Human behaviour articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    Eye movements are inhibited prior to the occurrence of predictable visual events. Here the authors show that this inhibition is also found in the auditory domain, thus revealing a multimodal perception action coupling.

    • Dekel Abeles
    • , Roy Amit
    •  & Shlomit Yuval-Greenberg

  • Article
    | Open Access

    When our expectations are violated, it is adaptive to update our internal models to improve predictions in the future. Here, the authors show that during mnemonic violations, hippocampal networks are biased towards an encoding state and away from a retrieval state to potentially update these predictions.

    • Oded Bein
    • , Katherine Duncan
    •  & Lila Davachi

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People regularly punish norm violations using gossip and direct confrontation. Here, the authors show that the use of gossip versus direct confrontation is context sensitive, with confrontation used more when punishers have more to gain, and gossip used more when the costs of retaliation loom large.

    • Catherine Molho
    • , Joshua M. Tybur
    •  & Daniel Balliet

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In some types of decision-making, people must accept or forego an option without knowing what prospects might later be available. Here, the authors reveal how a key bias– asymmetric learning from negative versus positive outcomes – emerges in this type of decision.

    • Neil Garrett
    •  & Nathaniel D. Daw

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People are disproportionately more patient when evaluating larger rewards. Here, the authors show how this magnitude effect may reflect an adaptive response to uncertainty in mental representations of future value.

    • Samuel J. Gershman
    •  & Rahul Bhui

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Decision-making is traditionally thought to be guided by memories of option values. Here, the authors challenge this view by showing that merely making a choice – even without experiencing any outcomes – alters neural representations of stimulus-reward associations and biases future decisions.

    • Lennart Luettgau
    • , Claus Tempelmann
    •  & Gerhard Jocham

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humankind is in a period of unprecedented cognitive sophistication as well as globalization. Here, using an evolutionary game theory model, the authors reveal ways in which the transition from local to global interaction can have both positive and potentially negative consequences for the prevalence of cognitive sophistication in the population.

    • Mohsen Mosleh
    • , Katelynn Kyker
    •  & David G. Rand

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Music varies across cultures, but some features are widespread, consistent with biological constraints. Here, the authors report that both Western and native Amazonian listeners perceptually fuse concurrent notes related by simple-integer ratios, suggestive of one such biological constraint.

    • Malinda J. McPherson
    • , Sophia E. Dolan
    •  & Josh H. McDermott

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Although the feeling of being stressed is ubiquitous and clinically significant, the underlying neural mechanisms are unclear. Using a novel predictive modeling approach, the authors show that functional hippocampal networks specifically and consistently predict the feeling of stress.

    • Elizabeth V. Goldfarb
    • , Monica D. Rosenberg
    •  & Rajita Sinha

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Local participatory experiences can influence broader democratic attitudes and participation. Here, in two field experiments in US and China, the authors find that participatory work meetings led workers to be less authoritarian and more critical about societal authority and justice, and more willing to participate in political and social decision-making.

    • Sherry Jueyu Wu
    •  & Elizabeth Levy Paluck

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People often ignore evidence that disconfirms their prior beliefs. Here, the authors investigate the underlying cognitive, computational and neuronal mechanisms of such confirmation bias, and show that high confidence induces a selective neural processing of choice-consistent information.

    • Max Rollwage
    • , Alisa Loosen
    •  & Stephen M. Fleming

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Working memory training reshapes the brain functional network reorganization. Here, the authors demonstrate an increase of the whole-brain network segregation during the n-back task, accompanied by alterations in dynamic communication between the default mode system and task-positive systems.

    • Karolina Finc
    • , Kamil Bonna
    •  & Danielle S. Bassett

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Humans can easily uncover abstract associations. Here, the authors propose that higher-order associations arise from natural errors in learning and memory. They suggest that mental errors influence the humans’ representation of the world in significant and predictable ways.

    • Christopher W. Lynn
    • , Ari E. Kahn
    •  & Danielle S. Bassett

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Divisive normalization is thought to be a ubiquitous computation in the brain, but has not been studied in decisions that require integrating evidence over time. Here, the authors show in humans that dynamic divisive normalization accounts for the uneven weighting of perceptual evidence over time.

    • Waitsang Keung
    • , Todd A. Hagen
    •  & Robert C. Wilson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People often prioritize their own interests, but also like to see themselves as moral. Here the authors show how distortions in memory might resolve this tension by demonstrating that people tend to remember being more generous in the past than they actually were.

    • Ryan W. Carlson
    • , Michel André Maréchal
    •  & Molly J. Crockett

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Conventional theory suggests that people’s confidence about a decision reflects their subjective probability that the decision was correct. By studying decisions with multiple alternatives, the authors show that confidence reports instead reflect the difference in probabilities between the chosen and the next-best alternative.

    • Hsin-Hung Li
    •  & Wei Ji Ma

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Visual cognition compensates for small changes in an object’s appearance to ensure its perceived continuity. We show that in situations with multiple objects, context features like color, temporal or spatial position are used as anchors to selectively integrate corresponding objects over time.

    • Cora Fischer
    • , Stefan Czoschke
    •  & Christoph Bledowski

  • Article
    | Open Access

    When a cue is provided, people can rapidly attend to a changing scene and remember how it looked right after the cue appeared, but if the scene changes gradually, there is a delay in what we remember. Here the authors model these effects as prolonged attentional engagement.

    • Chloe Callahan-Flintoft
    • , Alex O. Holcombe
    •  & Brad Wyble

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Feelings of confidence reflect the likelihood that decisions are correct. Here the authors show that confidence taps partially dissociable evidence from that used for perceptual decisions, and that, rather than passively monitoring, confidence controls the depth of sensory information processing.

    • Tarryn Balsdon
    • , Valentin Wyart
    •  & Pascal Mamassian

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The roots of psychopathology take shape during adverse parent-infant interactions, shown through infant attachment quality. Using rodents, the authors show that blunted infant cortical processing of the mother determines attachment quality through a stress hormone-dependent mechanism.

    • Maya Opendak
    • , Emma Theisen
    •  & Regina M. Sullivan

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People often fail to perceive the second of two brief visual targets, a phenomenon known as the attentional blink (AB). Here the authors modelled behaviour and brain activity to show that the AB arises from short- and long-range interactions between representations of elementary visual features.

    • Matthew F. Tang
    • , Lucy Ford
    •  & Jason B. Mattingley

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Efficient learning is akin to goal-directed dimensionality reduction, in which relevant information is highlighted and irrelevant input is ignored. Here, the authors show that ventromedial prefrontal cortex uniquely supports such learning by compressing neural codes to represent goal-specific information.

    • Michael L. Mack
    • , Alison R. Preston
    •  & Bradley C. Love

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Early adversity may sensitize people to the effects of later stress, amplifying psychopathology risk. Here, the authors show this stress sensitization effect for adolescents who experienced prolonged institutional deprivation in childhood, but not those assigned to foster care intervention.

    • Mark Wade
    • , Charles H. Zeanah
    •  & Charles A. Nelson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The brain dynamically arbitrates between two model-based and model-free reinforcement learning (RL). Here, the authors show that participants tended to increase model-based control in response to increasing task complexity, but resorted to model-free when both uncertainty and task complexity were high.

    • Dongjae Kim
    • , Geon Yeong Park
    •  & Sang Wan Lee

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Household income is used as a marker of socioeconomic position, a trait that is associated with better physical and mental health. Here, Hill et al. report a genome-wide association study for household income in the UK and explore its relationship with intelligence in post-GWAS analyses including Mendelian randomization.

    • W. David Hill
    • , Neil M. Davies
    •  & Ian J. Deary

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The visual word form area (VWFA) is a brain region associated with written language, but it has also been linked to visuospatial attention. Here, the authors reveal distinct structural and functional circuits linking VWFA with language and attention networks, and demonstrate that these circuits separately predict language and attention abilities.

    • Lang Chen
    • , Demian Wassermann
    •  & Vinod Menon

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The fusiform face area and parahippocampal place area respond to face and scene stimuli respectively. Here, the authors show using fMRI that these brain areas are also preferentially activated by eye movements associated with looking at faces and scenes even when no images are shown.

    • Lihui Wang
    • , Florian Baumgartner
    •  & Stefan Pollmann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Because our immediate observations are often ambiguous, we must use the context (prior beliefs) to guide inference, but the context may also be uncertain. Here, the authors show that humans can accurately estimate the reliability of the context and combine it with sensory uncertainty to form their decisions and estimate confidence.

    • Philipp Schustek
    • , Alexandre Hyafil
    •  & Rubén Moreno-Bote

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Eye‐tracking is a valuable tool in cognitive science for measuring how attention is directed during visual scene exploration. Here, the authors introduce a new, touchscreen-based method that accomplishes the same goal via tracking finger movements.

    • Guillaume Lio
    • , Roberta Fadda
    •  & Angela Sirigu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The brain mechanisms underlying cooperation within groups, while balancing individual and collective interests, are poorly understood. Here, the authors identify the neurocomputations engaged in social dilemmas requiring strategic decisions during repeated social interactions in groups.

    • Seongmin A. Park
    • , Mariateresa Sestito
    •  & Jean-Claude Dreher

  • Article
    | Open Access

    From observational studies, alcohol consumption behaviours are known to be correlated in spouses. Here, Howe et al. use partners’ genotypic information in a Mendelian randomization framework and show that a SNP in the ADH1B gene associates with partner’s alcohol consumption, suggesting that alcohol consumption affects mate choice.

    • Laurence J. Howe
    • , Daniel J. Lawson
    •  & Gibran Hemani

  • Article
    | Open Access

    We tend to be more trusting of people who we know to be honest. Here, the authors show using fMRI that honesty-based trustworthiness is represented in the posterior cingulate cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and intraparietal sulcus, and predicts subsequent trust decisions.

    • Gabriele Bellucci
    • , Felix Molter
    •  & Soyoung Q. Park

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Is there an optimum difficulty level for training? In this paper, the authors show that for the widely-used class of stochastic gradient-descent based learning algorithms, learning is fastest when the accuracy during training is 85%.

    • Robert C. Wilson
    • , Amitai Shenhav
    •  & Jonathan D. Cohen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Decision-making research has confounded the reward value of options with their goal-congruency, as the task goal was always to pick the most rewarding option. Here, authors separately asked participants to select the least rewarding of a set of options, revealing a dominant role for goal congruency.

    • Romy Frömer
    • , Carolyn K. Dean Wolf
    •  & Amitai Shenhav

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Previous studies have suggested that being hungry causes people to make more selfish and less prosocial decisions. Here, the authors carried out a series of studies to test this claim and found that the effect of acute hunger was very weak at best.

    • Jan A. Häusser
    • , Christina Stahlecker
    •  & Nadira S. Faber

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How do liberals and conservatives differ in their expression of compassion and moral concern? The authors show that conservatives tend to express concern toward smaller, more well-defined, and less permeable social circles, while liberals express concern toward larger, less well-defined, and more permeable social circles.

    • Adam Waytz
    • , Ravi Iyer
    •  & Jesse Graham

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Females tend to perform poorer than males on math and science tests, but better on verbal reading tests. Here, by analysing performance during a cognitive test, the authors provide evidence that females are better able to sustain their performance during a test across all of these topics.

    • Pau Balart
    •  & Matthijs Oosterveen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Questions related to human altruism are often studied through self-reported behavior or by measuring behavior in laboratory experiments. Here, the authors examine real-world prosocial behavior using charitable donations made online.

    • Matthew R. Sisco
    •  & Elke U. Weber

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The empirical consequences of human explorative strategies are not fully understood. Here the authors find that during undisturbed conditions, more-explorative vessels gained no performance advantage while during a major disturbance event, explorers benefited significantly from less-impacted revenues and were also more likely to continue fishing.

    • Shay O’Farrell
    • , James N. Sanchirico
    •  & Andrew Strelcheck

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Higher educational attainment is positively associated with a number of health outcomes. Here, Sanderson et al. use multivariable Mendelian randomisation analysis to test whether the association of educational attainment with smoking behaviour is direct or indirectly mediated via general cognitive ability.

    • Eleanor Sanderson
    • , George Davey Smith
    •  & Marcus R. Munafò

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The visual system excels at segregating moving objects from their backgrounds, a key visual function hypothesized to be driven by suppressive centre-surround mechanisms. Here, the authors show that spatial suppression of background motion signals is critical for rapid segmentation of moving objects.

    • Duje Tadin
    • , Woon Ju Park
    •  & Randolph Blake

  • Comment
    | Open Access

    Qualitative psychological principles are commonly utilized to influence the choices that people make. Can this goal be achieved more efficiently by using quantitative models of choice? Here, we launch an academic competition to compare the effectiveness of these two approaches.

    • Ohad Dan
    •  & Yonatan Loewenstein

  • Article
    | Open Access

    People can learn to identify a person based on their voice, despite variation in their voice. Here, the authors show that this ability relies on a statistical abstraction mechanism during which people form average-based representations of voices, even without prior exposure to the average.

    • Nadine Lavan
    • , Sarah Knight
    •  & Carolyn McGettigan

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