Your conscious choices may change your brain, and one theory says the work happens in the fatty skin of a single brain cell.

Nature - Objects found in a cave in southwestern China suggest that these enigmatic ancient humans were accomplished hunters.

Want your favorite social media platform to just show you your friends' posts — not a bunch of unrelated things it thinks you'll like? Australia wants to make that mandatory.

Using a combined approach of monkey electrophysiology, artificial neural networks and human psychophysics, Xue et al. show that neuronal interference from irrelevant information underlies behavioral e...

The nativist–empiricist debate has long organized cognitive science, framing cognitive mechanisms as either innate or learned. Recent advances in controlled rearing and scalable domain-general neural networks now allow this debate to be tested with unprecedented rigor, by raising newborn animals and deep neural networks under tightly matched developmental conditions. Strikingly, when pushed to this empirical limit, the debate does not resolve: the same developmental phenomena support both radical empiricism and radical nativism. We argue that this stalemate reflects a conceptual error. The debate conflates explanatory levels and ontological orientations, with nativists emphasizing stable symbolic structures and empiricists emphasizing the subsymbolic processes that produce those structures. We propose dissolving the dichotomy within a multilevel framework of cognitive development.

Abstract. Even young toddlers coordinate actions with a partner. But coordinating choices or decisions is more challenging, particularly in multi-party gro

The genetic architecture of personality is robustly generalizable, minimally confounded and widely relevant to human experience.

This study proposes inferential planning as a framework for understanding frontal neural activity during sequential behaviour. Using active inference models, Donnarumma et al. reproduce key findings f...

Abstract. The term 5- to 7-year shift refers to the marked changes in behavior observed as children transition from preschool age to school age. In 1996, a

A new paper in Psychological Science (.htm) reports a failure to replicate Study 2 of Ariely and Wertenbroch’s influential article entitled, “Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Contr…

Nature Human Behaviour, Published online: 26 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41562-026-02540-2Harootonian et al. find that people switch between effortful, tailored teaching and easier, simple shortcuts, favouring shortcuts even when unhelpful. Prompting participants to reflect on learners’ limitations restores effective, personalized instruction.

Abstract. Working memory (WM) is essential for almost every cognitive task. The neural and synaptic mechanisms supporting the rapid encoding and maintenance of memories in diverse tasks are the subject of an ongoing debate. The traditional view of WM as stationary persistent firing of selective neuronal populations has given room to newer ideas regarding mechanisms that support a more dynamic maintenance of multiple items. Various computational WM models based on different biologically plausible plasticity mechanisms have been proposed. We show that these proposed short-term plasticity mechanisms may not necessarily be competing explanations but instead yield interesting interactions that broaden the functional range of models on a wide set of WM task motifs and simultaneously enhance the biological plausibility of spiking neural network models, in particular of the underlying synaptic plasticity. Although reductionist models (WM function explained by one particular mechanism) are theoretically appealing and have increased our understanding of specific mechanisms, they are narrow explanations. In this study, we evaluate the interactions between three commonly proposed classes of plasticity, namely, intrinsic excitability, synaptic facilitation/augmentation, and Hebbian plasticity. We systematically test combinations of mechanisms in a spiking neural network model on a broad suite of tasks or functional motifs deemed principally important for WM operation, such as one-shot encoding, free and cued recall, and multi-item delay maintenance and updating. Our analysis of the operational task performance indicates that a composite model is superior to more reductionist variants. Importantly, we attribute the observable differences to the principle nature of specific types of plasticity.

The brain's ability to generate quick, nimble volitional thought—and a unified awareness of thought and experience—arises from analog computations carried out by electrical waves, MIT neuroscientists ...

How the social brain hypothesis undermines hereditarianism

We are preparing substantial changes to OSF that will reduce its functionality, focus OSF on its unique strengths, and move toward an integrated model with complementary services. As part of that shif...

Nature - Reactivation of typically harmless anelloviruses, in particular, seems to be linked with developing long COVID, study finds.

Abstract. Visual experience requires orchestration of intricate brain connections. One of the most influential models of human visual information processing posits two segregated streams and postulate...

Comprehending language involves active prediction of what might occur next. In this Review, Federmeier and colleagues synthesize evidence from children, young adults and older adults to show how predi...

Abstract. Young children struggle in situations involving mere possibility, such as when a target object could be in one of two possible locations. This difficulty is often interpreted as a general li...

– by Haneul Jang For decades, the phrase Man the Hunter has occupied a central place in discussions of human evolution. Today, however, the phrase sounds outdated, evoking a familiar image of men…

For centuries, scholars have debated the etiology and evolution of writing. The most persistent concerns relate to the relationship between writing and social organization, linguistic structure, and c...

Nature Human Behaviour, Published online: 13 July 2026; doi:10.1038/s41562-026-02528-yAI detection risks undermining academic integrity

As neurons migrate to their final destinations in the forming brain, their DNA gets damaged. The brain has evolved a fix, but there can be lasting consequences if repair fails.