Articles

Trach and McDougle show that motor responses can form part of structured, graph-like memory representations.

Du and Haith show that behaviour can become habitual in two different ways, involving response initiation and response preparation.

Collecting an extensive publicly available dataset on four inhibitory control tasks, Gratton et al. show that more than 1,000 trials per participant are necessary to reduce within-participant variability and improve the reliability of the congruency effect.

Why do people follow rules, even when breaking them has no consequences? Experiments with 14,034 participants reveal that rule-following is not just about rewards or punishments—it is driven by intrinsic respect for rules and social expectations, regulating everyday social interactions.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is clinically heterogeneous, with ongoing debates about phenotypic differences between boys and girls. Leveraging the Get SET Early programme, Pierce and colleagues find no statistically significant sex differences in toddlers with ASD across 17 of 18 measures, including symptom severity, receptive and expressive language, and social attention.

PIGEON is a statistical framework that uses summary statistics from genome-wide interaction studies to estimate how genes and environments jointly influence human complex traits.

Tu et al. find inequalities in access to economic, social and environmental infrastructure across 166 countries. Regional disparities and their association with health outcomes underscore the need for equitable infrastructure development.

Salvi et al. find that GPT-4 outperforms humans in debates when given basic sociodemographic data. With personalization, GPT-4 had 81.2% higher odds of post-debate agreement than humans.

Social comparison is frequently used as a behaviour change technique. This meta-analysis of 79 randomized controlled trials found a significant effect of social comparison as a behaviour change technique on behaviours related to health, performance, service and the environment.

Fridman, Khazeeva et al. show associations of reproductive phenotypes and educational attainment in heterozygotic carriers of pathogenic variants associated with recessive conditions.

This study of 50 wild Western chimpanzee mother–offspring dyads revealed no evidence of disorganized attachment. Instead, offspring exhibited secure-like and insecure avoidant-like behaviours during threats, consistent with the theory that attachment is an adaptive trait.

Fillingim et al. show that biological and psychosocial factors jointly predict conditions associated with chronic pain.

Large language models perform well in self-interested games such as the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma but struggle in games that require coordination. Social reasoning strategies can improve cooperative outcomes with both other models and human players.

A genome-wide association study of age at onset of walking in over 70,000 infants found 11 significant loci. Age at onset of walking showed SNP heritability of 24%, a reliable polygenic score and genetic overlap with ADHD and brain phenotypes.

Cuartas et al.’s meta-analysis of 189 studies, including 1,490 effect sizes from 92 low- and middle-income countries, shows that physical punishment of children is linked to a higher risk of detrimental outcomes across the life course.

Whether happiness is determined by your life circumstances or general outlook (or both) has long occupied psychologists and laypeople alike. The authors demonstrate that both circumstances and outlook influence happiness, with the degree to which each contributes differing across people.

This study shows how auditory cortex activation and cognitive function develop during a six-month follow-up after gene therapy in children with congenital deafness.

Bialowolski et al. analyse financial well-being across 22 countries using data from the Global Flourishing Study. They find that demographic factors (for example, age) and early-life conditions (for example, childhood finances) correlate with financial outcomes.

In this systematic review and meta-analysis of 132 studies, Hindes et al. examine evidence for adverse birth and pregnancy outcomes. They find that reduced rates of preterm birth and increased positive screening rates for possible antenatal depression are associated with the first lockdowns.

This network meta-analysis leveraging large language models compared 19 mobile stress interventions. There was no conclusive evidence that human support or mobile technology substantially enhanced intervention outcomes.