Enlightening the brain

The Observer has compiled a list of 2025 guides, tutorials, and manuals designed to support psychological scientists as they expand their toolboxes of research practices and methods.

If attention were a muscle, most of us would swear ours had been skipping leg day. One minute you’re reading an email, the next you’re three tabs deep into a recipe for a croquembouche that looks l…

Disruptions in interoception may underlie anxiety, eating disorders, and other mental health ailments

Executive functions (EFs) develop dramatically across childhood and predict important outcomes, including academic achievement. These links are often attributed to individual differences in EF capacities. However, individual difference accounts underemphasize contextual influences on EF. We propose a complementary perspective, the adaptive habits framework, which emphasizes how contextual factors support or hinder EF engagement in children. Contexts that support repeated EF engagement establish habits for engaging EF in similar contexts and in similar ways. Such habits, in turn, reduce the effort associated with engaging EF and thus increase the likelihood of deciding to engage EF in the future. We interpret empirical findings through the lens of adaptive habits, discuss the implications of this framework, and propose novel research approaches and interventions to support EF in children.

Multimodal analysis of spontaneous attentional state dynamics during sustained task performance reveals distinctive profiles of brain–heart interaction in mind-wandering and mind-blanking.

Learning depends not only on the content of what we learn, but also on how we learn and on how experiences are structured over time. To investigate how task similarity and training regime interact dur...

Increasing working memory (WM) load incurs behavioral costs, and whether the neural constraints on behavioral costs are localized (i.e., emanating from the intraparietal sulcus) or distributed across ...

The cognitive neuroscience community using M/EEG has not converged on measures of task-related inter-regional brain connectivity that generalize across tasks and laboratories. We call for community-driven efforts to systematically test and validate connectivity metrics using shared datasets and protocols, aiming to establish robust, replicable frameworks for cognitive and clinical applications.

Installer for MorePower 6.0 (windows). Contribute to LewisPeacockLab/MorePower development by creating an account on GitHub.