A series of psychoacoustic and neuroimaging studies reveal the effect that the sound of Aztec skull whistles has on modern listeners; the sound, which is perceived as a mixture of voice-like, scream-like, and technological, triggers affective processing.

Across two studies using desktop VR, curiosity determined how much humans explored and how well the hand-drawn spatial maps they acquired corresponded to the rooms

When asked to judge if a chase was present in a visual display of moving discs, people with higher paranoia and teleological thinking were more likely to perceive a chase in its absence. They were also worse at detecting the chaser and the chased, yet highly confident when there was no chase.

White Americans who feel they are in “last place” – falling behind the perceived status of most white, Black, Asian, and Latinx Americans – express the most support for alt-right ideology and politics.

Brief inductions of happiness versus sadness bias unrelated economic choices towards more rewarded but more costly options. This choice bias is predicted by a mood proxy reconstructed from physiological measures.

Interpolating a lecture with quiz questions enhanced online learning for both community college and university students. The benefit is influenced by level of distraction, is associated with engagement, and can reduce racial achievement gaps.

Combining human data and a simulation, this study shows that problem-solving relies on a dynamic interplay between de-fixation and exploration, where broader exploration marks more insightful searches.

In paintings made by a patient with visuospatial neglect over three years post-stroke, spatial omissions disappeared within half a year, while color patch asymmetries persisted for longer, suggesting distinct processes involved in spatial awareness recovery.

Using simulated social interactions, findings reveal that highly socially avoidant individuals form socially distant relationships through abstract low affiliation and low power trajectories, corresponding to smaller real-world networks

Evidence from repeated daily life assessments from community-dwelling older adults reveals that more intense positive emotional experiences and less intense negative emotional experiences were each associated with elevated everyday goal pursuit. Relationships varied based on hoped-for versus feared goals.

This study introduces Self-Utility Distance, a mechanistically informed metric quantifying mismatches between self-concept traits and their perceived utility, and show it robustly predicts self-concept clarity across three empirical and computational studies.

In a multilingual corpus of child-directed songs, an analysis of the cumulative-compressibility of the lyrics reveals multiscale complexity patterns that could support different relevant fuctions, e.g. attention, learning and bonding.

In community and ADHD patient samples, lower information transmission, based on both external factors such as stimulus complexity and internal factors such as personality, was associated with higher levels of boredom.