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Soderberg et al. asked scientists to peer review registered reports and standard articles post-publication, after information explicitly identifying the article type had been removed. Registered reports scored higher on some dimensions, including quality and rigour.
Using data-driven epidemiological modelling, Yu et al. estimate that, even with increasing vaccine availability, China will have to maintain stringent non-pharmaceutical interventions for at least a year to prevent new widespread outbreaks of COVID-19.
Nordt et al. show in a longitudinal MRI study in children that face- and word-selective regions expand in development and become more category selective while limb-selective regions shrink and become less selective.
Benjamin et al. construct polygenic indexes (DNA-based predictors) for 47 phenotypes and make them available to researchers in 11 datasets. They also present a theoretical framework and estimator to help interpret analyses using polygenic indexes.
Denison and colleagues present a computational account of attention—temporal dynamic normalization—which extends the idea of limited attentional resources across space at a single moment to a formal account of limited resources across time at a single location.
Burton et al. probe the question of moral contagion through out-of-sample prediction, model comparisons and specification curve analyses, demonstrating the limitations of conclusions based on large-scale, observational social media datasets alone.
Bhattacharjee and Schaeffer et al. map exclusive breastfeeding (EBF) in 94 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), finding increased EBF practice and reduced subnational variation across the majority of LMICs from 2000 to 2018. However, only six LMICs will meet WHO’s target of ≥70% EBF by 2030 nationally, and only three will achieve this in all districts.
The implementation of COVID-19 stay-at-home policies was associated with a considerable drop in urban crime in 27 cities across 23 countries. More stringent restrictions over movement in public space were predictive of larger declines in crime.
Sandeford challenges the standard model of intensification using an ethnographic dataset that describes food production in 40 human societies ranging in complexity from small-scale foraging bands to large-scale agricultural states.
Petitet et al. demonstrate that while human decision-making typically follows a speed–efficiency trade-off in sampling information, it is possible to break this trade-off, sampling both faster and more efficiently. In a computational model, they show that incorporating the cost of cognitive effort provides an improved account of this sampling behaviour.
Existing measures of cognitive impulsivity have suboptimal reliability and validity. Here, the authors introduce a new online test battery featuring a gamified interface and show that it aids in the prediction of real-world, addiction-related problems.
Judd and Klingberg analysed data from more than 17,000 children who performed mathematical training together with randomly assigned training on spatial tasks. The type of cognitive training had a significant impact on mathematical learning.
Using administrative data from Denmark, Sønderskov et al. find that terrorism in the country of origin is associated with poorer mental health among refugees, as indicated by an increased use of psychotropic drugs.
How do we evaluate art? Here, Iigaya et al. show that aesthetic preferences for visual art can be predicted by a mixture of low- and high-level image features, and that a convolutional neural network trained only on object recognition naturally encodes many of these features.
Scientists fear that systemic incentives lead to poor science. Stewart and Plotkin use modelling to show how a scientific process emphasizing the use of theory to select hypotheses can allow good science to thrive in the face of pressure to publish.
In a pre-registered meta-analysis, Parry et al. find that, when self-reported media use is compared with digital logs of media use, subjective judgements are often inaccurate. This suggests caution when self-reports are used to test associations between media use and other outcomes.
Trust in science is important for vaccine confidence, and this is true for countries as well as individuals. Sturgis et al. find that confidence in vaccination is higher in countries where people agree that scientists are trustworthy.
Two eye-tracking experiments revealed that adolescents and older adults look less at social stimuli during a face-to-face conversation and while navigating the real world compared with young adults, which may affect the success of their social interactions.
Schmid et al. present a unified framework for direct and indirect reciprocity, exploring how people choose to cooperate on the basis of either their direct experience with others (direct reciprocity) or the others’ general reputation (indirect reciprocity).
The Our World in Data COVID-19 vaccination tracker charts the scale and rate of global vaccinations against COVID-19, making the data available to scientists, policymakers and the general public