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Regular physical exercise has been proposed as a cost-effective strategy for keeping our brains sharp, but it remains unclear how we can optimise the cognitive benefits of long-term exercise. New findings inform us how exercise intensity, progression and type can increase expected cognitive gains and how this differs by sex.
Claessens et al. propose that the two dimensions of political ideology identified by previous research correspond to two key shifts in the evolution of human group living: a shift towards cooperation and a shift towards group conformity.
Many decisions in life involve deliberating about trade-offs between sooner and later outcomes. Bulley and Schacter argue that the mechanisms of prospection and metacognition are integral to deliberation in intertemporal choice.
Although disease dynamics of prey are influenced by predator behaviour, little is known about the potential effects of wide-ranging post-industrial hunters. Mysterud et al. describe the movement behaviour of Norwegian hunters using more than 165,000 hunting records from 2001–2017, showing that hunters migrate to and from areas of high prey density, potentially moving pathogens into previously unaffected areas.
When making economic decisions, our choices are often influenced by irrelevant information. One prominent explanation appeals to normalisation in neural circuits. A new paper by Gluth and colleagues suggests that instead, attentional processes may be responsible.
Motivated control processes help us optimize our behaviour to deal with competing task demands: seeking rewards while minimizing the associated effort. A new study in Nature Human Behaviour argues that the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, a key contributor to motivated control, tracks a computational quantity akin to surprise that is generated when events differ from our expectations.
Sharot and Sunstein propose a framework of information-seeking, whereby individuals decide to seek or avoid information based on combined estimates of the potential impact of information on their action, affect and cognition.
