Articles in 2020

Malhotra and colleagues find that exposure to the economic benefits associated with the presence of higher socioeconomic status immigrants, such as the receipt of large inflows of foreign capital, can reduce xenophobic and antiforeigner sentiment.

Sznycer and Patrick show that laypeople can intuitively recreate core aspects of criminal laws drawn from ancient, culturally foreign legal codes and argue that this is consistent with the theory that criminal laws originate in the human brain.

Most adolescents exhibit late chronotypes but attend school early in the morning. Goldin et al. show that sleep is longer and academic performance is improved when school time is better aligned with the biological rhythms of students.

A previous study reported that conservatives have stronger physiological responses to threatening stimuli than liberals. A new study from the United States (n = 202 and 352) and the Netherlands (n = 81) does not support the conclusions of the original work.

Losin et al. use neuroimaging to identify a brain mechanism underlying increased pain sensitivity in African Americans. This mechanism correlated with racial discrimination and implicated brain systems involved in context-based pain evaluation.

Decisions between differently valued items can be influenced by irrelevant choices. Combining a replication and a new experiment, Gluth et al. find that effects of value on attention drive this behaviour, hitherto attributed to divisive normalization.

Using data from 69 countries, Hässler et al. show that intergroup contact and support for social change towards greater equality are positively associated among members of advantaged groups, but negatively associated among disadvantaged groups.

Wang et al. combine functional and anatomical connectivity data with behavioural measures to create a global model of the human face connectome, proposing a neurocognitive model with three core face-processing streams.

Matoba et al. performed GWAS on 13 dietary habits in Japanese individuals, identifying ten new associations in eight traits and five dietary-trait-associated loci with pleiotropic effects on multiple human disease and clinical measurements.

Tropical tree and shrub microparticles uncovered from ancient human tooth plaque in Vanuatu show that early colonists were horticulturalists and foragers who adapted to and modified their environments depending on their local ecology and subsistence needs.

Using administrative data on 4 million citizens from two nations, Richmond-Rakerd et al. find that multiple health and social problems cluster in a population segment with low workforce readiness, including low education and poor early-life mental health.

Li et al. show that human value-based decision-making can be modelled using the quantum reinforcement learning framework. These new models reveal the importance of the medial frontal cortex in this quantum-like decision-making process.

How do young learners decide when and how to try in challenging situations? Lucca et al. find that infants dynamically integrate first-hand experience with social information to selectively persist when their hard work is likely to pay off.

Modern culture appears to change at a rapid rate compared with biological evolution. Lambert et al. test this and find that the pace of modern cultural evolution is surprisingly slow—slower than, for example, changes seen in Darwin’s finches.

Balland et al. use data on scientific papers, patents, employment and GDP for 353 metropolitan areas in the United States to show that economic complexity drives the spatial concentration of productive activities in large cities.

Stolier et al. find that people apply their learned conceptual associations between personality traits across social perception, from which emerges the common, yet dynamic, structure observed across social cognition (for example, competence and warmth).

The role of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in decision-making and cognitive control is the subject of a long-standing debate. Vassena et al. tested the dominant accounts in the same paradigm and found that the ACC signals the difference between predicted and actual outcomes.