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How does the brain support a wide range of behaviours? Mohan et al. examine how the direction of travelling waves of neural oscillations coordinates interactions between brain regions to support different functional processes in memory.
We can coordinate multiple muscles for movement, but can we do the same for attention? Using human functional MRI, Ritz and Shenhav found that the frontoparietal cortex independently encodes task-relevant stimulus features, enabling coordinated cognitive control.
Van Leeuwen and colleagues demonstrate that chimpanzees use social learning to acquire a skill they failed to innovate, supporting the hypothesis that social learning is necessary for acquiring complex skills after initial innovation.
Measuring rhythm priors in 39 participant groups from 15 countries, the authors find that properties of rhythm representations are common across cultures, while variation from place to place related to local musical traditions exists.
In this Stage 2 Registered Report, Lin et al. report that people can learn to value effort and that this valuation can generalize to unfamiliar and unrewarded tasks.
Conservatives show higher bias thresholds towards underrepresentation of non-dominant groups, while liberals do for dominant ones. This relationship weakens if bias targets are unknown or irrelevant, highlighting context-dependency in bias judgements.
In this article, Batten and colleagues measure fast neurotransmitter release in patients undergoing awake brain surgery. As volunteers play an economic game with human and computer partners, dopamine and serotonin track social context and value statistics.
People often believe what they want to believe rather than what the evidence implies. Here Melnikoff and Strohminger find that this seemingly irrational tendency may emerge from fully rational Bayesian calculations.
Zhao et al. find that children exhibit greater honesty after having been trusted by adults. The findings validate philosophical conjectures and offer practical strategies to foster honesty in children by nurturing adult trust.
In 2021, the United States provided an unconditional child allowance to most families with children. Using anonymized mobile-location and debit/credit card data, the authors find that the benefits increased spending at childcare centres, health- and personal-care establishments, and grocery stores.
Using intracranial EEG in human participants, the authors identify a functionally distinct set of brain regions which exhibited characteristic signatures of decision formation independently of the motor action associated with the choice.
The authors document wide variation in information density and speed of communication across the world’s languages. They find that higher-density languages communicate information more quickly but with more sustained focus than lower-density languages.
Brus et al. show that modulation of slow oscillatory neural activity with non-invasive electrical stimulation of the prefrontal cortex can be used to modulate top-down control and behavioural performance in non-spatial attention.
The authors use several computational methods to investigate genetics signatures of assortative mating across behavioural and psychiatric traits, identifying signals for traits such as alcohol consumption traits, major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder and Tourette syndrome, as well as complex interactions between assortative mating, socioeconomic status and participation bias.
Here Shoham and colleagues use deep learning algorithms to disentangle the contributions of visual, visual–semantic and semantic information in human face and object representations. Visual–semantic and semantic algorithms improve prediction of human representations.
A longitudinal study over 12 weeks used computational models on behavioural data from seven cognitive tasks while tracking participants’ mood, habits and activities to understand individual variability. The findings revealed that practice and emotional states significantly influenced various aspects of computational phenotypes, suggesting that apparent unreliability might actually uncover previously unnoticed patterns, supporting a dynamic perspective on cognitive diversity within individuals.
Using mobility data, the authors quantify usage patterns of so-called ‘15-minute cities’ and uncover a worrying trade-off: increased local usage correlates with higher experienced segregation for low-income residents.
This Article makes the case for moving motor learning research outside the lab. Tsay and colleagues show that a large-scale citizen science approach can replicate established findings, reconcile conflicting ideas and identify key demographic predictors of successful motor learning.
The study of personal ornaments worn by Ice Age European hunter-gatherers between 34,000 and 24,000 years ago identifies nine regional groups, which align with the known genetic diversity of that period.
Although action and motor imagery share similar population-wide neural responses in motor cortex, a subset of those responses exists in orthogonal action-unique and imagery-unique subspaces.