Lackner et al. found science overconfidence peaks at intermediate levels of knowledge. Those with intermediate knowledge also hold the most negative attitudes toward scientists. In doing so, they provide a novel measure of overconfidence that measures the tendency to give incorrect answers as opposed to answering, ‘I don’t know’.

Does empathy necessarily impede equity in altruism? Emerging findings from cognitive and affective science suggest that rationality and empathy are mutually compatible, contradicting some earlier, prominent arguments that empathy impedes equitable giving. We propose alternative conceptualizations of relationships among empathy, rationality, and equity, drawing on interdisciplinary advances in altruism

Prominent accounts of sentient behavior depict brains as generative models of organismic interaction with the world, evincing intriguing similarities with current advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI). However, because they contend with the control of purposive, life-sustaining sensorimotor interactions, the generative models of living organisms are inextricably anchored to the body and

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We examine the opportunities and challenges of expert judgment in the social sciences, scrutinizing the way social scientists make predictions. While social scientists show above-chance accuracy in predicting laboratory-based phenomena, they often struggle to predict real-world societal changes. We argue that most causal models used in social sciences are oversimplified, confuse levels of analysis

Psychology is crucial for understanding human history. When aggregated, changes in the psychology of individuals – in the intensity of social trust, parental care, or intellectual curiosity – can lead to important changes in institutions, social norms, and cultures. However, studying the role of psychology in shaping human history has been hindered by the difficulty of documenting the psychological

Around the world, people engage in social protests aimed at addressing major societal problems. Certain protests have led to significant progress, yet other protests have resulted in little demonstrable change. We introduce a framework for evaluating the effectiveness of social protest made up of three components: (i) what types of action are being considered; (ii) what target audience is being affected;

Intergroup conflict has been conceptualized as a strategic interaction (conflict-as-contest) and separately as a pathological condition (conflict-as-disease). We highlight how insights and tools from the former perspective can potentially inform the latter. Harnessing the science of strategic decision-making can facilitate the development of novel approaches for mitigating intergroup conflict.

Inhibitory control is a fundamental mechanism underlying flexible behavior and features in theories across many areas of cognitive and psychological science. However, whereas many theories implicitly or explicitly assume that inhibitory control is a domain-general process, the vast majority of neuroscientific work has hitherto focused on individual domains, such as motor, mnemonic, or attentional inhibition

The robustness and flexibility of human language is underpinned by a machinery of interactive repair. Repair is deeply intertwined with two core properties of human language: reflexivity (it can communicate about itself) and accountability (it is used to publicly enforce social norms). We review empirical and theoretical advances from across the cognitive sciences that mark interactive repair as a

Learning continues beyond the end of training. Post-training learning is supported by changes in plasticity and stability in the brain during both wakefulness and sleep. However, the lack of a unified measure for assessing plasticity and stability dynamics during training and post-training periods has limited our understanding of how these dynamics shape learning. Focusing primarily on procedural learning

High-level visual areas in ventral temporal cortex (VTC) support recognition of important categories, such as faces and words. Word-selective regions are left lateralized and emerge at the onset of reading instruction. Face-selective regions are right lateralized and have been documented in infancy. Prevailing theories suggest that face-selective regions become right lateralized due to competition

If you are currently feeling tired, you are not alone: feelings of fatigue are incredibly common. In a recent study, Matthews et al. investigated moment-to-moment fluctuations in fatigue using behavioral experiments and computational modeling. The study offers a precise account of how fatigue waxes (during physical and cognitive effort) and wanes (during rest).

Neuroscientific buzzwords, such as ‘brain hacks’, have become commonplace when discussing social media (SM)-platform engineering. Despite societal debates, few studies have used neuroscientific approaches to validate the claims empirically. We call here for a transformative shift engaging scientists and other stakeholders to address this critical knowledge gap.

Although each of us was once a baby, infant consciousness remains mysterious and there is no received view about when, and in what form, consciousness first emerges. Some theorists defend a ‘late-onset’ view, suggesting that consciousness requires cognitive capacities which are unlikely to be in place before the child’s first birthday at the very earliest. Other theorists defend an ‘early-onset’ account

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Seeing the interactions between other people is a critical part of our everyday visual experience, but recognizing the social interactions of others is often considered outside the scope of vision and grouped with higher-level social cognition like theory of mind. Recent work, however, has revealed that recognition of social interactions is efficient and automatic, is well modeled by bottom-up computational

Research on human navigation by psychologists and neuroscientists has come mainly from a limited range of environments and participants inhabiting western countries. By contrast, numerous anthropological accounts illustrate the diverse ways in which cultures adapt to their surrounding environment to navigate. Here, we provide an overview of these studies and relate them to cognitive science research

Humans possess a remarkable ability to make decisions within real-world environments that are expansive, complex, and multidimensional. Human cognitive computational neuroscience has sought to exploit reinforcement learning (RL) as a framework within which to explain human decision-making, often focusing on constrained, artificial experimental tasks. In this article, we review recent efforts that use

Many people report a form of internal language known as inner speech (IS). This review examines recent growth of research interest in the phenomenon, which has broadly supported a theoretical model in which IS is a functional language process that can confer benefits for cognition in a range of domains. A key insight to have emerged in recent years is that IS is an embodied experience characterized

Despite the physiological complexity of the hypothalamus, its role is typically restricted to initiation or cessation of innate behaviors. For example, theories of lateral hypothalamus argue that it is a switch to turn feeding ‘on’ and ‘off’ as dictated by higher-order structures that render when feeding is appropriate. However, recent data demonstrate that the lateral hypothalamus is critical for

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Adolescents are often portrayed as reckless risk-takers because of their immature brains. Recent research has cast doubt on this portrayal, identifying the environment as a moderator of risk-taking. However, the key features of environments that drive risk-taking behaviors are often underspecified. We call for greater attention to the environment by drawing on research showing that its statistical

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Antisocial behaviour (ASB) incurs substantial costs to the individual and society. Cognitive neuroscience has the potential to shed light on developmental risk for ASB, but it cannot achieve this potential in an ‘essentialist’ framework that focuses on the brain and cognition isolated from the environment. Here, we present the case for studying the social transactional and iterative unfolding of brain

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Governments and organizations often offer cash payments for vaccination. How effective are such payments? A literature review shows that incentives usually increase vaccination, especially for nonhesitant populations and when using guaranteed payments. Concerns about negative unintended consequences are unsupported. We also discuss open questions and avenues for future research.

Network neuroscience has emphasized the connectional properties of neural elements – cells, populations, and regions. This has come at the expense of the anatomical and functional connections that link these elements to one another. A new perspective – namely one that emphasizes 'edges' – may prove fruitful in addressing outstanding questions in network neuroscience. We highlight one recently proposed

Prediction is often regarded as an integral aspect of incremental language comprehension, but little is known about the cognitive architectures and mechanisms that support it. We review studies showing that listeners and readers use all manner of contextual information to generate multifaceted predictions about upcoming input. The nature of these predictions may vary between individuals owing to differences

People increasingly read text displayed on digital devices, including computers, handheld e-readers, and smartphones. Given this, there is rapidly growing interest in understanding how the cognitive processes that support the reading of static text (e.g., books, magazines, or newspapers) might be adapted to reading digital texts. Evidence from recent experiments suggests a complex interplay of visual

Goals play a central role in human cognition. However, computational theories of learning and decision-making often take goals as given. Here, we review key empirical findings showing that goals shape the representations of inputs, responses, and outcomes, such that setting a goal crucially influences the central aspects of any learning process: states, actions, and rewards. We thus argue that studying

How do team leaders and followers synchronize their behaviors and brains to effectively manage intergroup conflicts? Zhang and colleagues offered a collective neurobehavioral narrative that delves into the intricacies of intergroup conflict. Their results underscore the importance of leaders’ group-oriented actions, along with leader–follower synchronization, in intergroup conflict resolution.

Davis and Bainbridge reveal a consistent memorability signal for artworks, both online and in a museum setting, which is predicted by the intrinsic visual attributes of the paintings. The fusion of artificial intelligence (AI) with artistic intuition emerges as a promising avenue to deepen our understanding of what makes images memorable.

Attention has been regarded as the ‘gatekeeper’ controlling what information gets selected into working memory. However, a new perspective has emerged with the discovery of attribute amnesia, a phenomenon revealing that people are frequently unable to report information they have just attended to moments ago. This report failure is thought to stem from a lack of consolidating the attended information

The action observation network (AON) has traditionally been thought to be dedicated to recognizing animate actions. A recent study by Karakose-Akbiyik et al. invites rethinking this assumption by demonstrating that the AON contains a shared neural code for general events, regardless of whether those events involve animate or inanimate entities.

Large language models (LLMs) show intriguing emergent behaviors, yet they receive around four or five orders of magnitude more language data than human children. What accounts for this vast difference in sample efficiency? Candidate explanations include children’s pre-existing conceptual knowledge, their use of multimodal grounding, and the interactive, social nature of their input.

Do large language models (LLMs) constitute a computational account of how humans process language? And if so, what is the role of (psycho)linguistic theory in understanding the relationship between artificial and biological minds? The answer depends on choosing among several, fundamentally distinct ways of interpreting these models as hypotheses about humans.

COVID-19 is associated with a range of neurological, cognitive, and mental health symptoms both acutely and chronically that can persist for many months after infection in people with long-COVID syndrome. Investigations of cognitive function and neuroimaging have begun to elucidate the nature of some of these symptoms. They reveal that, although cognitive deficits may be related to brain imaging abnormalities

Semantic cognition and numerical cognition are dissociable faculties with separable neural mechanisms. However, recent advances in the cortical topography of the temporal and parietal lobes have revealed a common organisational principle for the neural representations of semantics and numbers. We discuss their convergence and divergence through the prism of topography.

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The classical notion of a ‘language of thought’ (LoT), advanced prominently by the philosopher Jerry Fodor, is an influential position in cognitive science whereby the mental representations underpinning thought are considered to be compositional and productive, enabling the construction of new complex thoughts from more primitive symbolic concepts. LoT theory has been challenged because a neural implementation

In an updated meta-analysis of 90 prospective studies with over two million adults, Wang et al. found that social isolation and loneliness were linked to a substantial increase in all-cause mortality in the general population. They also discovered a higher mortality risk in isolated individuals with cardiovascular disease (CVD) or cancer.

Recent work by Pang et al. enriches our understanding of how the anatomy of the human brain constrains its function by demonstrating that brain geometry plays a crucial role in predicting neuronal dynamics. We highlight some key findings from this work while also addressing some points of confusion that could potentially cause public misunderstanding.

How does the human brain develop stable emotion representations? According to recent work by Camacho et al., neural representations of contextualized emotional cues are distinct and fairly stable by mid-to-late childhood and activation patterns become increasingly similar between individuals during adolescence. Here, I propose a framework for investigating contextualized emotion processing.

Contemplative practices are a staple of modern life and have historically been intertwined with morality. However, do these practices in fact improve our morality? The answer remains unclear because the science of contemplative practices has focused on unidimensional aspects of morality, which do not align with the type of interdependent moral functioning these practices aspire to cultivate. Here,

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Vicarious reward plays a pivotal role in shaping altruism and prosociality. However, neural circuit mechanisms underlying the distinction between vicarious reward and experienced reward are poorly understood. Putnam et al. recently demonstrated that the two types of reward are represented by distinct coordination frequencies within the same cingulate–amygdala pathway.

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Modifiable risk and protective factors for boosting brain and cognitive development and preventing neurodegeneration and cognitive decline are embraced in neuroimaging studies. We call for sobriety regarding the timing and quantity of such influences on brain and cognition. Individual differences in the level of brain and cognition, many of which present already at birth and early in development, appear

Human social learning is increasingly occurring on online social platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok. On these platforms, algorithms exploit existing social-learning biases (i.e., towards prestigious, ingroup, moral, and emotional information, or ‘PRIME’ information) to sustain users’ attention and maximize engagement. Here, we synthesize emerging insights into ‘algorithm-mediated social

Individuals typically want what they expect to like, often based on memories of previous positive experiences. However, in some situations desire can decouple completely from memories and from learned predictions of outcome value. The potential for desire to separate from prediction arises from independent operating rules that control motivational incentive salience. Incentive salience, or 'wanting'

Theory of mind research has traditionally focused on the ascription of mental states to a single individual. Here, we introduce a theory of collective mind: the ascription of a unified mental state to a group of agents with convergent experiences. Rather than differentiation between one’s personal perspective and that of another agent, a theory of collective mind requires perspectival unification across

Does expertise mostly stem from pattern recognition or look-ahead search? van Opheusden et al. contribute to this important debate in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence (AI) with a multi-method, multi-experiment study and a new model. Using a novel, relatively simple board game, they show that players increase depth of search when improving their skill.

Patch foraging is a near-ubiquitous behaviour across the animal kingdom and characterises many decision-making domains encountered by humans. We review how a disposition to explore in adolescence may reflect the evolutionary conditions under which hunter-gatherers foraged for resources. We propose that neurocomputational mechanisms responsible for reward processing, learning, and cognitive control

Events associated with aversive or rewarding outcomes are prioritized in memory. This memory boost is commonly attributed to the elicited affective response, closely linked to noradrenergic and dopaminergic modulation of hippocampal plasticity. Herein we review and compare this ‘affect’ mechanism to an additional, recently discovered, ‘prediction’ mechanism whereby memories are strengthened by the

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