Volume 10 Issue 2, February 2007

Humans engage in complex social interactions, including altruism. A study in this issue finds that watching a computer perform an altruistic act, earning money for charity, is sufficient to activate a brain region that has been implicated in the evaluation of others' motives and goals, suggesting that this area may be involved in detecting agency in other creatures.

A new study shows that the identity of olfactory sensory neurons in flies is regulated by Notch signaling, which divides the neurons into two classes that express specific sets of olfactory receptors and project to distinct glomeruli.

Studying consciousness is difficult because asking subjects to report their awareness of a stimulus perturbs that awareness. A new paper shows that asking subjects to wager on whether their response is correct can solve this problem.

The primate prefrontal cortex is associated with cognitive operations linked to intelligence. A study in Nature now shows that prefrontal neurons represent movement sequences at an abstract level, even when not required for the task.