Articles

Cash transfers reduced AIDS incidence and mortality among 12.3 million Brazilian women, especially those with overlapping social vulnerabilities, highlighting the role of social protection in addressing health inequalities.

Maier et al. show that metacognitive learning from consequences can shape moral decision-making.

Newman et al. find that higher education is consistently associated with better health indicators, while higher income correlates with greater well-being, based on a large-scale Ecological Momentary Assessment study.

Drawing on methods from psychophysics across ten experiments, Boger and Firestone examine the cognitive and computational foundations of style perception. Their findings suggest that this capacity is grounded in psychological processes for separating form from content.

Using intracranial EEG recordings in epilepsy patients, Pacheco-Estefan et al. describe changes in the neural representations of cues and contexts during fear and extinction learning in the human brain.

Shen et al. show that pre-existing neural similarity in strangers predicts future friendship and changes in social distance over time in an emerging social network of MBA students.

Liang et al. estimate the prevalence of text modified by large language models in recent scientific papers and preprints, finding widespread use (up to 17.5% of papers in computer science).

Johnson and Obradovich report that widely used large language models, including the early text-davinci-003 and GPT-4, regularly produce text completions that simulate behaviour reminiscent of altruism.

This research advances a mechanistic reward learning account of social learning strategies. Through experiments and simulations, it shows how individuals learn to learn from others, dynamically shaping the processes involved in cultural evolution.

This study establishes how aperiodic activity, a ubiquitous signal linked to neural noise, develops in localized brain regions and illuminates the development of prefrontal control during adolescence in the development of attention and memory.

Fan et al. find that income-preserving 4-day workweeks boost job satisfaction and mental and physical health, while easing burnout. Gains are partly driven by improvements in work ability, reduced fatigue and fewer sleep problems.

A new model merges behavioural science and machine learning to predict choice under risk and uncertainty. Tested on multiple large datasets, it outperforms top psychological and AI models, enabling accurate, interpretable forecasts of human decisions.

Using data from 100 million Brazilian workers, this study reveals persistent occupational segregation—skills segregate workers by gender, while social status of occupations segregates by race, with Black workers concentrated in lower-status jobs.

Liu et al. examine the role of sustained neural activity in the planning and production of speech sequences, revealing a key role for the middle precentral gyrus.

Paluch et al. show that unattended working memory items, as well as attended ones, are encoded in persistent activity in the medial temporal lobe.

Chen et al. use UK Biobank data to reveal a dietary pattern associated with a lower risk of dementia, and validate this in additional cohorts.

Ojer et al. use data from the American National Election Studies to map US voters in a two-dimensional ideological space. Democrats and Republicans have grown more polarized over the past 30 years, while partisan sorting has declined since 2010.

People use knowledge of social network structure—that is, popularity and distance—to strategically spread gossip. To achieve this, they draw on internal models that capture the cascading dynamics of information flow across ties in a network.

AI mimics empathy well, but does its empathy feel different? The authors show human empathy has unique value: human-attributed responses are rated as more empathic than AI-attributed ones, especially when conveying shared experience and care.

Altay et al. show that following the news on social media increases current affairs knowledge, the ability to discern true from false news and trust in the news.