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The authors use a computational data-driven approach to study the determinants of conscious processing of human faces. They show that the speed at which a face reaches conscious awareness depends on its perceived power or dominance.
Steinbeis and colleagues show that chimpanzees and six-year-old children will pay a cost to see the punishment of an antisocial agent when it is deserved, suggesting that both are motivated to see just punishment enacted.
Intracranial recordings from epileptic patients during a number of different behavioural tasks reveal, in impressive spatiotemporal detail, that the human brain links perception and action through persistent neural activity in the prefrontal cortex and functionally linked brain regions.
The authors used graph signal processing to examine whether fMRI signals correspond to underlying anatomical networks. They found that alignment between functional signals and anatomical structure was associated with greater cognitive flexibility.
The authors use large, real-world guessing competition datasets to test whether accuracy can be improved by aggregating repeated estimates by the same individual. They find that estimates do improve, but substantially less than with between-person aggregation.
In a series of 11 experiments, the authors show that what has traditionally been considered 'pitch perception' is mediated by several different mechanisms.
Using magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalography during a face-discrimination task, the authors show face-processing lateralization in infants in the first postnatal semester, despite a corpus callosum mature enough to transfer visual information across hemispheres.
Two surveys of a large cohort of US parents find that concerns about purity and liberty are strongly associated with vaccine hesitancy. This suggests that vaccination campaigns may be more effective by targeting these moral values.
Over four functional MRI experiments, Axelrod et al. show that several cognitive processes function simultaneously during self-generated mental activity.
In two neuroimaging studies, Nam et al. find that amygdala volume is associated with individual preferences to maintain (versus change) the societal status quo.
Personality traits differ across geographical regions, suggesting a role for environmental factors. Wei, Lu, and colleagues show an association between regional ambient temperature and personality in two large studies conducted in China and the United States.
Nook et al. show that emotion concept representations develop from a monodimensional focus on positive versus negative valence in childhood to multidimensional organization in adulthood. This expansion is facilitated by increasing verbal knowledge.
By alternately exciting and inhibiting fronto-striatal pathways in the brain as participants listen to music, the authors are able to show causal evidence that this system mediates both affective and motivational responses to music.
Nielsen and colleagues’ analysis of a large database of medical research papers shows a correlation between women’s authorship and the likelihood of a study including gender and sex analysis.
Just et al. develop a highly accurate biological classification method for identifying suicidal ideators by applying machine learning to neural representations of death- and life-related concepts.
Direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceutical drugs requires mention of severe side effects, along with the most frequent. Sivanathan and Kakkar show that this practice dilutes consumers’ judgements of the overall severity of side effects
Women often behave more prosocially than men. Soutschek et al. use pharmacology and neuroimaging to show that the neural reward system appears to be more sensitive to prosocial rewards in women than men, providing a neurobiological account for this gender difference.
Cao et al. demonstrate that people systematically rely on social base rates when making judgements about individuals, even when these base rates are statistically irrelevant. The authors show that multiple remedies are required to eliminate this bias of base rate intrusion.