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| Open AccessMendelian randomisation analysis of the effect of educational attainment and cognitive ability on smoking behaviour
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
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Article
| Open AccessSpatial suppression promotes rapid figure-ground segmentation of moving objects
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
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| Open AccessFrom choice architecture to choice engineering
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
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| Open AccessListeners form average-based representations of individual voice identities
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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| Open AccessUncovering the structure of self-regulation through data-driven ontology discovery
Scientific progress relies on integrating and building on existing knowledge. Here, the authors propose improving cumulative science by developing data-driven ontologies, and they apply this approach to understanding the construct of self-regulation.
- Ian W. Eisenberg
- , Patrick G. Bissett
- & Russell A. Poldrack
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| Open AccessResting brain dynamics at different timescales capture distinct aspects of human behavior
An individual’s pattern of resting state brain connectivity, as measured with fMRI, has been shown to predict cognitive and behavioral traits. Here, the authors show that different traits are predicted by different time-scales of resting state activity (dynamic vs. static).
- Raphaël Liégeois
- , Jingwei Li
- & B. T. Thomas Yeo
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| Open AccessThe brain represents people as the mental states they habitually experience
Social life requires us to store information about each person’s unique disposition. Here, the authors show that the brain represents people as the sums of the mental states that those people are believed to experience.
- Mark A. Thornton
- , Miriam E. Weaverdyck
- & Diana I. Tamir
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| Open AccessForm vision from melanopsin in humans
The perception of spatial patterns (form vision) is thought to rely on rod and cone cells in the retina. Here, the authors show that a third kind of retinal cell, melanopsin-expressing ganglion cells, can also detect form in humans, under particular conditions.
- Annette E. Allen
- , Franck P. Martial
- & Robert J. Lucas
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| Open AccessCoordinated representational reinstatement in the human hippocampus and lateral temporal cortex during episodic memory retrieval
Episodic memory retrieval is hypothesized to rely on hippocampal reinstatement of item-context associations which drives reinstatement of item information in cortex. Here, the authors confirm this sequence of events, using iEEG recordings from the human hippocampus and lateral temporal cortex.
- D. Pacheco Estefan
- , M. Sánchez-Fibla
- & P. F. M. J. Verschure
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| Open AccessForming attitudes via neural activity supporting affective episodic simulations
People vividly simulate prospective events and experience the anticipated affect—processes supported by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Here, the authors show that these mere simulations change real-life attitudes, via a value transfer between environmental representations in the vmPFC.
- Roland G. Benoit
- , Philipp C. Paulus
- & Daniel L. Schacter
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| Open AccessPeople represent their own mental states more distinctly than those of others
The brain can represent the mental states of others, as well as those of the self. Here, the authors show that social brain manifests more distinct activity patterns when thinking about one's own states, compared to those of others, suggesting that we represent our own mind with greater granularity.
- Mark A. Thornton
- , Miriam E. Weaverdyck
- & Diana I. Tamir
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Article
| Open AccessDecoding individual differences in STEM learning from functional MRI data
People differ in their current levels of understanding of many complex concepts. Here, the authors show using fMRI that brain activity during a task that requires concept knowledge can be used to compute a ‘neural score’ of the participant’s understanding.
- Joshua S. Cetron
- , Andrew C. Connolly
- & David J. M. Kraemer
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| Open AccessExposure to violence affects the development of moral impressions and trust behavior in incarcerated males
In a sample of prisoners, the authors show how learning contributes to the link between exposure to violence (ETV) and maladaptive behavior. While ETV did not disrupt people's ability to learn others' propensity to harm, it did disrupt the development of subjective moral impressions and, subsequently, their ability to adjust levels of trust in others.
- Jenifer Z. Siegel
- , Suzanne Estrada
- & Arielle Baskin-Sommers
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| Open AccessBridge ties bind collective memories
Social groups form collective memories, but the temporal dynamics of this process are unclear. Here, the authors show that when early conversations involve individuals that bridge across clusters of a social network, the network reaches higher mnemonic convergence compared to when early conversations occur within clusters.
- Ida Momennejad
- , Ajua Duker
- & Alin Coman
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| Open AccessRecollection in the human hippocampal-entorhinal cell circuitry
The hippocampus is involved both in episodic memory recall and scene processing. Here, the authors show that hippocampal neurons first process scene cues before coordinating memory-guided pattern completion in adjacent entorhinal cortex.
- Bernhard P. Staresina
- , Thomas P. Reber
- & Florian Mormann
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| Open AccessThe computational and neural substrates of moral strategies in social decision-making
The authors show that individuals apply different ‘moral strategies’ in interpersonal decision-making. These strategies are linked to distinct patterns of neural activity, even when they produce the same choice outcomes, illuminating how distinct moral principles can guide social behavior.
- Jeroen M. van Baar
- , Luke J. Chang
- & Alan G. Sanfey
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| Open AccessThe architecture of functional lateralisation and its relationship to callosal connectivity in the human brain
Many functions of the human brain are lateralised i.e. associated more strongly with either the left or the right hemisphere of the brain. Here, the authors report the first complete map of functional asymmetries in the human brain, and its relationship with structural inter-hemispheric connectivity.
- Vyacheslav R. Karolis
- , Maurizio Corbetta
- & Michel Thiebaut de Schotten
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| Open AccessHumans can decipher adversarial images
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have reached human-level benchmarks in classifying images, but they can be “fooled” by adversarial examples that elicit bizarre misclassifications from machines. Here, the authors show how humans can anticipate which objects CNNs will see in adversarial images.
- Zhenglong Zhou
- & Chaz Firestone
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| Open AccessSocial networks and risk of delayed hospital arrival after acute stroke
Rapid arrival to hospital after stroke is critical for patients to receive effective treatment. Here, the authors examine how stroke patients’ social network structure relates to stroke arrival time, and show that small and close-knit personal networks predict delayed arrival.
- Amar Dhand
- , Douglas Luke
- & Jin-Moo Lee
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| Open AccessForming global estimates of self-performance from local confidence
Human confidence tracks current performance, but little is known about the formation of ‘global’ self-performance estimates over longer timescales. Here, the authors show that people use local confidence to form global estimates, but tend to underestimate their performance when feedback is absent.
- Marion Rouault
- , Peter Dayan
- & Stephen M. Fleming
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| Open AccessHippocampal pattern separation supports reinforcement learning
When learning about rewards and threats in the environment, animals often need to learn the value associated with conjunctions of features, not just individual features. Here, the authors show that the hippocampus forms conjunctive representations that are dissociable from individual feature components.
- Ian C. Ballard
- , Anthony D. Wagner
- & Samuel M. McClure
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| Open AccessResource sharing in technologically defined social networks
Resource sharing over peer-to-peer technological networks is emerging as economically important, yet little is known about how people choose to share in this context. Here, the authors introduce a new game to model sharing, and test how players form sharing strategies depending on technological constraints.
- Hirokazu Shirado
- , George Iosifidis
- & Nicholas A. Christakis
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| Open AccessReconstructing meaning from bits of information
We can recognize an object from one of its features, e.g. hearing a bark leads us to think of a dog. Here, the authors show using fMRI that the brain combines bits of information into object representations, and that presenting a few features of an object activates representations of its other attributes.
- Sasa L. Kivisaari
- , Marijn van Vliet
- & Riitta Salmelin
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| Open AccessThe importance of cognitive diversity for sustaining the commons
Social intelligence and general intelligence are two distinct cognitive abilities. Here, the authors show that groups of people with high competency in both social and general intelligence perform better in a resource-management task involving cooperation, and adjustment to unexpected ecological change.
- Jacopo A. Baggio
- , Jacob Freeman
- & David Pillow
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| Open AccessPatients with basal ganglia damage show preserved learning in an economic game
Neuroimaging evidence implicates basal ganglia (BG) in social decision-making, yet causal evidence remains lacking. Here, the authors show that learning in strategic (but not non-strategic) games is spared in patients with BG damage, suggesting social decision making is not fully reliant on the BG.
- Lusha Zhu
- , Yaomin Jiang
- & Ming Hsu
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| Open AccessThe rise and fall of cooperation through reputation and group polarization
Group membership can inform individuals’ decisions on whether to cooperate. Here, the authors show how cooperative groups themselves can emerge and change due to use of reputation heuristics (such as “the enemy of a friend is an enemy”), and how this destabilizes cooperation over time.
- Jörg Gross
- & Carsten K. W. De Dreu
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| Open AccessExtortion strategies resist disciplining when higher competitiveness is rewarded with extra gain
In game theory, ‘extortionate’ tactics in two-player games are predicted to give way to ‘generous’ strategies. Here, the authors show in a human experimental sample that extortion can prevail as a strategy in games in which there is a specific reward for doing better than the other player.
- Lutz Becks
- & Manfred Milinski
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| Open AccessRetrospective model-based inference guides model-free credit assignment
The reinforcement learning literature suggests decisions are based on a model-free system, operating retrospectively, and a model-based system, operating prospectively. Here, the authors show that a model-based retrospective inference of a reward’s cause, guides model-free credit-assignment.
- Rani Moran
- , Mehdi Keramati
- & Raymond J. Dolan
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| Open AccessDifferential influences of environment and self-motion on place and grid cell firing
Place cells and grid cells are known to encode spatial information about an animal’s location relative to the surrounding environment. Here, the authors show that place cells predominantly encode environmental sensory inputs, while grid cell activity reflects a greater influence of physical motion.
- Guifen Chen
- , Yi Lu
- & Neil Burgess
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| Open AccessReductions in prefrontal activation predict off-topic utterances during speech production
The ability to speak coherently is essential for effective communication, but little is known about the neural systems that support coherence. Here, the authors show that activity in two prefrontal cortex regions, BA10 and BA45, predicts the level of coherence in the speech of healthy older adults.
- Paul Hoffman
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| Open AccessActivity in perceptual classification networks as a basis for human subjective time perception
How the brain tracks the passage of time remains unclear. Here, the authors show that tracking activation changes in a neural network trained to recognize objects (similar to the human visual system) produces estimates of duration that are subject to human-like biases.
- Warrick Roseboom
- , Zafeirios Fountas
- & Anil K. Seth
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| Open AccessPrefrontal mechanisms combining rewards and beliefs in human decision-making
Optimal decision-making requires integrating expectations about rewards with beliefs about reward contingencies. Here, the authors show that these aspects of reward are encoded in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex then combined in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a process that guides choice biases characteristic of human decision-making.
- Marion Rouault
- , Jan Drugowitsch
- & Etienne Koechlin
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Article
| Open AccessSuicide among cancer patients
Cancer patients are at an increased risk of suicide: elderly, white, unmarried males with localized disease are at highest risk vs other cancer patients. Among those diagnosed at < 50 years of age, the plurality of suicides is from hematologic and testicular tumors; if > 50, from prostate, lung, and colorectal cancer patients.
- Nicholas G. Zaorsky
- , Ying Zhang
- & Vernon M. Chinchilli
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| Open AccessDissociable cognitive strategies for sensorimotor learning
Motor learning is thought to be mostly procedural, but recent work has suggested that there is a strong cognitive component to it. Here, the authors show that humans use dissociable cognitive strategies, either caching successful responses or using a rule-based strategy, to solve a visuomotor learning task.
- Samuel D. McDougle
- & Jordan A. Taylor
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| Open AccessDrawings of real-world scenes during free recall reveal detailed object and spatial information in memory
Previous research on visual memory often relies on image recognition as a test, and the exact nature of memory when freely recalling information is not clear. Here, Bainbridge and colleagues develop a drawing-based memory recall task, and show detailed-rich, quantifiable information diagnostic of previously encountered visual scenes.
- Wilma A. Bainbridge
- , Elizabeth H. Hall
- & Chris I. Baker
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| Open AccessEye activity tracks task-relevant structures during speech and auditory sequence perception
Our eyes constantly follow objects we see, but do they also move in synchrony with auditory inputs? Here, the authors show that eyelid movements track the temporal structure of speech and other sound sequences, which could reflect a role of motor systems in temporal attention and sequence processing.
- Peiqing Jin
- , Jiajie Zou
- & Nai Ding
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| Open AccessPredicting eye movement patterns from fMRI responses to natural scenes
Human eye movements when viewing scenes can reflect overt spatial attention. Here, O’Connell and Chun predict human eye movement patterns from BOLD responses to natural scenes. Linking brain activity, convolutional neural network (CNN) models, and eye movement behavior, they show that brain activity patterns and CNN models share representations that guide eye movements to scenes.
- Thomas P. O’Connell
- & Marvin M. Chun
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| Open AccessCortical beta power reflects decision dynamics and uncovers multiple facets of post-error adaptation
People slow down reactions after errors, yet it is debated whether the mechanisms behind this slowing are beneficial for future performance. Here, the authors show that EEG measures converge with model predictions supporting a complex but overall beneficial mechanism of post-error slowing.
- Adrian G. Fischer
- , Roland Nigbur
- & Markus Ullsperger
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| Open AccessEarly childhood investment impacts social decision-making four decades later
Early childhood educational intervention has positive outcomes in adulthood, including higher education attainment, economic status, and overall health. This study shows that adults who underwent such intervention have greater enforcement of equality norm during social decision-making, potentially motivated by future planning.
- Yi Luo
- , Sébastien Hétu
- & Craig Ramey
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| Open AccessRetroactive and graded prioritization of memory by reward
Rewarding events are prioritized in memory, but to support adaptive decision-making memory should also be prioritized for the events leading up to a reward. Here, the authors show that reward retroactively prioritizes memory for proximal, neutral events that precede the reward.
- Erin Kendall Braun
- , G. Elliott Wimmer
- & Daphna Shohamy
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| Open AccessNeural mechanisms for learning self and other ownership
The sense of ownership – of which objects belong to us and which to others - is an important part of our lives, but how the brain keeps track of ownership is poorly understood. Here, the authors show that specific brain areas are involved in ownership acquisition for the self, friends, and strangers.
- Patricia L. Lockwood
- , Marco K. Wittmann
- & Matthew F. S. Rushworth
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| Open AccessA model of temporal scaling correctly predicts that motor timing improves with speed
Humans can perform complex motor movements at varying speeds. Here, the authors show that a recurrent neural network can be trained to exhibit temporal scaling obeying Weber’s law as well as validate a prediction of the model of improved precision of movements at faster speeds.
- Nicholas F. Hardy
- , Vishwa Goudar
- & Dean V. Buonomano
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Article
| Open AccessImplicit preference for human trustworthy faces in macaque monkeys
Humans infer the trustworthiness of others based on subtle facial features such as the facial width-to-height ratio, but it is not known whether other primates are sensitive to these cues. Here, the authors show that macaque monkeys prefer to look at human faces which appear trustworthy to humans.
- Manuela Costa
- , Alice Gomez
- & Angela Sirigu
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| Open AccessReference-point centering and range-adaptation enhance human reinforcement learning at the cost of irrational preferences
Humans often make sub-optimal decisions, choosing options that are less advantageous than available alternatives. Using computational modeling of behavior, the authors demonstrate that such irrational choices can arise from context dependence in reinforcement learning.
- Sophie Bavard
- , Maël Lebreton
- & Stefano Palminteri
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Article
| Open AccessDistinct patterns of brain activity mediate perceptual and motor and autonomic responses to noxious stimuli
Pain is a complex phenomenon involving not just the perception of pain, but also autonomic and motor responses. Here, the authors show that these different dimensions of pain are associated with distinct patterns of neural responses to noxious stimuli as measured using EEG.
- Laura Tiemann
- , Vanessa D. Hohn
- & Markus Ploner
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| Open AccessLate Bayesian inference in mental transformations
Humans compensate for sensory noise by biasing sensory estimates toward prior expectations, as predicted by models of Bayesian inference. Here, the authors show that humans perform ‘late inference’ downstream of sensory processing to mitigate the effects of noisy internal mental computations.
- Evan D. Remington
- , Tiffany V. Parks
- & Mehrdad Jazayeri
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| Open AccessClosing the gender gap in competitiveness through priming
Men are often more willing to compete compared to women, which may contribute to gender differences in wages and career advancement. Here, the authors show that ‘power priming’ - encouraging people to imagine themselves in a situation of power - can close the gender gap in competitiveness.
- Loukas Balafoutas
- , Helena Fornwagner
- & Matthias Sutter
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| Open AccessElectrophysiological mechanisms of human memory consolidation
It is believed that fast “ripple” oscillations in the hippocampus play a role in consolidation, a process by which memory traces are stabilized. Here, the authors show that ripples occuring during non-REM sleep trigger “replay” of brain activity associated with previously experienced stimuli.
- Hui Zhang
- , Juergen Fell
- & Nikolai Axmacher
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| Open AccessA scalable online tool for quantitative social network assessment reveals potentially modifiable social environmental risks
An individual’s social network—their friends, family, and acquaintances—is important for their health, but existing tools for assessing social networks have limitations. Here, the authors introduce a quantitative social network assessment tool on a secure open-source web platform and show its utility in a nation-wide study.
- Amar Dhand
- , Charles C. White
- & Philip L. De Jager