Volume 5 Issue 1, January 2021

Efforts to eliminate anti-Black racism in academia must go far beyond superficial ticking of boxes. The academic community must create conditions for authentic, not tokenistic, Black engagement, argues Tony Reames.

Doubly marginalized by race and gender, Black women expend vital energy managing stereotypes. Black women should be able to succeed in ways that affirm rather than negate their identities, argues Ebony Omotola McGee.

The year 2020 has been marked by unprecedented cascading traumas, including the COVID-19 pandemic, an economic recession, race-driven social unrest and weather-related disasters. Mental health consequences of direct and media-based exposure to compounding stressors may be profound. Policymakers must act to ease the burden of trauma to protect public health.

A study in Nature Human Behaviour proposes a biologically plausible algorithm producing near-optimal behaviour in uncertain and volatile environments through computational imprecision. A complementary study in the same issue shows that, depending on context, uncertainty itself guides different decisions and is differentially represented in the brain.

Winterton et al. review the status and challenges of intranasal oxytocin research and argue that only a combination of theory, methodology and replicability will achieve a successful reorganisation of intranasal oxytocin research.

Combining standardized achievement data for 58 countries and 12,000 US school districts with detailed weather and academic calendar information, Park et al. show that the rate of learning decreases as the number of hot school days goes up.

Druckman et al. use a two-wave survey fielded before and during the COVID-19 pandemic to study the relationship between affective polarization and issue positions. They find an association between previous out-party animus and COVID-19 policy beliefs, and local context moderates this relationship.

Using a cultural evolutionary model, this paper proposes that organizations producing goods and services—both ancient craft guilds and modern firms—evolved because they facilitate the accumulation of culture. Ethnographic data support the predictions.

Using data from multiple cognitive tests, de la Fuente et al. find evidence for a general dimension of genetic sharing across diverse cognitive traits and identify genomic regions relevant for general cognitive ability.

A genome-wide association study of 1.7 million individuals identified 41 genetic variants associated with left-handedness and 7 associated with ambidexterity. The genetic correlation between the traits was low, thereby implying different aetiologies.

Assaneo et al. show that speech production timing can facilitate perception. Individuals differed in whether they utilized motor timing depending on the auditory–motor cortex connection strength.

Trudel et al. find that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex carries multiple decision variables, the strength and polarity of which vary according to their relevance to the context of exploration, exploitation and the transition between these states.

Findling et al. present the Weber-imprecision model of decision-making, which operates on imprecise representations of uncertainty. It produces efficient adaptive behaviour regardless of environmental volatility and fits human behaviour better than optimal adaptive models.

How long does the average person sleep? Here, Kocevska et al. conducted a meta-analysis including over 1.1 million people to produce age- and sex-specific population reference charts for sleep duration and efficiency.

In their analysis of two datasets, Djonlagic et al. identify 23 objective sleep metrics that predict cognitive performance and processing speed in older adults.

In a Registered Report, Horne et al. report a sham-controlled, 5-day tDCS intervention paired with cognitive training, and found evidence against tDCS-induced training enhancement or transfer to untrained tasks.

Jones et al. examine the generalizability of the valence–dominance model of social judgements of faces in 41 countries across 11 world regions. They find evidence of both generalizability and variation, depending on the analytical method.