This genomic study of magnetic resonance imaging-based brain age in 56,348 people identifies 59 genetic loci, links brain aging to mental and physical health, and suggests high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes as causal factors of brain aging.

Children’s ability to generalize from episodic memories varies by both age and the level of abstraction. Here, the authors show that lower level generalization increasingly depends on episodic memory with age, whereas higher level generalization shows no such relationship.

In a recent series of experiments, Boger and Firestone ask: How do we perceive style?’. Their findings suggest that style perception relies on basic p…

Abstract. To maintain and develop close relationships, people need to accurately represent the minds of their social partners. Although studies have characterized many aspects of children’s intuitive ...

Sick of scrolling through junk results, AI-generated ads and links to lookalike products? The author and activist behind the term ‘enshittification’ explains what’s gone wrong with the internet – and ...

Maternal care is crucial for primate offspring development, particularly in species with prolonged developmental periods, such as humans and other primates. In this study, we used a cross-species and developmental approach to assess the role of mothers and infants in initiating bouts of affiliation (i.e., proximity and grooming) and visual engagement (i.e., unidirectional and mutual gaze) in humans (N = 10), great apes (N = 18) and small apes (N = 20). We observed mother-infant dyads when the offspring was 1, 6 and 12 months of age, using focal sampling. Our results showed that mothers were generally more likely than infants to initiate grooming, unidirectional and mutual gazes, but not proximity. As infants got older, mothers became even more likely to initiate unidirectional and mutual gazes, but infants also started to initiate proximity and unidirectional gazes more frequently, with infant-initiated mutual gazes peaking at around 6 months of age. Moreover, human mothers were more likely to initiate proximity than great ape mothers, and especially more than small ape mothers; in contrast, infants in great and small apes initiated proximity more frequently than human infants. These findings highlight important similarities between humans and other apes in the initiation patterns of affiliative interactions and visual engagement.

Sensory Horizons and the Functions of Conscious Vision

People synchronize their periodic behavioural and physiological rhythms with each other during social interaction. While this interpersonal synchronization has largely been associated with positive ef...

Scientific Reports - Asian elephants (Elephas maximus) recognise human visual attention from body and face orientation

Over 20 species of geographically and phylogenetically diverse bird species produce convergent whining vocalizations towards their respective brood parasites. Model presentation and playback experiments across multiple continents suggest that these learned calls provoke an innate response even among allopatric species.