A neurocognitive mechanism for increased cooperation during group formation.

How do group size changes influence cooperation within groups? To examine this question, we performed a dynamic, network-based prisoner's dilemma experiment with fMRI. Across 83 human participants, we observed increased cooperation as group size increased. However, our computational modeling analysis of behavior and fMRI revealed that groups size itself did not increase cooperation.

Exploring digital use, happiness, and loneliness in Japan with the experience sampling method.

Smartphones have become an integral part of modern life, raising concerns about their impact on mental health, especially among young people. However, previous studies yielded inconsistent results, possibly due to neglecting the possibility of interactions between offline and online communications. To explore potential interactions among different communication modes (online vs.

The neuroanatomy of social trust predicts depression vulnerability.

Trust attitude is a social personality trait linked with the estimation of others' trustworthiness. Trusting others, however, can have substantial negative effects on mental health, such as the development of depression. Despite significant progress in understanding the neurobiology of trust, whether the neuroanatomy of trust is linked with depression vulnerability remains unknown.

Trust in Institutions, Not in Political Leaders, Determines Compliance in COVID-19 Prevention Measures within Societies across the Globe.

A core assumption often heard in public health discourse is that increasing trust in national political leaders is essential for securing public health compliance during crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic (2019-ongoing). However, studies of national government trust are typically too coarse-grained to differentiate between trust in institutions versus more interpersonal trust in political leaders. Here, we present multiscale trust measurements for twelve countries and territories across the West, Oceania and East Asia.

Multiscale Computation and Dynamic Attention in Biological and Artificial Intelligence.

Biological and artificial intelligence (AI) are often defined by their capacity to achieve a hierarchy of short-term and long-term goals that require incorporating information over time and space at both local and global scales. More advanced forms of this capacity involve the adaptive modulation of integration across scales, which resolve computational inefficiency and explore-exploit dilemmas at the same time. Research in neuroscience and AI have both made progress towards understanding architectures that achieve this.

Neural Mechanisms for Adaptive Learned Avoidance of Mental Effort.

Humans tend to avoid mental effort. Previous studies have demonstrated this tendency using various demand-selection tasks; participants generally avoid options associated with higher cognitive demand. However, it remains unclear whether humans avoid mental effort adaptively in uncertain and nonstationary environments.

Control without Controllers: Toward a Distributed Neuroscience of Executive Control.

Executive control refers to the regulation of cognition and behavior by mental processes and is a hallmark of higher cognition. Most approaches to understanding its mechanisms begin with the assumption that our brains have anatomically segregated and functionally specialized control modules. The modular approach is intuitive: Control is conceptually distinct from basic mental processing, so an organization that reifies that distinction makes sense.

Predictive decision making driven by multiple time-linked reward representations in the anterior cingulate cortex.

In many natural environments the value of a choice gradually gets better or worse as circumstances change. Discerning such trends makes predicting future choice values possible. We show that humans track such trends by comparing estimates of recent and past reward rates, which they are able to hold simultaneously in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC).

Neural Mechanisms of Credit Assignment in a Multicue Environment.

Unlabelled: In complex environments, many potential cues can guide a decision or be assigned responsibility for the outcome of the decision. We know little, however, about how humans and animals select relevant information sources that should guide behavior. We show that subjects solve this relevance selection and credit assignment problem by selecting one cue and its association with a particular outcome as the main focus of a hypothesis.

Autonomous mechanism of internal choice estimate underlies decision inertia.

Our choice is influenced by choices we made in the past, but the mechanism responsible for the choice bias remains elusive. Here we show that the history-dependent choice bias can be explained by an autonomous learning rule whereby an estimate of the likelihood of a choice to be made is updated in each trial by comparing between the actual and expected choices. We found that in perceptual decision making without performance feedback, a decision on an ambiguous stimulus is repeated on the subsequent trial more often than a decision on a salient stimulus.

Task-related modulation of effective connectivity during perceptual decision making: dissociation between dorsal and ventral prefrontal cortex.

The dorsal and ventral parts of the lateral prefrontal cortex have been thought to play distinct roles in decision making. Although its dorsal part such as the frontal eye field (FEF) is shown to play roles in accumulation of sensory information during perceptual decision making, the role of the ventral prefrontal cortex (PFv) is not well-documented. Previous studies have suggested that the PFv is involved in selective attention to the task-relevant information and is associated with accuracy of the behavioral performance.

Stimulation of the frontal eye field reveals persistent effective connectivity after controlled behavior.

Our ability to choose nonhabitual controlled behavior instead of habitual automatic behavior is based on a flexible control mechanism subserved by neural activity representing the behavior-guiding rule. However, it has been shown that the behavior slows down more when switching from controlled to automatic behavior than vice versa. Here we show that persistent effective connectivity of the neural network after execution of controlled behavior is responsible for the behavioral slowing on a subsequent trial.

Impacts of switching antidepressants after successful electroconvulsive therapy on the maintenance of clinical remission in patients with treatment-resistant depression: a chart review.

Introduction: There is no consensus regarding whether a previously prescribed, that is, failed, antidepressant should be continued or switched after a successful electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) for the maintenance of clinical remission in patients with treatment-resistant depression (TRD). In this study, we conducted a chart review to examine impacts of the antidepressant switch after the successful ECT on 1-year outcome in patients with TRD.

Materials And Methods: This retrospective chart review included inpatients with TRD (ie, those who failed to respond to adequate trials of 2 distinctly different classes of antidepressants) who showed clinical remission after ECT.

Predictive and postdictive mechanisms jointly contribute to visual awareness.

One of the fundamental issues in visual awareness is how we are able to perceive the scene in front of our eyes on time despite the delay in processing visual information. The prediction theory postulates that our visual system predicts the future to compensate for such delays. On the other hand, the postdiction theory postulates that our visual awareness is inevitably a delayed product.

Task-specific signal transmission from prefrontal cortex in visual selective attention.

Our voluntary behaviors are thought to be controlled by top-down signals from the prefrontal cortex that modulate neural processing in the posterior cortices according to the behavioral goal. However, we have insufficient evidence for the causal effect of the top-down signals. We applied a single-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation over the human prefrontal cortex and measured the strength of the top-down signals as an increase in the efficiency of neural impulse transmission.