The real world is stochastic, making it difficult to know when planning is worthwhile. Here the authors show that as stochasticity increases, people spend less effort planning and adopt simpler, less ...

Humans rely on complex social learning and collective adaptation to navigate dynamically changing environments. The authors show that human collective intelligence in a dynamic, naturalistic task depe...

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 role of know-how copying in and beyond social tinkering - Volume 49

We reared and recorded behaviours of clonal Amazon mollies in standardized environments, with and without predation stress, from birth through week four of life, to understand how the developmental e...

What does it mean for something to be complex? Fundamentally, complexity is a cue that something is less easily represented by our minds. With this fact in view, complexity becomes a tool: By understa...

Humans are reading ChatGPT users’ prompts to improve OpenAI’s models, and those chats can include sensitive, personal information, according to leaked internal documents and real prompts seen by 404 M...

Read the declaration and add your name.

Using a self-paced reading paradigm, we show that, from just the mention of a role, people build rapid expectations about how other people will act, what they know, and whether they can be interchange...

While multi-agent debate has been proposed as a promising strategy for improving AI reasoning ability, we find that debate can sometimes be harmful rather than helpful. Prior work has primarily…

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

People are effort-averse in most situations but can exert effort for little reward when progressing towards goals. Here, the authors show that under deadline pressure people become effort-seeking whil...

Cognitive maps are essential for navigation, but to what extent are they involved in thinking more broadly? In this opinion article, we examine whethe…

Objectives Caregiving during early childhood emerges from a dynamic interplay between maternal and allomaternal contributions. This study aimed to challenge polarized portrayals of hunter-gatherer c...

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.

The free-rider detection problem: How groups balance fairness and cooperation

Direct recordings from the human brain reveal a hierarchy in planning to speak, with neural activity organizing whole syllables before the individual sounds that compose them are sequenced.

Mizrachi et al. show that directing attention to bodily sensations, rather than away, promotes more regulated acute inflammatory responses in healthy volunteers, revealing sensory and vagal pathways l...

Ticklishness is a familiar but poorly understood experience. Xiong and Kilteni show that ticklishness is culturally shared and follows a distinct bodily topography. They evaluate different theories on...

Compositionality exists on a continuum of increasing complexity rather than as a binary trait. Studying its implementation in simpler biological and artificial systems is the most tractable path towar...

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While AI coding tools have demonstrated potential to accelerate software development, their use in scientific computing raises critical questions about code quality and scientific validity. In this pa...