Decisions in the natural world are rarely made in isolation. Each action that an organism selects will affect the future situations in which it finds itself, and those situations will in turn affect the future actions that are available. Achieving real-world goals often requires successfully navigating a sequence of many actions. An efficient and flexible way to achieve such goals is to construct an

Recent models have identified evolutionary explanations for sensitive periods, when individuals are more responsive to experiences at certain stages of development, based on benefits and costs of attending to environmental cues. Empirical tests of these models face challenges, requiring complex, long-term experiments, and detailed understanding of physiology and ecology. Insect systems offer the opportunity

Curiosity is critical to learning and generally seen as a highly desirable quality, while impulsivity is generally seen as maladaptive and is associated with deleterious outcomes. The differing views of these constructs present somewhat of a paradox, as curiosity and impulsivity share remarkable overlaps, both in terms of the way they are measured behaviorally and in terms of their underlying neural

Of the more than 2 billion children worldwide, 90% live in low- or middle-income countries, and are particularly vulnerable to early life exposures and experiences. A wide range of factors contribute to maternal and child well-being, including maternal depression as well as larger social determinants such as poverty. In this review, we provide a framework for conceptualizing interventions that can

Curiosity is evoked when people experience an information-gap between what they know and what they do not (yet) know. Curious people are motivated to find the information they are missing. This motivation has different components: People want to reduce the uncertainty of not knowing something (deprivation motive) and they want to discover new information to expand their knowledge (discovery motive)

Executive functions (EFs) are cognitive processes that support flexible goal pursuit. Healthy development of EFs during childhood is critical for later life outcomes including health, wealth and educational attainment. As such it is crucial to understand how EFs can be supported and protected against insult. Here we examine whether there are sensitive periods in the development of EFs, by drawing on

To make adaptive decisions in multi-dimensional environments, animals must infer the relevant features and afford them priority for the control of learning and actions. Prioritizing sources of information is the role of executive control and attention, but very little is known about the mechanisms by which the brain computes relevance or priority. We present a new decision-theoretic view of priority

Curiosity—the desire to know—is a powerful motivator for learning and behavior. Theoretical and anecdotal discussions have also linked curiosity to creativity and innovation, but there is little empirical evidence for this connection, aside from a handful of recent studies. We review the existing evidence and discuss potential mechanisms through which curiosity may facilitate the creative process.

Clinical evidence indicates that stressful experiences during adolescence can increase rates of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in adulthood, while prospective evidence from animal models shows that stress in adolescence can increase risk or resilience to the effects of subsequent stress exposure. We discuss recent evidence of lasting effects from adolescent stress in clinical and rodent studies

Proponents of the ‘ideological symmetry thesis’ claim that liberals and conservatives are equally prejudiced — but against different groups. Whereas conservatives are said to be more prejudiced against ‘left-leaning’ groups (such as racial, religious, and sexual minorities), liberals are said to be prejudiced against ‘right-leaning’ groups (such as racial, religious, and sexual majorities). We identify

Here, we summarize recent advances on how environmental influences during sensitive phases alter the social behavioral phenotype of rodents later in life. Current studies support the view that the prenatal, early postnatal and adolescent periods of life can be regarded as sensitive phases. Environmental cues acting on the organism during these phases have a wide variety of effects on adult social behavior

Humans and animals navigate uncertain environments by seeking information about the future. Remarkably, we often seek information even when it has no instrumental value for aiding our decisions — as if the information is a source of value in its own right. In recent years, there has been a flourishing of research into these non-instrumental information preferences and their implementation in the brain

There is a growing appreciation for the range of sensitive periods which occur across the brain. These sensitive periods give rise to sensory outcomes, as well as complex higher-order cognitive functions like learning and memory. More recently, an understanding that sensitive periods of development occur outside of the central nervous system (e.g. in the gastrointestinal microbiota) has emerged. Less

In recent years, empirical work has documented a curiosity for negative content – people deliberately view images detailing death, violence or harm or engage with other aversive stimuli. The question that emerges from this work is why people are curious about aversive information. Our central premise is that curiosity for negative content can be valuable – it may serve fundamental psychological functions

From both a medical and educational perspective, there is enormous value to understanding the environmental factors that sculpt learning and decision making. These questions are often approached from proximate levels of analysis, but may be further informed by the adaptive developmental plasticity framework used in evolutionary biology. The basic adaptive developmental plasticity framework posits that

Cognitive control allows us to think and behave flexibly based on our context and goals. At the heart of theories of cognitive control is a control representation that enables the same input to produce different outputs contingent on contextual factors. In this review, we focus on an important property of the control representation’s neural code: its representational dimensionality. Dimensionality

Political polarization is on the rise in America. Although social psychologists frequently study the intergroup underpinnings of polarization, they have traditionally had less to say about macro societal processes that contribute to its rise and fall. Recent cross-disciplinary work on the contemporary political and media landscape provides these complementary insights. In this paper, we consider the

Macronutrients consumed by the pregnant mother enter her homeostatically regulated metabolism, which buffers the fetus against short-term increases or deficits in intake. In contrast, hormones that coordinate this homeostasis, including cortisol, respond acutely to stressors. Because maternal cortisol crosses the placenta to influence fetal tissues, transient stress activation during pregnancy can

Although it is widely accepted that the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is important for decision making, its precise contribution to behavior remains a topic of debate. While many loss of function experiments have been conducted in animals, causal studies of human OFC function are relatively scarce. This review discusses recent causal investigations into the human OFC, with an emphasis on advances in network-based

Humans’ impressive cognitive abilities — map reading, understanding numerical structure, learning grammar rules — rest on the ability to abstract sameness of relations. How does this ability arise and why do animals not read maps or learn grammars like humans do? Here, I review evidence suggesting that object similarity — perceiving that two events look alike — is crucial for learning to perceive relational

The function of consciousness has often been investigated by looking at the cognitive processes that can (not) be performed without conscious awareness. The most important processes — historically and theoretically — in this context are semantic processing and information integration. Here, I will argue that a subliminal priming version of the same-different task is a perfect tool to investigate these

The study of evolution and development together, ‘evo-devo’, is essential to understand sensitive periods. The combination of phylogenetic history, life history, the biophysics of developing physical substrates, as well as cognitive and neural mechanisms, can distinguish their accidental from essential features. Two examples of research programs concerning sensitive periods, the calibration of eye

Curiosity refers to a demand for information that has no instrumental benefit. Because of its critical role in development and in the regulation of learning, curiosity has long fascinated psychologists. However, it has been difficult to study curiosity from the perspective of the single neuron or the circuit – that is, at the systems level. Recent advances; however, have made doing so more feasible

In the real world, uncertainty is omnipresent due to incomplete or noisy information. This makes inferring the state-of-the-world difficult. Furthermore, the state-of-the-world often changes over time, though with some regularity. This makes learning and decision-making challenging. Organisms have evolved to take advantage of environmental regularities, that allow organisms to acquire a model of the

In the current review, we propose to look at curiosity from the goal systemic perspective and differentiate between curiosity as a motive/goal, which engenders various activities (means) aimed at satisfying it, and information-seeking behaviors which can, but do not have to be, driven by the curiosity motivation as such. We thus assume that people can adopt various behaviors in order to satisfy their

We propose a framework for understanding epistemic curiosity as a metacognitive feeling state that is related to the individual's Region of Proximal Learning (RPL), an adaptive mental space where we feel we are on the verge of knowing or understanding. First, we review several historical views, contrasting the RPL perspective with alternative views of curiosity. Second, we detail the processes, conditions

Same/different abstract-concept learning provides a basis for higher order learning. We present criteria (e.g. the use of novel items, how to reinforce responding, achieving full concept learning) for evaluating evidence of abstract-concept learning. We discuss how revealing functional relationships also are critical for understanding how abstract concepts are learned. To illustrate our points, data

Early life experiences have profound effects on later life health and on Darwinian fitness in many mammalian species, including humans. However, while it is clear that early life adversity often leads to compromised health, reproduction, and survival in adulthood, it is less clear why these links have evolved. Here, we review hypotheses from the evolutionary biology literature that have been proposed

Curiosity is a desire for information that is not motivated by strategic concerns. Latent learning is not driven by standard reinforcement processes. We propose that curiosity serves the purpose of motivating latent learning. While latent learning is often treated as a passive or incidental process, it normally reflects a strong evolved pressure to actively seek large amounts of information. That information

Can nonhuman animals learn abstract concepts? This intriguing question has been extensively studied over the past several decades with many different species and experimental methods. Here, we review evidence showing that pigeons can acquire a same–different concept: they readily learn to discriminate between arrays of same and different items as well as robustly transfer their discrimination to novel

Cognitive, comparative, and developmental psychologists have long been interested in humans’ and animals’ ability to respond to abstract relations. Cross-species research has used relational matching-to-sample (RMTS) tasks in which participants try to find stimulus pairs that ‘match’ because they express the same abstract relation (same or different). Researchers seek to understand the cognitive processes

Infants are highly curious and show remarkable self-driven learning capabilities. Inspired by developmental psychology and recent advances in neuroscience, computational models of curiosity have been implemented in robots. These models are based on the paradigm that learning progress generates intrinsic rewards, which in turn determine action selection. With the rise of deep learning, robots’ perceptual

A burgeoning literature has recently begun investigating the links between socioeconomic inequality and the developing brain. This work suggests widespread disparities in both brain structure and function that begin as early as the first year of life. Here, we review disparities in neural structure that have been reported in both cortical and subcortical gray matter, as well as in white matter. Disparities

Same/different abstract concept learning in pigeons is typically assessed by training subjects with one set of stimuli and demonstrating that they can transfer that learning to new stimuli. Converging evidence suggests that under a variety of conditions, pigeons do show evidence of conceptual same/difference learning that goes beyond the if-then chains proposed by Skinner (1950). The fact that transfer

Adult ability in complex cognitive domains, including music performance, is commonly thought of as the product of gene-environment interactions, where genetic predispositions influence and are modulated by experience resulting in the final phenotypic expression. Recently, however, the important contribution of maturation to gene-environment interactions has become better understood. Thus the timing

Humans are known to seek non-instrumental information, sometimes expending considerable effort or taking risks to receive it, for example, ‘curiosity killed the cat’. This suggests that information is highly motivationally salient. In the current article, we first review recent empirical studies that demonstrated the strong motivational lure of curiosity – people will pay and risk electric shocks for

Humans and non-human primates learn conceptual relationships such as ‘same’ and ‘different, which have to be encoded independently of the physical nature of objects linked by the relation. Consequently, concepts are associated with high-level cognition and are not expected in an insect brain. Yet, various works have shown that the miniature brain of honey bees also learns the conceptual relationships

Neoliberalism asserts that to preserve individual liberty, an effective competitive market must be established to allow individuals to freely choose their economic activities and to reward individuals according to their merits. This ideology has been criticized for condoning social inequality by attributing the presence of social hierarchy to innate or learned personal qualities. We review existing

Children are known for asking ‘why?’ — a query motivated by their desire for explanations. Research suggests that explanation-seeking curiosity (ESC) is triggered by first-person cues (such as novelty or surprise), third-person cues (such as a knowledgeable adults’ surprise or question), and future-oriented cues (such as expectations about information gain or future value). Once triggered, ESC is satisfied

Curiosity is associated with increased learning, and developing curious individuals is an educational goal in its own right. This review uses Bioecological Systems Theory to examine how students’ curiosity can be supported in educational contexts. Understanding the nature of curiosity as a biopsychosocial characteristic that can change over time and its relation to other characteristics such as knowledge

The study of trait curiosity — individual differences in curious thoughts, feelings, and actions — sorts into two approaches. One looks downward by unpacking and differentiating trait curiosity, with an emphasis on curiosity’s facets, kinds, and parts. Another looks upward by locating trait curiosity within the larger structure of global personality traits. This article reviews research that looks

The existence of critical or sensitive periods has been argued for cognitive functions such as language, which allows for communication with conspecifics. Faces also play a crucial role in establishing social communication. Here we discuss if critical or sensitive period concepts apply to face processing. We describe how experience shapes face processing during development. While there is not clear

During sensitive periods an individual’s development is especially receptive to information from the environment in ways that it is not at earlier and later developmental stages. Here, we describe challenges in applying the concept of sensitive periods to the domain of socio-emotional development, review what applications of this approach have accomplished, and point to promising future directions

Research on foreign policy ideology indicates a two-dimensional structure with clear parallels to numerous dual-process psychological frameworks. In foreign affairs, as in domestic affairs, individual differ in their underlying motivation to both provide and protect, captured by the constructs of cooperative internationalism (CI) and militant internationalism (MI), respectively. Recent studies indicate

Because of the legacy of the French Revolution and the post-World War II consensus on providing social welfare, France provides an intriguing context in which to investigate political ideology and system justification. We summarize the results of a large, nationally representative survey of French voters, which revealed that general system justification was associated—not with rightist ideology, as

Recent advances in the study of political attitudes and behavior have incorporated neurobiological methods to elucidate the basic affective and cognitive processes that support political decisions. This review integrates perspectives in political neuroscience research and focuses on the neurobiological bases of system justification — the motivation to regard the existing social system as legitimate

Recent models of cognition suggest that the brain may implement predictive processing, in which top-down expectations constrain incoming sensory data. In this perspective, expectations are updated (error minimization) only if sensory data sufficiently deviate from these expectations (prediction error). Although originally applied to perception, predictive processing is thought to generally characterize

Democracies welcome dissent, but when disagreements turn divisive, they can imperil social cohesion and become toxic to democracy. We review research on the psychological processes associated with toxic polarization. Prior work has generally focused on polarization as a consequence of ideological differences or affective evaluations. We assess recent research on these dimensions, and extend the scope

Heteronormative ideology refers to the belief that there are two separate and opposing genders with associated natural roles that match their assigned sex, and that heterosexuality is a given. It is pervasive and persistent, carrying negative consequences. Because it is embedded in societal institutions and propagated through socialization and other widely held ideologies, it is prevalent among both

Processes occurring during sleep contribute critically to the stabilization of new learning for long-term retention. Previously consolidated memory traces can be reactivated rendering memories labile again, and vulnerable to disruption or alteration. Across the phases of reactivation, modification, and re-consolidation, processing during sleep may play an essential role in restabilizing the transformed

Research unravelling the facilitating role of sleep for cognitive processes is nowadays mainly performed in adults. Neural activity patterns during NREM sleep like sleep spindles and slow oscillations have been shown to guide and time the reactivation, transformation and stabilization of memories. Whether and how sleep — especially sleep spindles — similarly plays a role in the development of learning

With the success of artificial neural network models in machine learning has come a renewed interest in the possibility that neural networks can be used as scientific models for understanding the function of real neural systems. When similar questions initially arose in the 1980’s and ‘90’s, the many discrepancies between artificial and natural neural systems contributed to the widespread view that

The rise of polarization over the past 25 years has many Americans worried about the state of politics. This worry is understandable: up to a point, polarization can help democracies, but when it becomes too vast, such that entire swaths of the population refuse to consider each other’s views, this thwarts democratic methods for solving societal problems. Given widespread polarization in America, what

Scholars have long been interested in the underpinnings of political ideology. Over the past fifteen years or so, political scientists, psychologists, sociologists, and economists have started to take seriously the idea that ideology might be influenced by genes. In this article, we review the literature on the genetics of ideology. We begin by describing twin studies and more sophisticated approaches

Memory and planning rely on learning the structure of relationships among experiences. Compact representations of these structures guide flexible behavior in humans and animals. A century after ‘latent learning’ experiments summarized by Tolman, the larger puzzle of cognitive maps remains elusive: how does the brain learn and generalize relational structures? This review focuses on a reinforcement

Gambling involves placing something of value at risk in exchange for the opportunity to potentially gain something of greater value in return. A variety of gambling paradigms have been designed to study the maladaptive decision-making that underlies problematic gambling. Central to these gambling models are the definitions of ‘risk’ and ‘loss’, especially when translating the results from rodent studies

Moralistic punishment is common in humans and functions to discourage perceived moral transgressions. Research in neuroeconomics suggests that moralistic punishment behavior is associated with activity in neural systems involved in detecting norm violations and in value-based decision-making. Separately, research in philosophy and social psychology highlights different moral expectations for girls/women

Understanding memory fundamentally relies on the study of behaviour, the readout of learned information encoded in the brain. Investigating memory, therefore, requires an integrative approach that links behaviour to neural substrates. Classical methods of measuring and manipulating brain activity such as in vivo electrophysiology and pharmacological interventions have been very useful, but lack precision

Left and right are political constructs whose meanings and functions need to be historically and contextually situated. Despite exerting similar functions such as liberal and conservative, left and right correspond to a distinct ideological divide. They do not necessarily cover the same issues and reflect the same priorities and platforms across times and political context; nor do they meet and express

The authors of The Authoritarian Personality famously posited a psychological affinity between the authoritarian personality syndrome and politically conservative ideology. Seven decades later, we evaluate the empirical evidence bearing on this hypothesis. We conclude that: (a) there is a large body of evidence, including data from six continents and many different measures, documenting a positive