Volume 2 Issue 4, April 2023

Universals of thought and behaviour across variable cultural experiences can reveal uniquely human cognition. However, culturally informed and theoretically motivated sampling is needed to reveal true universals.

From infancy, humans learn the regularities of their world using statistical learning. In this Review, Forest et al. consider how statistical learning changes quantitatively and qualitatively across development, considering influences on the input to learning and the resulting memory representations.

Authoritarianism weakens democratic institutions and fosters societal divisions. In this Review, Osborne et al. describe the psychological processes and situational factors that give rise to authoritarianism, as well as the societal consequences of its apparent resurgence within the general population.

Fear is an adaptive response to threat, but is also implicated in clinical conditions. In this Perspective, Beckers et al. argue that harnessing the potential of Pavlovian fear conditioning as a laboratory model of clinical anxiety requires moving beyond the study of fear acquisition to associated phenomena: extinction, generalization and avoidance.

Neurocognitive evidence indicates that episodic memory and semantic memory have a more extensive role in creative ideation. In this Perspective, Benedek et al. integrate this memory research within existing creativity theorizing to present a framework whereby creative ideas arise across four distinguishable stages.