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 ...

Many decisions require maintaining beliefs across multiple levels of representation, from sampling and integrating information to forming action plans. To elucidate these processes and reveal the neur...

A capacity to navigate social relationships is fundamental to human wellbeing. However, the cognitive mechanisms underlying social dysfunction in psychiatric conditions remain poorly understood. Using...

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...

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In Genesis, humanity’s shared language is scattered at Babel. But inside the bilingual brain, we found something the story leaves out: a single, hidden map of meaning that English and Spanish both rea...

Autistic people can find social interactions difficult to navigate, traditionally attributed to difficulties in taking others' perspectives. However, we have a limited understanding of how autistic pe...

Ultrasonic neuromodulation of the human amygdala provides causal evidence for its role in forming persistent threat memories.

The amygdala shows abnormal metabolism in depression, a disorder marked by altered emotion, motivation, and learning. Yet its causal role in these pro…

Implementation of Bayesian regressions over the meta-d' model of psychological data from two alternative forced choice tasks with ordinal confidence ratings. For more information, see Maniscalco & Lau...

Making decisions on behalf of other people reduces decision confidence, which leads to responsibility aversion.

This study shows that non-invasive ultrasound to the human nucleus accumbens can modulate deep brain activity and enhance reward-guided learning, offering a potential alternative to invasive neuromodu...

In this issue of Neuron, Dijkstra et al. showed that deciding whether a perceived stimulus is actually present or whether it is just one’s own imagination depends on specific signals in the fusiform g...

Individual brain activity profiles are shaped by lifelong genetic influences.

Reinforcement learning task-based behavioral and computational measures displayed low test–retest reliability at the individual level. Also in contrast to self-assessed personality measures, behaviora...

The hippocampus maps how other people’s attributes relate to each other, but are these map-like representations anchored to self-knowledge? This study shows other people’s preferences are represented ...

UCL is consistently ranked as one of the top ten universities in the world (QS World University Rankings 2010-2022) and is No.2 in the UK for research power (Research Excellence Framework 2021).

The temporal order of neuronal firing within bursts of population spiking in the human anterior temporal lobe is dependent on the category as well as the identity of the individual stimulus, and this ...

A task in which participants learned to perform inference led to the formation of hippocampal representations whose geometric properties reflected the latent structure of the task, indicating tha...

How do neurophysiological traits that characterize individuals evolve across the lifespan? To address this question, we analyzed brief, task-free magnetoencephalographic recordings from over 1,000 ind...

The success of our actions often depends on what others are doing. How does the brain discern predictions of others’ actions when situations are ambig…

Memories for event sequences are represented hierarchically in the brain, with further-reaching representations of both the past and future in higher-order brain areas. In the hippocampus, these repre...

Adaptive learning is difficult in noisy environments, yet people often succeed. Here, the authors show that humans do this by distinguishing between two easily confused types of noise—volatility and s...