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When people make a decision, the actions they take might look similar regardless of how they arrived at that decision. In this Article, Hagura et al. show that the brain learns and remembers actions differently on the basis of the level of uncertainty associated with its context.
Does self-administered mindfulness effectively reduce stress? In a study across 37 sites involving 2,239 participants, four mindfulness exercises significantly reduced short-term, self-reported stress.
This study reveals that current interventions against misinformation erode belief in accurate information. The authors argue that future strategies should shift their focus from only fighting falsehoods to also nurturing trust in reliable news.
Kranzler et al. examine the association between adverse childhood events and mood and anxiety disorders and substance dependence. The results show that adverse childhood events are associated with risk of substance dependence, with this effect mediated by mood and anxiety disorders. Similar associations were found for the risk of mood and anxiety disorders with substance dependence as a mediator.
Gretzinger et al. examine genetic evidence from 31 Iron Age individuals in southern Germany and find that this early Celtic society probably had a dynastic system of matrilineal inheritance, with a network of well-connected elites covering a broad territory.
Vassiliadis et al. use transcranial temporal interference stimulation—a non-invasive deep brain stimulation technique—to show that stimulation of the striatum applied at 80 Hz disrupts the ability to learn from reinforcement feedback.
Genome-wide analyses reveal a deep history of musical instruments and specialized vocabulary among Central African hunter-gatherers and the long-term cultural interconnectivity of these groups before and after the Bantu expansion.
By combining advanced mathematical modelling with data from a rare sample of patients with brain damage, the authors show that a specific part of the brain in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is associated with putting in effort to help other people.
A mathematical model of the evolution and development of hominin brain size suggests that the evolution of a larger brain size in humans may have been driven by changes in developmental constraints rather than selection for brain size.
A randomized controlled trial of a nurse-led 911 triage programme in Washington, DC, by Wilson et al. finds that the programme improves the use of ambulance services and helps connect non-emergency callers with primary care.
Testing two families of large language models (LLMs) (GPT and LLaMA2) on a battery of measurements spanning different theory of mind abilities, Strachan et al. find that the performance of LLMs can mirror that of humans on most of these tasks. The authors explored potential reasons for this.
Using foraging theory and ethnohistoric data, the authors’ analysis supports the hypothesis that the human ability to sweat while running long distances evolved in the context of persistent, endurance-based pursuits of game.
Wandelt et al. describe a brain–machine interface that captures intracortical neural activity during internal speech (words said within the mind with no associated movement or audio output) and translates those cortical signals into real-time text.
By digitizing a large lexical dataset of Chinese dialects and comparing it to genetic profiles, Yang et al. reveal a hybrid model of language diffusion, consisting of both population migrations and social learning across different regions of China.
Using a computational model to quantify difficulty in reconstructing images from compressed codes, Lin et al. show that reconstruction errors interface perception and memory by modulating how well images are encoded.
How do we orient ourselves in space? Using electroencephalography and intracranial electroencephalography, Griffiths et al. identify a complex network of brain regions that track head direction in free-moving human participants.
This study examines individuals with autoimmune limbic encephalitis, a condition that impairs the hippocampus, to understand how they evaluate rewards and efforts in uncertain scenarios compared to healthy controls. The findings reveal that while patients with autoimmune limbic encephalitis retain their sensitivity to uncertainty, their capability to assess rewards and efforts is notably diminished when uncertainty is a factor.
The authors introduce Ouvrai, an open-source solution that facilitates the design and execution of remote virtual reality studies, capitalizing on the surge in virtual reality headset ownership.