Review Articles

Rhythmic elements including beat and metre are integral to human experiences of music. In this Review, Snyder and colleagues discuss leading theories of rhythm perception and synthesize relevant behavioural, neural and genetic findings.

Declines in adolescent mental health over the past decade have been attributed to social media, but the empirical evidence is mixed. In this Review, Orben et al. describe the mechanisms by which social media could amplify the developmental changes that increase adolescents’ mental health vulnerability.

Emotional memories can be vivid and detailed but are prone to change over time. In this Review, Wardell and Palombo detail the malleability of emotional autobiographical memories, the role of narrative and the use of these memories in future thinking.

Changing behaviours might be central to responding to societal issues such as climate change and pandemics. In this Review, Albarracín et al. synthesize meta-analyses of individual and social-structural determinants of behaviour and the efficacy of behavioural change interventions that target them across domains to identify general principles that can inform future intervention decisions.

Humans have a unique capacity for objective and general causal understanding. In this Review, Goddu and Gopnik describe the development of causal learning and reasoning abilities during evolution and across childhood.

Visual temporal attention involves the prioritization of certain points in time at the expense of others. In this Review, Denison synthesizes experimental results and computational models of voluntary temporal attention and distinguishes it from related phenomena.

Personality is relatively stable over long timescales but remains malleable to some degree. In this Review, Jackson and Wright examine the mechanisms responsible for intentional and naturally occurring change as well as mechanisms that promote stability, thereby limiting potential change.

Focal neuromodulation approaches are promising therapeutic options for challenging-to-treat neurological and psychiatric symptoms, but might indirectly or directly affect cognition. In this Review, Rabin et al. describe the cognitive effects of transcranial magnetic stimulation, deep brain stimulation and ablative techniques.

Sounds are generated by interactions between objects in the world. In this Review, Winkler and Denham describe how representations of sources and actions enable humans to segment complex auditory experience into meaningful units.

A sense of belonging can provide LGBTQ+ people with the opportunity to thrive and promote psychological well-being. In this Review, Matsick et al. summarize factors that influence belonging based on sexual orientation and gender diversity using a multi-pronged approach.

Visual memory has traditionally been thought of as all-or-none, with items remembered perfectly or completely forgotten. In this Review, Brady and colleagues synthesize work that indicates that visual memory representations in working memory and long-term memory are not all-or-none but are instead noisy and hierarchical.

People frequently use their own minds as a point of departure when generating inferences about the minds of others, and such self-referential information often persists in biasing social inferences. In this Review, Todd and Tamir discuss features that amplify and attenuate egocentrism during mentalizing.

Impairments in social cognition are typical in schizophrenia–bipolar spectrum disorders. In this Review, Lewandowski and colleagues characterize impairments across social cognitive domains and illness phases including links with community functioning, and make recommendations for assessment and intervention.

Humans organize the visual world into meaningful perceptual objects. In this Review, Ayzenberg and Behrmann examine the maturation of object recognition from infancy through childhood and describe how children’s environments and visual capabilities shape early object recognition.

Some researchers equate insight with cognitive restructuring processes that occur when solvers reinterpret the problem, whereas others equate insight with phenomenological Aha! experiences that accompany solutions. In this Review, Wiley and Danek summarize both approaches to insight problem solving and consider the extent to which Aha! experiences co-occur with restructuring.

Laypeople tend to believe that self-esteem influences the quality of relationships, but the empirical evidence is mixed. In this Review, Wood et al. summarize the current state of evidence for simple direct effects, propose that self-esteem is best understood as influencing relationships indirectly through a causal chain of mediators, and review evidence for such mediators.

Humans can rapidly and accurately recognize visual scenes and objects within them. In this Review, Peelen and colleagues discuss bidirectional interactions between object and scene processing and the role of predictive processing in visual inference.

Autistic individuals and people with schizophrenia spectrum disorders share traits and behaviours, which can interfere with diagnosis and treatment. In this Review, Schalbroeck and colleagues describe the shared and unique clinical and neuropsychological features of each condition and discuss clinical implications.

Metacognition is the evaluation, control, or representation of one’s own cognition. In this Review, Mazancieux et al. discuss whether metacognition is general or specific across domains, focusing on memory and perception.

Mobile sensing methods can overcome methodological challenges to naturalistic observation and facilitate research about the link between everyday behaviours and psychological constructs. In this Review, Harari and Gosling describe illustrative findings from mobile sensing studies in psychology and propose a research agenda to guide future work.