Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
How does the neurotransmitter dopamine and Parkinson’s disease (PD) affect decision-making under uncertainty? Vilares and Kording find that dopamine levels, which are affected by PD and the drugs used for its treatment, influence reliance on new versus prior information in decision-making.
Spitzer et al. investigate the neural and computational mechanisms involved in weighting, integrating and comparing numbers. They find systematic overweighting of larger numbers, which is reflected in stronger neural signals over the parietal cortex.
Hollands and colleagues classify possible interventions regarding the selection, purchase and consumption of food, alcohol and tobacco. The TIPPME framework enables systematic reporting and analysis of health-related behavioural change interventions.
Research has shown that people dislike inequality. However, in a cross-cultural experiment, Zhou and colleagues show that, from a young age, people are unwilling to redistribute resources between individuals if this reverses an existing hierarchy.
Peters et al. use intracranial recordings and machine-learning techniques to show that human subjects under-use decision-incongruent evidence in the brain when computing perceptual confidence.
Tannenbaum et al. show that partisan framing influences beliefs about the ethical use of behavioural policy interventions, but both US adults and practising policymakers are accepting of nudges when stripped of partisan cues.
Lockwood et al. use a real-effort task and computational modelling to examine how individuals choose to expend effort when rewards accrue to themselves versus others. They find that people are less motivated to work for others.
How should Europe allocate asylum seekers? Bansak et al. show that a majority of Europeans support allocating asylum seekers proportionally to each country’s capacity, rather than the current policy of allocation based on country of first entry.
Why does low-quality information go viral? A stylized model of social media predicts that under real-world conditions of high information load and limited attention, low- and high-quality information are equally likely to go viral.
Bang et al. use behavioural data in culturally distinct settings (United Kingdom and Iran) and computational modelling to show that, when making decisions in pairs, people adopt a confidence-matching heuristic to combine their opinions.
Assessment of moral judgements and social-cognitive profiles of Colombian paramilitary terrorists by Baez et al. reveals a moral code abnormally guided by outcomes, rather than the integration of intentions and outcomes.
Motor skill memories are consolidated and enhanced during sleep. Breton and Robertson show that the neural circuits that support offline memory improvements differ depending on how the memory was acquired — through implicit or explicit learning.
The advent of Acheulian stone-tool technologies 1.75 million years ago is likely to have coincided with changes in early human cognition. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy neuroimaging, modern Acheulian toolmakers are shown to use the same brain network as is involved in playing the piano.
How do prior expectations affect perception? The authors show that arousal has a key role: it facilitates biases from prior expectations in predictable environments, but reduces these biases in unpredictable environments.
A series of decision-making experiments with three recently diverged populations from the same ethnic group in Ethiopia demonstrates that dependence on social learning differs between interdependent pastoralists and independent horticulturalists.
People willing to incur significant costs to help strangers, ‘extraordinary altruists’, are shown to have an increased subjective valuation of the welfare of distant others, rather than a misconception of the social distance of strangers.
Speer and Delgado demonstrate that recalling positive memories dampens stress responses and correlates with activation of reward-processing corticostriatal circuits. Positive reminiscence may promote resilience to stress.
Obradovich and Fowler use data on participation in physical activity from 1.9 million US residents from 2002–2012, coupled with daily temperature data, to show that unmitigated climate change is likely to alter future patterns of physical activity.
In an analysis of 15,000 Facebook networks, Hobbs and Burke find that online social networks are resilient to the death of an individual, showing an increase in interactions between friends following a loss, which remains stable for years after.