000 years ago identifies nine regional groups, which align with the known genetic diversity of that period.

Using mobility data, the authors quantify usage patterns of so-called ‘15-minute cities’ and uncover a worrying trade-off: increased local usage correlates with higher experienced segregation for low-income residents.

Monetary incentives were found to be more motivating than psychological interventions for individuals in the United States and the United Kingdom, compared with individuals in China, India, Mexico and South Africa. Among bilinguals on Facebook, money was more motivating in English compared with in Hindi.

Using experimental and archival data, Johnson and Proudfoot show that when an idea is novel, disagreement on how valuable it is grows. People may see the higher variability in value evaluation as a sign of risk and be less willing to invest in such an idea.

This collaborative realist review examines evidence for the use of remote measurement technologies for depression in young people, to inform future research and practice.

This systematic review and meta-analysis examines the evidence for transdiagnostic cognitive behavioural psychotherapy for the treatment of emotional disorders.

This Article makes the case for moving motor learning research outside the lab. Tsay and colleagues show that a large-scale citizen science approach can replicate established findings, reconcile conflicting ideas and identify key demographic predictors of successful motor learning.

Spens and Burgess develop a computational model that shows how the hippocampus encodes episodic memories and replays them to train generative models of the world. Conceptual and sensory representations of experience can then be recombined for imagination and memory.

Tuckute et al. use a machine learning approach to identify sentences that either maximally or minimally activate the human language processing network.

The authors conducted a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in an East Asian ancestry cohort, and a cross-ancestry meta-analysis with earlier genome-wide association studies from European ancestry populations, providing new insights into correlations and transferability between ancestries.

The authors conducted a comprehensive exome-wide association analysis on eight sleep-related traits. The researchers identified 22 new genes associated with various aspects of sleep, such as chronotype, daytime sleepiness, daytime napping, snoring and sleep apnoea, highlighting the importance of large-scale genomic studies in unravelling the genetic basis of sleep-related traits.

In this Stage 2 Registered Report, Blume et al. report results of a study on the contribution of colour vision mechanisms to circadian modulation by light.