Volume 6 Issue 4, April 2022

A number of US cities and states have introduced regulations on government use of facial recognition and surveillance technologies. These efforts are vital to prevent these methods from becoming tools of oppression, argues Kade Crockford.

Science could hold the answer to many of society’s challenges, if only scientists engaged with policy-makers. Alma Hernández-Mondragón explains how this realization led her to pursue a career outside the laboratory, at the science–policy interface.

Women are underrepresented in prestigious science roles in many countries. This is also true in China, where they are less likely to succeed in election to the Chinese Academies of Sciences and Engineering — for reasons unrelated to scientific merit. Reform of election procedures is needed to foster gender balance.

Financial, informational and other constraints lower the adoption of welfare-improving technologies amongst people living in poverty. Field trials have identified effective strategies to facilitate behaviour change. Researchers and policymakers need to apply this knowledge, and form institutional partnerships to implement solutions at scale.

Past research has put forward competing hypotheses about the determinants of the evolvement of romantic love, including it being a consequence of economic development or the result of transmission of culture. A new large-scale empirical study by Baumard et al.¹ puts these different hypotheses to the test.

Developing theories by designing experiments that are aimed at falsifying them is a core endeavour in empirical sciences. By analysing 365 articles dedicated to the study of consciousness, Yaron et al.’s study¹ shows that there is almost no dialogue between the four main theories of this elusive phenomenon and gives us an interactive database with which to probe the literature.

Koops et al. ran four field experiments in Guinea and found that chimpanzees did not independently (re-)innovate nut cracking. Their null results are consistent with the hypothesis that chimpanzee nut cracking is a product of social learning.

Using survey and internet browsing data and expert ratings, Bhadani et al. find that incorporating partisan audience diversity into algorithmic rankings of news websites increases the trustworthiness of the sites they recommend and maintains relevance.

Using qualitative and quantitative methods, Baumard et al. build a database of ancient literary fiction. They find that higher levels of economic development are associated with a greater incidence of love in narrative fiction.

Across 24 countries, Hoogeveen et al. found that gobbledegook coming from a scientist was considered more credible than when coming from a spiritual guru. This ‘Einstein effect’ was less pronounced for religious individuals.

Draschkow et al. test working memory in virtual reality following self-movement and find that multiple representations of spatial environment are used to maintain and select visual contents in working memory.

Skies of Manawak, a video game designed to train attentional control and executive processes, is associated with better reading skills in 8- to 12-year-old children that are maintained 6 months later and higher school grades 12–18 months later.

Ciranka, Linde-Domingo et al. show that inference of transitive orderings from pairwise relations benefits from a seemingly biased learning strategy, where observers update their belief about one of the pair members but not the other.

Serino et al. studied the sense of agency for actions generated via a brain–machine interface. They show that primary motor cortex encodes not only motor and sensory signals, but also subjective agency signals, enabling improved brain–machine interface proficiency.

In a Registered Report, Altay et al. find that learning about the scientific consensus on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) reduces the gap between public opinion and scientists. This gap is also narrowed, to a greater extent, by reading counterarguments to anti-GMO arguments in a chatbot or in a list.

Yaron and colleagues collected and classified 412 experiments relating to four leading theories in consciousness research, providing a comprehensive overview of the field and unravelling trends and methodological biases.