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The article discusses the contribution of chemist Rosalind E. Franklin in the discovery of double helix and highlights the changes and developments in the research practices and genomic collaborations as of 2016. Topics discussed include the rise of coauthorship in scientific papers, the underrepresentation of women in terms of authorship and the differences between the propensity of men and women to collaborate in research.

The article discusses developments on bee research. A study published in the journal "PLOS Biology" highlighted the capabilities of bees for social learning and cultural transmission. Also discussed are an operant conditioning test for bees, mechanisms used by bees to warn their nestmates of danger, and collective respiratory behavior in Asian giant honeybees.

Declarative memory encompasses representations of specific events as well as knowledge extracted by accumulation over multiple episodes. To investigate how these different sorts of memories are created, we developed a new behavioral task in rodents. The task consists of 3 distinct conditions (stable, overlapping, and random). Rodents are exposed to multiple sample trials, in which they explore objects in specific spatial arrangements, with object identity changing from trial to trial. In the stable condition, the locations are constant during all sample trials even though the objects themselves change; in the test trial, 1 object’s location is changed. In the random condition, object locations are presented in the sample phase without a specific spatial pattern. In the overlapping condition, 1 location is shared (overlapping) between all trials, while the other location changes during sample trials. We show that in the overlapping condition, instead of only remembering the last sample trial, rodents form a cumulative memory of the sample trials. Here, we could show that both mice and rats can accumulate information across multiple trials and express a long-term abstracted memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans not only value extrinsic monetary rewards but also their own morality and their image in the eyes of others. Yet violating moral norms is frequent, especially when people know that they are not under scrutiny. When moral values and monetary payoffs are at odds, how does the brain weigh the benefits and costs of moral and monetary payoffs? Here, using a neurocomputational model of decision value (DV) and functional (f)MRI, we investigated whether different brain systems are engaged when deciding whether to earn money by contributing to a "bad cause" and when deciding whether to sacrifice money to contribute to a "good cause," both when such choices were made privately or in public. Although similar principles of DV computations were used to solve these dilemmas, they engaged 2 distinct valuation systems. When weighing monetary benefits and moral costs, people were willing to trade their moral values in exchange for money, an effect accompanied by DV computation engaging the anterior insula and the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC). In contrast, weighing monetary costs against compliance with one's moral values engaged the ventral putamen. Moreover, regardless of the type of dilemma, a brain network including the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), anterior insula, and the right temporoparietal junction (TJP) was more engaged in public than in private settings. Together, these findings identify how the brain processes three sources of motivation: extrinsic rewards, moral values, and concerns for image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Almost all attention and learning—in particular, most early learning—take place in social settings. But little is known of how our brains support dynamic social interactions. We recorded dual electroencephalography (EEG) from 12-month-old infants and parents during solo play and joint play. During solo play, fluctuations in infants’ theta power significantly forward-predicted their subsequent attentional behaviours. However, this forward-predictiveness was lower during joint play than solo play, suggesting that infants’ endogenous neural control over attention is greater during solo play. Overall, however, infants were more attentive to the objects during joint play. To understand why, we examined how adult brain activity related to infant attention. We found that parents’ theta power closely tracked and responded to changes in their infants’ attention. Further, instances in which parents showed greater neural responsivity were associated with longer sustained attention by infants. Our results offer new insights into how one partner influences another during social interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Altruistic behavior is considered a key feature of the human cooperative makeup, with deep ontogenetic roots. The tendency to engage in altruistic behavior varies between individuals and has been linked to differences in responding to fearful faces. The current study tests the hypothesis that this link exists from early in human ontogeny. Using eye tracking, we examined whether attentional responses to fear in others at 7 months of age predict altruistic behavior at 14 months of age. Our analysis revealed that altruistic behavior in toddlerhood was predicted by infants’ attention to fearful faces but not happy or angry faces. Specifically, infants who showed heightened initial attention to (i.e., prolonged first look) followed by greater disengagement (i.e., reduced attentional bias over 15 seconds) from fearful faces at 7 months displayed greater prosocial behavior at 14 months of age. Our data further show that infants’ attentional bias to fearful faces and their altruistic behavior was predicted by brain responses in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), measured through functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). This suggests that, from early in ontogeny, variability in altruistic helping behavior is linked to our responsiveness to seeing others in distress and brain processes implicated in attentional control. These findings critically advance our understanding of the emergence of altruism in humans by identifying responsiveness to fear in others as an early precursor contributing to variability in prosocial behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The faculty of language is thought to be uniquely human. Recently, it has been claimed that songbirds are able to associate meaning with sound, comparable to the way that humans do. In human language, the meaning of expressions (semantics) is dependent on a mind-internal hierarchical structure (syntax). Meaning is associated with structure through the principle of compositionality, whereby the meaning of a complex expression is a function of the meaning of its constituent parts and the mode of composition. We argue that while recent experimental findings on songbird call sequences offer exciting novel insights into animal communication, despite claims to the contrary, they are quite unlike what we find in human language. There are indeed remarkable behavioral and neural parallels in auditory-vocal imitation learning between songbirds and human infants that are absent in our closest evolutionary relatives, the great apes. But so far, there is no convincing evidence of syntax-determined meaning in nonhuman animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding how knowledge is represented in the human brain is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience. To date, most of the work on this topic has focused on knowledge representation in cortical areas and debated whether knowledge is represented in a distributed or localized fashion. Fang and colleagues provide evidence that brain connections and the white matter supporting such connections might play a significant role. The work opens new avenues of investigation, breaking through disciplinary boundaries across network neuroscience, computational neuroscience, cognitive science, and classical lesion studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article covers topics related to neural oscillations. Topics discussed include the importance of entrainment of ongoing neural oscillations as a key mechanism used by the brain to create temporal predictions and support active perception of the sensory cortices, the measures of neural phase coherence or phase concentration, and the use of non-rhythmic information like the passage of time to form temporal predictions.

The “gamification” of science has gained a lot of traction in recent years, and games that convey scientific concepts or themes are increasingly popular. While a number of existing games touch on microbiology, very few consider the beneficial (as opposed to the detrimental) aspects of microbes. We designed a board game called “Gut Check: The Microbiome Game” to fill this gap. The game is meant to be both educational as well as challenging and fun. Here we discuss the development of the game, some of the logistics of game development in this context, and offer suggestions for others thinking of similar projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information sampling is often biased towards seeking evidence that confirms one’s prior beliefs. Despite such biases being a pervasive feature of human behavior, their underlying causes remain unclear. Many accounts of these biases appeal to limitations of human hypothesis testing and cognition, de facto evoking notions of bounded rationality, but neglect more basic aspects of behavioral control. Here, we investigated a potential role for Pavlovian approach in biasing which information humans will choose to sample. We collected a large novel dataset from 32,445 human subjects, making over 3 million decisions, who played a gambling task designed to measure the latent causes and extent of information-sampling biases. We identified three novel approach-related biases, formalized by comparing subject behavior to a dynamic programming model of optimal information gathering. These biases reflected the amount of information sampled (“positive evidence approach”), the selection of which information to sample (“sampling the favorite”), and the interaction between information sampling and subsequent choices (“rejecting unsampled options”). The prevalence of all three biases was related to a Pavlovian approach-avoid parameter quantified within an entirely independent economic decision task. Our large dataset also revealed that individual differences in the amount of information gathered are a stable trait across multiple gameplays and can be related to demographic measures, including age and educational attainment. As well as revealing limitations in cognitive processing, our findings suggest information sampling biases reflect the expression of primitive, yet potentially ecologically adaptive, behavioral repertoires. One such behavior is sampling from options that will eventually be chosen, even when other sources of information are more pertinent for guiding future action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most fundamental features of the human brain is its ability to detect and attend to salient goal-relevant events in a flexible manner. The salience network (SN), anchored in the anterior insula and the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, plays a crucial role in this process through rapid detection of goal-relevant events and facilitation of access to appropriate cognitive resources. Here, we leverage the subsecond resolution of large multisession fMRI datasets from the Human Connectome Project and apply novel graph-theoretical techniques to investigate the dynamic spatiotemporal organization of the SN. We show that the large-scale brain dynamics of the SN are characterized by several distinctive and robust properties. First, the SN demonstrated the highest levels of flexibility in time-varying connectivity with other brain networks, including the frontoparietal network (FPN), the cingulate–opercular network (CON), and the ventral and dorsal attention networks (VAN and DAN). Second, dynamic functional interactions of the SN were among the most spatially varied in the brain. Third, SN nodes maintained a consistently high level of network centrality over time, indicating that this network is a hub for facilitating flexible cross-network interactions. Fourth, time-varying connectivity profiles of the SN were distinct from all other prefrontal control systems. Fifth, temporal flexibility of the SN uniquely predicted individual differences in cognitive flexibility. Importantly, each of these results was also observed in a second retest dataset, demonstrating the robustness of our findings. Our study provides fundamental new insights into the distinct dynamic functional architecture of the SN and demonstrates how this network is uniquely positioned to facilitate interactions with multiple functional systems and thereby support a wide range of cognitive processes in the human brain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning January 2014, Psychological Science gave authors the opportunity to signal open data and materials if they qualified for badges that accompanied published articles. Before badges, less than 3% of Psychological Science articles reported open data. After badges, 23% reported open data, with an accelerating trend; 39% reported open data in the first half of 2015, an increase of more than an order of magnitude from baseline. There was no change over time in the low rates of data sharing among comparison journals. Moreover, reporting openness does not guarantee openness. When badges were earned, reportedly available data were more likely to be actually available, correct, usable, and complete than when badges were not earned. Open materials also increased to a weaker degree, and there was more variability among comparison journals. Badges are simple, effective signals to promote open practices and improve preservation of data and materials by using independent repositories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]