Research finds that creative ideas are generated by two cognitive pathways: insight and persistence. However, emerging research suggests people’s lay beliefs may not adequately reflect both routes. We propose that people exhibit an insight bias, such that they undervalue persistence and overvalue insight in the creative process.

A recent study by Witvliet et al. reconstructed the entire brain connectome for eight Caenorhabditis elegans spanning from birth to adulthood and described how synapse changes shape the connectome topology during development. Their data suggest some convergent developmental principles in connectome maturation between C. elegans and humans.

This article reviews the empirical evidence on the relationship between social media and political polarization. We argue that social media shapes polarization through the following social, cognitive, and technological processes: partisan selection, message content, and platform design and algorithms.

Individuals with a greater sense of purpose maintain better cognitive function and have lower dementia risk. We review evidence linking purpose in life to healthier cognitive aging across adulthood and diverse demographic groups. Experimental work is now needed to test causal mechanisms to evaluate the utility of purpose as an intervention target.

A recent article by Perez and Feigenson explores variability in order to better understand infant looking time. They found that individual differences in infants’ interest in surprising events were consistent across months, despite changes in event type. Moreover, looking times in infancy predicted curiosity in childhood.

Implicit bias refers to automatically evoked mental associations about social groups. The idea has been influential across the social sciences as a way to explain persistent racial disparities amid changing self-report attitudes. Most research has treated implicit bias as an individual attitude. However, evidence suggests that it is neither a stable individual difference nor a strong correlate of individual

In order to keep up with a changing environment, mobile organisms must be capable of deciding both where and when to move. This precision necessitates a strong sense of time, as otherwise we would fail in many of our movement goals. Yet, despite this intrinsic link, only recently have researchers begun to understand how these two features interact. Primarily, two effects have been observed: movements

Technology is central to human life but hard to define and study. This review synthesizes advances in fields from anthropology to evolutionary biology and neuroscience to propose an interdisciplinary cognitive science of technology. The foundation of this effort is an evolutionarily motivated definition of technology that highlights three key features: material production, social collaboration, and

Perceptual gaps can be caused by objects in the foreground temporarily occluding objects in the background or by eyeblinks, which briefly but frequently interrupt visual information. Resolving visual motion across perceptual gaps is particularly challenging, as object position changes during the gap. We examine how visual motion is maintained and updated through externally driven (occlusion) and internally

Pain is a fundamental experience that promotes survival. In humans, pain stands at the intersection of multiple health crises: chronic pain, the opioid epidemic, and health disparities. The study of placebo analgesia highlights how social, cognitive, and affective processes can directly shape pain, and identifies potential paths for mitigating these crises. This review examines recent progress in the

The so-called resting state, in which participants lie quietly with no particular inputs or outputs, represented a paradigm shift from conventional task-based studies in human neuroimaging. Our foray into rest was fruitful from both a scientific and methodological perspective, but at this point, how much more can we learn from rest on its own? While rest still dominates in many subfields, data from

The dominant theory of facial attractiveness judgments is that they evolved to identify healthy individuals with strong immune systems. Here, we summarize results of recent tests of this hypothesis, concluding that it has little compelling empirical support. We then propose an alternative perspective that emphasizes the effects of lifestyle health.

Changes in cognition, affect, and brain function combine to promote a shift in the nature of mentation in older adulthood, favoring exploitation of prior knowledge over exploratory search as the starting point for thought and action. Age-related exploitation biases result from the accumulation of prior knowledge, reduced cognitive control, and a shift toward affective goals. These are accompanied by

The complex reward structure of the social world and the uncertainty endemic to social contexts poses a challenge for modeling. For example, during social interactions, the actions of one person influence the internal states of another. These social dependencies make it difficult to formalize social learning problems in a mathematically tractable way. While it is tempting to dispense with these complexities

Perception requires the brain to infer whether signals arise from common causes and should hence be integrated or else be treated independently. Rideaux et al. show that a feedforward network can perform causal inference in visuovestibular motion estimation by reading out activity from neurons tuned to congruent and opposite directions.

Humans have a remarkable ability to efficiently explore visual scenes and text using eye movements. Humans typically make eye movements (saccades) every ~250 ms. Since saccade initiation and execution take 100 ms, this leaves only ~150 ms to recognize the fixated object (or word) while simultaneously previewing candidates for the next saccade goal. We propose a pipelining mechanism where serial processing

People externalize their autobiographical memories by creating representations that exist outside of their minds. Externalizations often serve personal and social functions, consistent with theorized functions of autobiographical memory. With new digital technologies, people are documenting more memories than ever and are sharing them with larger audiences. However, these technologies do not change

Recent societal upheavals have highlighted stark inequalities that affect the livelihood of marginalized individuals pursuing research careers. Established scientists have a unique role to play as casual mentors, or experienced scholars who are well-positioned to serve as allies to early career researchers by informally advising on academia’s hidden curriculum.

Public space interventions offer one example of how to translate cognitive science into the public square. Here, we detail several successful projects and the six principles of learning that underlie them that support caregiver–child engagement, interaction, and the use of content area–specific language. Policy and community implications are also discussed.

Choice prediction competitions suggest that popular models of choice, including prospect theory, have low predictive accuracy. Peterson et al. show the key problem lies in assuming each alternative is evaluated in isolation, independently of the context. This observation demonstrates how a focus on predictions can promote understanding of cognitive processes.

Goal-directed behaviour requires flexible prioritisation of relevant sensations in space and time. A recent paper by Denison et al. brings time into a canonical model of voluntary selective attention. We reflect on this breakthrough and consider the opportunities it offers for future research on the dynamic fabric of mind.

How we can optimise behavioural gains from training is a key neuroscientific question. The role of consolidation has often been overlooked but offers a substantial potential target for therapeutic approaches. Here, we discuss the mechanisms underpinning off-line skill acquisition, as reported in a recent study by Herszage and colleagues.

Recent research formalizes cooperative communication as belief transport using the mathematical theory of optimal transport. This formalization allows rigorous a priori analysis of the statistical and ecological properties of models of cooperative communication, unification of prior models and analysis of their differences, and promising directions for future research.

Philosophers have argued that people ought to change their graded beliefs via Bayes’ rule. Recent work in psychology indicates that people sometimes violate that rule by attending to explanatory factors. Results from computational modeling suggest that such violations may actually be rational.

As we skillfully navigate through familiar places, neural computations of distances and coordinates escape our attention. However, we perceive clearly the division of space into socially meaningful territories. ‘My space’ versus ‘your space’ is a distinction familiar to all of us. Spatial frontiers are social in nature since they regulate individuals’ access to utilities in space depending on hierarchy

Contextual features influence human and non-human decision making, giving rise to preference reversals. Decades of research have documented the species and situations in which these effects are observed. More recently, however, researchers have focused on boundary conditions, that is, settings in which established effects disappear or reverse. This work is scattered across academic disciplines and

The field of human behavioral genetics has come full circle. It began by using twin/family studies to estimate the relative importance of genetic and environmental influences. As large-scale genotyping became cost-effective, genome-wide association studies (GWASs) yielded insights about the nature of genetic influences and new methods that use GWAS data to estimate heritability and genetic correlations

Attitudes are mental representations that help to explain why stimuli evoke positive or negative responses. Until recently, attitudes were often thought of as associations in memory. This idea inspired extensive research on evaluative conditioning (EC) and implicit evaluation. However, attitudes can also be seen as propositional representations, which, unlike associations, specify relational information

How does the human brain code knowledge about the world? While disciplines such as artificial intelligence represent world knowledge based on human language, neurocognitive models of knowledge have been dominated by sensory embodiment, in which knowledge is derived from sensory/motor experience and supported by high-level sensory/motor and association cortices. The neural correlates of an alternative

Social learning is often portrayed as a passive process of copying and trusting others. This view, however, does not fully capture what makes human social learning so powerful: social information is often ‘curated’ by helpful teachers. I argue that both learning from others (social learning) and helping others learn (teaching) can be characterized as probabilistic inferences guided by an intuitive

Rules form an important part of our everyday lives. Here we explore the role of social influence in rule-breaking. In particular, we identify some of the cognitive mechanisms underlying rule-breaking and propose approaches for how they can be scaled up to the level of groups or crowds to better understand the emergence of collective rule-breaking. Social contagion plays an important role in such processes

Infants raised in bilingual homes redirect attention faster than infants raised in monolingual homes. How can mere exposure to a bilingual environment affect an infant’s cognitive development? The more complex language environment may drive infants to explore (gather more information from) their visual environment to facilitate learning.

Brains at rest generate dynamical activity that is highly structured in space and time. We suggest that spontaneous activity, as in rest or dreaming, underlies top-down dynamics of generative models. During active tasks, generative models provide top-down predictive signals for perception, cognition, and action. When the brain is at rest and stimuli are weak or absent, top-down dynamics optimize the

Survival prompts organisms to prepare adaptive behavior in response to environmental and social threat. However, what are the specific features of the appearance of a conspecific that trigger such adaptive behaviors? For social species, the prime candidates for triggering defense systems are the visual features of the face and the body. We propose a novel approach for studying the ability of the brain

Humans are remarkably limited in: (i) how many control-dependent tasks they can execute simultaneously, and (ii) how intensely they can focus on a single task. These limitations are universal assumptions of most theories of cognition. Yet, a rationale for why humans are subject to these constraints remains elusive. This feature review draws on recent insights from psychology, neuroscience, and machine

fMRI has considerable potential as a translational tool for understanding risk, prioritizing interventions, and improving the treatment of brain disorders. However, recent studies have found that many of the most widely used fMRI measures have low reliability, undermining this potential. Here, we argue that many fMRI measures are unreliable because they were designed to identify group effects, not

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) enable computers to learn complex data distributions and sample from these distributions. When applied to the visual domain, this allows artificial, yet photorealistic images to be synthesized. Their success at this very challenging task triggered an explosion of research within the field of artificial intelligence (AI), yielding various new GAN findings and applications

Scientific reasoning is characterized by commitments to evidence and objectivity. New research suggests that under some conditions, people are prone to reject these commitments, and instead sanction motivated reasoning and bias. Moreover, people’s tendency to devalue scientific reasoning likely explains the emergence and persistence of many biased beliefs. However, recent work in epistemology has identified

Peer review is an integral part of scientific life, determining success in publishing, grant applications, and professional appointments. We argue for the importance of neutral language in peer review and provide examples of nonneutral linguistic and stylistic devices that emphasize a reviewer’s personal response to the manuscript rather than their objective assessment.

Persistence is crucial for overcoming academic and interpersonal challenges. However, there has been little progress in developing effective interventions to improve persistence in childhood. Here we outline how recent insights from cognitive science can be leveraged to promote young children’s persistence and highlight future directions to bridge research with practice.

There are anatomical and functional links between auditory and somatosensory processing. We suggest that these links form the basis for the popular internet phenomenon where people enjoy a sense of touch from auditory (and often audiovisual) stimuli.

Hierarchical synchronization of sleep oscillations establishes communication pathways to support memory reactivation, transfer, and consolidation. From an information-theoretical perspective, oscillations constitute highly structured network states that provide limited information-coding capacity. Recent findings indicate that sleep oscillations occur in transient bursts that are interleaved with aperiodic

Much research on the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) has focused on two evoked potentials, the P3b and the visual or auditory awareness negativity (VAN, AAN). Surveying a broad range of recent experimental evidence, we find that repeated failures to observe the P3b during conscious perception eliminate it as a putative NCC. Neither the VAN nor the AAN have been dissociated from consciousness;

A brain–computer interface (BCI) establishes a direct communication channel between a brain and an external device. With recent advances in neurotechnology and artificial intelligence (AI), the brain signals in BCI communication have been advanced from sensation and perception to higher-level cognition activities. While the field of BCI has grown rapidly in the past decades, the core technologies and

Challenges in social cognition and communication are core characteristics of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but in some domains, individuals with ASD may display typical abilities and even outperform their neurotypical counterparts. These enhanced abilities are notable in the domains of reasoning, judgment and decision-making, in which individuals with ASD often show ‘enhanced rationality’ by exhibiting

Although researchers investigating psychological contributors to educational inequality have traditionally focused on students, a growing literature highlights the importance of teachers’ psychology in shaping disparities in students’ educational achievement and attainment. In this review, we discuss recent advances linking teachers’ attitudes, perceptions, and beliefs to inequality in students’ outcomes

Dopamine contributes to cognitive control through well-established effects in both the striatum and cortex. Although earlier work suggests that dopamine affects cognitive control capacity, more recent work suggests that striatal dopamine may also impact on cognitive motivation. We consider the emerging perspective that striatal dopamine boosts control by making people more sensitive to the benefits

Neuromatch Academy (NMA) designed and ran a fully online 3-week Computational Neuroscience Summer School for 1757 students with 191 teaching assistants (TAs) working in virtual inverted (or flipped) classrooms and on small group projects. Fourteen languages, active community management, and low cost allowed for an unprecedented level of inclusivity and universal accessibility.

Concern over the welfare of captive animals is growing. Captivity is often associated with frequent exposure to stressors, which may be the source of persistent negative affective states. We argue that captivity may lead to depressive-like states and call for more research on this topic.

Have you ever been in a conversation that lasted too long or ended too soon? According to recent findings from Mastroianni et al., conversations rarely end when people want them to end. I propose a framework for studying conversation and outline new questions that follow from Mastroianni and colleagues’ generative studies.

A large and growing literature examines how we see the visual quantities of number, area, and density. The literature rests on an untested assumption: that our perception of area is veridical. Here, we discuss a systematic distortion of perceived area and its implications for quantity perception more broadly.

The readiness potential (RP), a slow buildup of electrical potential recorded at the scalp using electroencephalography, has been associated with neural activity involved in movement preparation. It became famous thanks to Benjamin Libet (Brain 1983;106:623–642), who used the time difference between the RP and self-reported time of conscious intention to move to argue that we lack free will. The RP’s

Autism Spectrum Conditions are typified by a divergence in cognitive style from that of the non-autistic population. Cognitive differences in autism may underlie significant strengths, but also increase vulnerability to psychopathology such as anxiety, which is a major problem for many autistic people. Many autistic people also do not respond to typical psychotherapeutic interventions, suggesting that

Biological cognition is based on the ability to autonomously acquire knowledge, or epistemic autonomy. Such self-supervision is largely absent in artificial neural networks (ANN) because they depend on externally set learning criteria. Yet training ANN using error backpropagation has created the current revolution in artificial intelligence, raising the question of whether the epistemic autonomy displayed

The most effective charities are hundreds of times more effective than typical charities, yet few donors prioritize effectiveness. Why is that? How might we increase the effectiveness of charitable giving? We review the motivational and epistemic causes of (in)effective giving. Many donors view charitable giving as a matter of personal preference, which favors decisions based on emotional appeal rather

Humans and other animals share a number sense’, an intuitive understanding of countable quantities. Having evolved independent from one another for hundreds of millions of years, the brains of these diverse species, including monkeys, crows, zebrafishes, bees, and squids, differ radically. However, in all vertebrates investigated, the pallium of the telencephalon has been implicated in number processing