Reviews & Analysis

McAuliffe et al. synthesize recent behavioural and neuroscientific evidence on the development of fairness behaviours in children, which shows that the signatures of human fairness can be traced in childhood.

A study now finds that visual perceptual learning of complex features occurs due to enhancement of later, decision-related stages of visual processing, rather than earlier, visual encoding stages. It is suggested that strengthening of the readout of sensory information between stages may be reinforced by an implicit reward learning mechanism.

A study now shows that 20% of the population accounts for 60–80% of several adult social ills. Outcomes for this group can be accurately predicted from as early as age 3 years, using a small set of indicators of disadvantage. This finding supports policies that target children from disadvantaged families.

Universal features of rhythmic music emerge culturally via iterated learning in the laboratory.

A new theory of city size, embodying ideas from economic complexity and cultural evolution, provides a rich basis for speculating on their economic structure and suggests hints as to how old cities might regenerate their past prosperity and how new ones might generate more success.

Duncan Watts considers whether many branches of social science could benefit from setting research goals aimed at specific and manageable real-world problems. He gives examples and discusses how more solution-oriented social science might work.

Leading voices in the reproducibility landscape call for the adoption of measures to optimize key elements of the scientific process.

Confronting fears is a core component of cognitive behavioural therapies for anxiety disorders, but also a major hurdle for patients. A new study introduces a method for reducing defensive responses without consciously confronting the threatening cues, paving the way for fear-reducing therapies via unconscious processing.