Volume 8 Issue 7, July 2024

Guoyu Wang leads and serves on Chinese ethics committees. She explains how research ethics have developed in China, and why ethics review promotes responsible innovation.

Mentorship from experienced peers critically improves individual career development and satisfaction in academia, but we have little information on how researchers are supported. We identify and recommend strategies for faculty members, departments, institutions and funders to ensure sustained excellence in academic mentorship.

Science communication often assumes a ‘deficit’ in knowledge on behalf of the recipient, but this deficit-based approach is inequitable and ineffective. We must train all STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) students in inclusive science communication, which uses collaboration with diverse people to address misinformation and solve socioscientific issues.

Causal inference is needed to understand whether conservation is working. There is a substantial role for behavioural science, as interventions often depend on behaviour change. A focus on design over data, embracing mixed methods and support from funders will help to provide the evidence needed to reverse biodiversity loss.

Behavioural scientists want to see more consideration of context — so why are they not using tools derived from ecology, the science of all life in context? We invite behavioural scientists to align the science of human behaviour with that of behavioural ecology.

Measuring neural activity in moving humans has been a longstanding challenge in neuroscience, which limits what we know about our navigational neural codes. Leveraging mobile EEG and motion capture, Griffiths et al. overcome this challenge to elucidate neural representations of direction and highlight key cross-species similarities.

Central Africa is home to the greatest number of hunter-gatherers remaining in the world, but the origins of their culture remain unclear. We compiled a dataset of Central African hunter-gatherer musical instruments, subsistence tools, specialized vocabulary and genome-wide single-nucleotide polymorphism data, which revealed ancient networks of cultural and linguistic exchange that spanned thousands of kilometres.

Emergency medical services and emergency departments face strain from calls and visits about non-emergency medical issues. A randomized controlled trial now shows that nurse-led triage of calls about non-emergency medical issues can reduce strain on ambulance systems and emergency departments, while connecting callers with appropriate and timely primary care.

Damage to a specific part of the brain in the frontal cortex reveals its necessity in effortful actions that help other people. These findings could have implications for understanding and treating disorders of social behaviour.

Recent advances in imaging reveal that birth is a punctuate event in the development of brain and behaviour, which begins in the womb and continues in infancy. Meredith Weiss et al. review our understanding of this developmental trajectory based on current knowledge.

Genome-wide analyses reveal a deep history of musical instruments and specialized vocabulary among Central African hunter-gatherers and the long-term cultural interconnectivity of these groups before and after the Bantu expansion.

A randomized controlled trial of a nurse-led 911 triage programme in Washington, DC, by Wilson et al. finds that the programme improves the use of ambulance services and helps connect non-emergency callers with primary care.

Testing two families of large language models (LLMs) (GPT and LLaMA2) on a battery of measurements spanning different theory of mind abilities, Strachan et al. find that the performance of LLMs can mirror that of humans on most of these tasks. The authors explored potential reasons for this.

In this Article, Ma et al. show, across a series of experiments, that time and memorability (the probability of recalling a visual stimulus) mutually influence one another, suggesting that time is a feature of visual processing that is intrinsic to perceptual experience.

Using a computational model to quantify difficulty in reconstructing images from compressed codes, Lin et al. show that reconstruction errors interface perception and memory by modulating how well images are encoded.

A mathematical model of the evolution and development of hominin brain size suggests that the evolution of a larger brain size in humans may have been driven by changes in developmental constraints rather than selection for brain size.

How do we orient ourselves in space? Using electroencephalography and intracranial electroencephalography, Griffiths et al. identify a complex network of brain regions that track head direction in free-moving human participants.

Using a combination of fMRI and lesion patient studies, Holton et al. show that human vmPFC causes goal perseveration during incremental goal pursuit.

This study examines individuals with autoimmune limbic encephalitis, a condition that impairs the hippocampus, to understand how they evaluate rewards and efforts in uncertain scenarios compared to healthy controls. The findings reveal that while patients with autoimmune limbic encephalitis retain their sensitivity to uncertainty, their capability to assess rewards and efforts is notably diminished when uncertainty is a factor.

In support of an evolutionary model that links distaste, disgust and socio-moral processes, Gan et al. use functional magnetic resonance imaging to develop a neuromarker for subjective core disgust that generalizes to oral distaste and unfairness.

By combining advanced mathematical modelling with data from a rare sample of patients with brain damage, the authors show that a specific part of the brain in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is associated with putting in effort to help other people.

Mu et al. use two-sample Mendelian randomization analyses to examine the causal impact of resting-state fMRI phenotypes on 12 psychiatric disorders.