A popular intervention for increasing support for peace in violent intergroup conflicts is to describe the peaceful resolution of other conflicts. In four experiments, we tested the effectiveness of this approach in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict by exposing Jewish-Israelis to information about the Northern Ireland conflict and peace process, or about tourism in Northern Ireland as a control. We found that learning about the historical peace process generally led participants to view conflicts as more malleable, their own conflict as less unique, and led to unfreezing of conflict-related beliefs. However, it neither increased hope nor consistently boosted support for conciliatory policies. We explored boundary conditions and found effects were often stronger among leftist and centrist compared with rightists. Moreover, explicitly drawing analogies between conflicts at the outset proved ineffective, whereas exposing participants to the historical conflict and peace process without mentioning the proximal conflict was more successful.

We perceive key aspects of familiar environments almost immediately, while perception in unfamiliar environments is slower. In this review, we examine the distinct roles of recent versus accumulative long-term exposure in enabling this efficiency. Accumulative statistics underlie the formation of stable categories (e.g. syllables in our native language), whereas recent events bias our online predictions toward the current context. Typically developing individuals place greater weight on recent events than single earlier events, but also weight accumulative statistics. However, individuals with developmental atypicalities show atypical patterns of statistical learning: individuals with dyslexia tend to assign less weight to long-term statistics, which affects their long-term categories. By contrast, autistics utilize long-term statistics like neurotypicals, but are slower in updating their priors and motor plans by recent events, which reduces their flexibility. These observations suggest that the dynamics of statistical learning impact the strengths and weaknesses of people's social and cognitive skill acquisition.

Work in the last decades showed that learning from multiword units is often beneficial for language learning, impacting mastery of arbitrary linguistic relations and predicting efficient language processing. Much of this work has looked at differences between first (L1) and second language (L2) learning, documenting differences in how children and adults approach language learning, with only a few studies looking at individual differences in reliance on multiword units. Here, we ask whether adults differ in their tendency to draw on multiword units when learning a new language, and if so, whether such differences are related to learning outcomes and to language processing. We used an artificial language with grammatical gender to measure participants' tendency to treat article-noun sequences as one unit during language learning, and a multiword recall task to measure their tendency to benefit from multiword units in their native language (L1). Our findings show that individuals differ in their tendency to chunk information into multiword units when learning an artificial language, with most participants falling into one of two distinct groups, showing a steady pattern of preferences to treat article-noun sequences as either one or more than one unit throughout the task. This tendency was found to be numerically, albeit not significantly, related to how much individuals benefit from multiword information in their L1. These findings document a novel dimension of individual differences – the tendency of a learner to rely on multiword units, which may be related to different aspects of language learning and processing.

Language is passed from one generation of learners to the next via cultural transmission. This process has been shown to give rise to core properties of language that enhance its learnability. Recent experimental work shows that statistical properties of language can also emerge through cultural transmission: specifically, the statistical coherence of words, and the Zipfian distribution of word frequencies. It has been proposed that these properties emerge because they facilitate segmentation. However, it is not clear whether segmentation is necessary for their emergence. We use a computational iterated learning model to simulate the cultural transmission of unsegmented sequences under different assumptions about the nature of learning. We show that segmentation indeed promotes the emergence of these statistical properties, whereas tracking of unigram statistics does not. In addition, we show that tracking sequential statistics alone can also promote their emergence.

Social working memory (SWM)—the ability to maintain and manipulate social information in the brain—plays a crucial role in social interactions. However, research on SWM is still in its infancy and is often treated as a unitary construct. In the present study, we propose that SWM can be conceptualized as having two relatively independent components: "externally oriented SWM" (e-SWM) and "internally oriented SWM" (i-SWM). To test this external–internal hypothesis, participants were tasked with memorizing and ranking either facial expressions (e-SWM) or personality traits (i-SWM) associated with images of faces. We then examined the neural correlates of these two SWM components and their functional roles in empathy. The results showed distinct activations as the e-SWM task activated the postcentral and precentral gyri while the i-SWM task activated the precuneus/posterior cingulate cortex and superior frontal gyrus. Distinct multivariate activation patterns were also found within the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex in the two tasks. Moreover, partial least squares analyses combining brain activation and individual differences in empathy showed that e-SWM and i-SWM brain activities were mainly correlated with affective empathy and cognitive empathy, respectively. These findings implicate distinct brain processes as well as functional roles of the two types of SWM, providing support for the internal–external hypothesis of SWM.

Background

Increased prevalence of neurodevelopmental syndromes raises concerns regarding risks from environmental exposures. Phthalates are a class of chemicals widely used in daily products. It has been suggested that prenatal and early childhood exposure to phthalates are associated with disruption of developmental outcomes, cognitive and psychomotor functions.

Aims

To estimate the association between prenatal and early childhood exposure to phthalates and neurodevelopmental outcomes.

Methods

Women were recruited at 11–18 weeks of gestation and provided spot urine samples, analyzed for phthalate metabolites (DEHP, DiNP, MBzBP). Children (n = 102) were examined at 42 months of age, using a broad developmental assessment and standard maternal reports, regarding cognitive, developmental and behavioral problems (WPPSI-III, NIH-toolbox, NEPSY-II, CBCL, ASQ-3 questionnaires), and provided spot urine samples (n = 47). To explore the associations between tertiles or continuous levels of metabolites and developmental outcomes, multivariate general linear models (GLM) were used.

Results

DEHP and DiNP metabolites were above the level of detection (>LOD) in more than 97 % of maternal specimens and MBzBP was detected in 88 % of maternal specimens. Increased DEHP levels were associated with problem solving scores among boys (scores: 53.24 + 2.34, 54.29 + 2.45, and 43.54 + 3.26 for low, medium and high DEHP tertiles, respectively; p = 0.029), and fine motor problems (47.58 + 2.93, 49.75 + 3.07, and 32.01 + 4.07 for low, medium and high DEHP tertiles, respectively; p = 0.003) and attention problems among girls (Flanker scores: 112.53 + 14.28, 110.3 + 12.93, and 98.83 + 12.65 for low, medium and high DEHP tertiles, respectively; p = 0.007). Moreover, in girls, a potential U-shaped association was found between levels of exposure to MBzBP and problem solving (54.55 + 6.87, 44.69 + 14.88, and 54.62 + 6.60 for low, medium and high MBzBP tertiles, respectively; p = 0.015), fine motor problems (56.36 + 5.04, 42.50 + 15.49, and 51.92 + 8.04 for low, medium and high MBzBP tertiles, respectively; p = 0.007), and verbal abilities (Vocabulary scores: 11.46 + 3.01, 8.25 + 3.43, and 11.53 + 2.69 for low, medium and high MBzBP tertiles, respectively; p = 0.007). Early childhood exposure was associated with fine motor scores and DEHP and MBzBP postnatal exposure (DEHP: β = −0.010, Cl: −0.016, −0.004, p = 0.003; MBzBP: β = −0.321, Cl: −0.499, −0.144, p = 0.001). Most associations became nonsignificant after FDR correction for multiple comparisons.

Conclusion

This study suggests associations between prenatal exposure to phthalates and early childhood motor and cognitive abilities, with sex differences, and an association between early childhood exposure with motor abilities. Larger studies are needed to confirm these exploratory findings.

The scope of unconscious processing has long been, and still remains, a hotly debated issue. This is driven in part by the current diversity of methods to manipulate and measure perceptual consciousness. Here, we provide ten recommendations and nine outstanding issues about designing experimental paradigms, analyzing data, and reporting the results of studies on unconscious processing. These were formed through dialogue among a group of researchers representing a range of theoretical backgrounds. We acknowledge that some of these recommendations naturally do not align with some existing approaches and are likely to change following theoretical and methodological development. Nevertheless, we hold that at this stage of the field they are instrumental in evoking a much-needed discussion about the norms of studying unconscious processes and helping researchers make more informed decisions when designing experiments. In the long run, we aim for this paper and future discussions around the outstanding issues to lead to a more convergent corpus of knowledge about the extent – and limits – of unconscious processing.

The impact of digitally mediated social interaction on understanding others and sharing their emotions has not been thoroughly investigated. We examined how live, video-mediated interaction as opposed to watching a prerecorded video, affects behavioral, neural, and physiological aspects of empathy for pain. Thirty-five observers watched targets undergoing painful electric stimulation in an electroencephalogram study. We hypothesized that reduced temporal presence would result in diminished behavioral and electrophysiological empathic responses. However, observer9s behavioral empathic responses were not diminished with reduced temporal presence. On a neural level, mid-frontal theta was sensitive to the other9s pain intensity, and we observed significant physiological coupling between participants. Mu suppression, on the other hand, was not modulated by pain intensity. Importantly, neural and physiological indices of empathy were independent of temporal presence. However, exploratory analyses indicated a latency effect of temporal presence on pain-related theta activity with an earlier theta increase in interactions with high temporal presence. The results suggest that the temporal presence of individuals may not be necessary for empathy towards another9s pain. Future studies may investigate more naturalistic social interactions and include motivational aspects of empathy. We discuss implications of these findings for debates on social presence and on second-person neuroscience.

This paper reports the Wave 2 expansion of the Multilingual Eye-Movement Corpus (MECO), a collaborative multi-lab project collecting eye-tracking data on text reading in a variety of languages. The present expansion comes with new eye-tracking data of N = 654 from 13 languages, collected in 16 labs over 15 countries, including in several languages that have little to no representation in current eye-tracking studies on reading. MECO also contains demographic, language use, and other individual differences data. This paper makes available the first-language reading data of MECO Wave 2 and incorporates reliability estimates of all tests at the participant and item level, as well as other methods of data validation. It also reports the descriptive statistics on all languages, including comparisons with prior similar data, and outlines directions for potential reuse.

The tendency to embrace or avoid risk varies across and within individuals, with significant consequences for economic behavior and mental health. Such variations can partially be explained by differences in the relative weights given to potential gains and losses. Applying this insight to real-life decisions, however, is complicated because such decisions are often based on prior learning experiences. Here, we ask which cognitive process—decision-making or learning—determines the weighting of gains or losses? Over 28 days, 100 participants engaged in a longitudinal decision task wherein choices were based on prior learning. Computational modeling of participants’ choices revealed that changes in risk-taking are primarily explained by changes in how learning, not decisions, weight gains and losses. Moreover, inferred changes in learning manifested in participants’ neural and physiological learning signals in response to outcomes. We conclude that in experience-based decisions, learning plays a primary role in governing risk-taking behavior.