Focus |

From Brain to Behaviour

Brittany Cardwell: human behaviour.

Fiona Carr: neurological disease.

Sachin Ranade: systems and computational neuroscience.

Christian Schnell: neurophysiology and neurotechnologies.

Welcome to the Nature Communications Editors’ Highlights webpage, 'From Brain to Behaviour'. Each month our editors select a small number of Articles recently published in Nature Communications that they believe are particularly interesting or important.

The aim is to provide a snapshot of some of the most exciting neuroscience research published at Nature Communications.

Make sure to check the Editors' Highlights page each month for new featured articles.

Humans explore the world by optimistically directing choices to less familiar options and by choosing more randomly when options are uncertain. Here, the authors show that these two exploration strategies rely on distinct uncertainty estimates represented in different parts of the prefrontal cortex.

Article | Open Access | | Nature Communications

People often prioritize their own interests, but also like to see themselves as moral. Here the authors show how distortions in memory might resolve this tension by demonstrating that people tend to remember being more generous in the past than they actually were.

Article | Open Access | | Nature Communications

In infants, superiority of semantic over episodic memory formation has been postulated. Here, authors show that both types of memory coexist in one-year-olds, with consolidation during sleep affecting whether an experienced event is recognized as a detailed episode or as general semantic knowledge.

Article | Open Access | | Nature Communications

The roots of psychopathology take shape during adverse parent-infant interactions, shown through infant attachment quality. Using rodents, the authors show that blunted infant cortical processing of the mother determines attachment quality through a stress hormone-dependent mechanism.

Article | Open Access | | Nature Communications

Conventional theory suggests that people’s confidence about a decision reflects their subjective probability that the decision was correct. By studying decisions with multiple alternatives, the authors show that confidence reports instead reflect the difference in probabilities between the chosen and the next-best alternative.

Article | Open Access | | Nature Communications

Visual cognition compensates for small changes in an object’s appearance to ensure its perceived continuity. We show that in situations with multiple objects, context features like color, temporal or spatial position are used as anchors to selectively integrate corresponding objects over time.

Article | Open Access | | Nature Communications