The human superior temporal gyrus processes acoustic–phonetic properties of speech regardless of whether the language is familiar to the listener, but only encodes word boundaries and language-specific sound sequences if the language is known.

Established in 1984 to encourage women and minority Ph.D.s to pursue academia, the program has attracted right-wing criticism for prioritizing diverse candidates.

Humans exhibit a striking tendency to persist with chosen goals. This strong attachment to goals can often appear irrational – a perspective captured by terms such as perseverance or sunk-cost biases. In this review, we explore how goal commitment could stem from several adaptive mechanisms, including those that optimise cognitive resources, shield decisions from interference, and scaffold motivation in the absence of accessible reward signals. We propose that these computational considerations have important implications for algorithmic architectures supporting decision making, including separate algorithms for goal selection and implementation, and for monitoring ongoing goals versus alternative sources of reward. Finally, we discuss how a variety of mechanisms supporting goal commitment and abandonment could relate to dimensions affected in mental health.

A core strength of computational psychiatry is its focus on theory-driven research, in which cognitive processes are precisely quantified using computational models that formalize specific theoretical mechanisms. However, the data used in these studies often come from traditional laboratory-based cognitive tasks, which have unclear ecological validity. In this review we propose that the same theoretical frameworks and computational models can be applied to real-world data such as experience sampling, passive data, and digital-behavior data (e.g., online activity such as on social media). In turn, modeling real-world data can benefit from a theory-driven computational approach to move from purely predictive to explanatory power. We illustrate these points using emerging studies and discuss the challenges and opportunities of using real-world data in computational psychiatry.

The search for neural mechanisms of behaviour often relies on a synchronic, driving view of causation, where neural activity drives more neural activity, which eventually drives behaviour. The real c....

In people with severe brain injuries, stimulation restored consciousness by engaging a deep brain circuit for wakefulness—revealing a target that may also guide treatment in stroke and epilepsy.

Acceptable image-editing practices are partly a matter of common sense. But researchers say journals and funders could help scientists by standardizing policies.

Here, the authors created a virtual reality task for monkeys and mice to explore if internal states like attention are similar across species. Their facial expressions during the task were similar, su...

Closed-loop brain stimulation of the human hippocampal theta rhythm produces lasting enhancement of network communication. This implicates theta rhythms in human hippocampal network communication and ...