Education and information can increase the acceptance of climate policies

An important question for policymakers worldwide is how to make climate and environmental policies acceptable among the populations. A new study sheds light on the preferences in five East African countries. The study shows, among others, that education and information about how revenues from carbon taxes are used are important factors.

Making climate policies acceptable to the public is crucial to make them effective and to avoid resistance and protests.

Research has, until now, focused on high-income countries. This new study, however, is based on a survey with 4,766 respondents in Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda.

It turns out that there are both similarities and differences compared to previous studies.

Important inform how revenues will be used

The researchers focused on educated individuals in urban areas since they are likely to influence policy processes.

This also means that the sample does not fully represent the total East African population.

One conclusion, that aligns with previous studies, is that a higher level of education and climate change concern are linked to a higher acceptance of policies aimed at reducing fossil fuel consumption.

If you specify how the revenue from a climate tax or subsidy removal would be used, the support for these policy instruments almost doubled.

Social programs more important than environmental

In contrast to earlier studies, the researchers found that investments in social programs, not environmental programs, increased the acceptability the most.

"One possible explanation would be that in a country where poverty is prevalent, social issues are more urgent to people," says Daniel Slunge, one of the study's authors.

Trust in government didn't seem to play a big role for the acceptance.

There were also significant differences between the countries.

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How just one set of animal tracks can provide a wealth of information

Rock faces in Namibia are decorated with hundreds of stone-age images not only of animals and human footprints, but also of animal tracks. These have been largely neglected to date as researchers lacked the knowledge required to interpret them. Archaeologists from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and the University of Cologne have now worked together with animal tracking experts from the Nyae Nyae Conservancy in Tsumkwe, Namibia, to investigate the engraved animal tracks on six rock faces in more detail, and were able to determine detailed information on the species, age, sex, limbs, side of the body, trackway and relative direction of the tracks.

In the Doro !nawas mountains in the Namib desert in northwest Central Namibia, vegetation is sparse, trees and bushes generally only grow along small dry river beds. Thanks to various permanent waterholes, however, there is an unusually high occurrence of different animals: springboks, giraffes, elephants, lions and leopards all cross the area. The area remains untouched by humans at the current time. It is not inhabited or exploited in any other way. It was a different story in the past, however. Numerous instances of rock art representing animals as well as human footprints and animal tracks show that stone age hunters and gatherers lived here in the past.

Until now, archaeologists have only been able to interpret the species of the animals depicted in the rock art. Animal tracks tended to be classified together with the abstract symbols. "Researchers have until now completely neglected the fact that traces and tracks are also a valuable source of information," explains PD Dr. Andreas Pastoors from the Institute for Prehistory and Protohistory at FAU. Together with his FAU colleagues Prof. Dr. Thorsten Uthmeier and Dr. Tilman Lenssen-Erz from the African Research Institute at the University of Cologne, Pastoors has therefore taken a new approach, merging western archaeological science with indigenous knowledge in an innovative research project. The project began in 2013, when San tracking experts from Namibia read human footprints on the floor of caves in France decorated with rock art from the Ice Age. Now together with the Namibian tracking experts Tsamgao Ciqae, Ui Kxunta and Thui Thao from the Nyae Nyae Conservancy in Namibia, the three researchers set up camp for approximately one week in the Doro !nawas mountains, and investigated six rock faces depicting a particularly large number of human footprints and animal tracks.

The investigated rock faces are at the edge of an area resembling a crater with a diameter of approximately one kilometer in the Doro !nawas mountains. "At the upper edge there are large boulders with flat surfaces which people in the Stone Age decorated with rock art," explains Pastoors. The rock art shows various different motifs, ranging from human footprints to people and animals such as elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses and ostriches. "These images are easily recognizable by western archaeologists," says Pastoors. However, they also depict animal tracks that have until now only been classified together with the abstract symbols. "Seen from the perspective of western art history, researchers are unable to recognize anything in these images, as they are lacking the relevant expertise. For this reason, the tracks have not yet been assessed as a legible source of information, which has in turn led to misleading hierarchies being created with regard to the value of the various images."

Stone age illustrations of animal tracks prove to be a valuable source of information

The study that has now been published counteracts this trend. Tsamgao Ciqae, Ui Kxunta und Thui Thao have discovered surprising details in the rock art. In more than 90 percent of the analyzed 513 images they were able to determine the species, age range, sex, specific limbs, side of the body and the direction of the animal tracks or human footprints. Interestingly, the animal tracks indicated a larger variety of species than those in the pictures of animals illustrated in profile in rock art in neighboring regions. The team of researchers was able to identify 20 further animal species in the animal tracks, ranging from bushpig, buffalo, monkey and caracal to various different types of antelopes (duiker, bushbuck, roan antelope, ibex), to bird species such as red-crested korhaan and marabou. One rather surprising aspect is that some of these species require damper conditions than those found in this part of Namibia, at least at the current time. But then why did the stone-age artists draw them? How did they know about them? "We cannot answer these questions with the state of research as it stands at present," admits Pastoors. However, it is plausible that the artists knew other regions with damper environmental conditions, as the Doro !nawas mountains were similarly dry as they are today."

In addition, the analyses show patterns that are obviously the result of cultural preferences. This includes, for example, the relative direction of the individual animal tracks that the tracking experts were able to decipher from the images. "We beamed a virtual clock onto the rock face and then noted the direction of the tracks according to the hours on the clock face." The result: Most tracks pointed upwards towards 12 o'clock, only a few pointed down towards 6 o'clock. The one exception were the zebra tracks. They were depicted traveling in all directions. "It's really exciting to see that the animal tracks can give us far more information that we originally thought," summarizes Pastoors.

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Social media algorithms exploit how humans learn from their peers

In prehistoric societies, humans tended to learn from members of our ingroup or from more prestigious individuals, as this information was more likely to be reliable and result in group success. However, with the advent of diverse and complex modern communities -- and especially in social media -- these biases become less effective. For example, a person we are connected to online might not necessarily be trustworthy, and people can easily feign prestige on social media. In a review published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Science on August 3rd, a group of social scientists describe how the functions of social media algorithms are misaligned with human social instincts meant to foster cooperation, which can lead to large-scale polarization and misinformation.

"Several user surveys now both on Twitter and Facebook suggest most users are exhausted by the political content they see. A lot of users are unhappy, and there's a lot of reputational components that Twitter and Facebook must face when it comes to elections and the spread of misinformation," says first author William Brady, a social psychologist in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern.

"We wanted to put out a systematic review that's trying to help understand how human psychology and algorithms interact in ways that can have these consequences," says Brady. "One of the things that this review brings to the table is a social learning perspective. As social psychologists, we're constantly studying how we can learn from others. This framework is fundamentally important if we want to understand how algorithms influence our social interactions."

Humans are biased to learn from others in a way that typically promotes cooperation and collective problem-solving, which is why they tend to learn more from individuals they perceive as a part of their ingroup and those they perceive to be prestigious. In addition, when learning biases were first evolving, morally and emotionally charged information was important to prioritize, as this information would be more likely to be relevant to enforcing group norms and ensuring collective survival.

In contrast, algorithms are usually selecting information that boosts user engagement in order to increase advertising revenue. This means algorithms amplify the very information humans are biased to learn from, and they can oversaturate social media feeds with what the researchers call Prestigious, Ingroup, Moral, and Emotional (PRIME) information, regardless of the content's accuracy or representativeness of a group's opinions. As a result, extreme political content or controversial topics are more likely to be amplified, and if users are not exposed to outside opinions, they might find themselves with a false understanding of the majority opinion of different groups.

"It's not that the algorithm is designed to disrupt cooperation," says Brady. "It's just that its goals are different. And in practice, when you put those functions together, you end up with some of these potentially negative effects."

To address this problem, the research group first proposes that social media users need to be more aware of how algorithms work and why certain content shows up on their feed. Social media companies don't typically disclose the full details of how their algorithms select for content, but one start might be offering explainers for why a user is being shown a particular post. For example, is it because the user's friends are engaging with the content or because the content is generally popular? Outside of social media companies, the research team is developing their own interventions to teach people how to be more conscious consumers of social media.

In addition, the researchers propose that social media companies could take steps to change their algorithms, so they are more effective at fostering community. Instead of solely favoring PRIME information, algorithms could set a limit on how much PRIME information they amplify and prioritize presenting users with a diverse set of content. These changes could continue to amplify engaging information while preventing more polarizing or politically extreme content from becoming overrepresented in feeds.

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Information 'deleted' from the human genome may be what made us human

What the human genome is lacking compared with the genomes of other primates might have been as crucial to the development of humankind as what has been added during our evolutionary history, according to a new study led by researchers at Yale and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

The new findings, published April 28 in the journal Science, fill an important gap in what is known about historical changes to the human genome. While a revolution in the capacity to collect data from genomes of different species has allowed scientists to identify additions that are specific to the human genome -- such as a gene that was critical for humans to develop the ability to speak -- less attention has been paid to what's missing in the human genome.

For the new study researchers used an even deeper genomic dive into primate DNA to show that the loss of about 10,000 bits of genetic information -- most as small as a few base pairs of DNA -- over the course of our evolutionary history differentiate humans from chimpanzees, our closest primate relative. Some of those "deleted" pieces of genetic information are closely related to genes involved in neuronal and cognitive functions, including one associated with the formation of cells in the developing brain.

These 10,000 missing pieces of DNA -- which are present in the genomes of other mammals -- are common to all humans, the Yale team found.

The fact that these genetic deletions became conserved in all humans, the authors say, attests to their evolutionary importance, suggesting that they conferred some biological advantage.

"Often we think new biological functions must require new pieces of DNA, but this work shows us that deleting genetic code can result in profound consequences for traits make us unique as a species," said Steven Reilly, an assistant professor of genetics at Yale School of Medicine and senior author of the paper.

The paper was one of several published in Science from the Zoonomia Project, an international research collaboration that is cataloging the diversity in mammalian genomes by comparing DNA sequences from 240 species of mammals that exist today.

In their study, the Yale team found that some genetic sequences found in the genomes of most other mammal species, from mice to whales, vanished in humans. But rather than disrupt human biology, they say, some of these deletions created new genetic encodings that eliminated elements that would normally turn genes off.

The deletion of this genetic information, Reilly said, had an effect that was the equivalent of removing three characters -- "n't" -- from the word "isn't" to create a new word, "is."

"[Such deletions] can tweak the meaning of the instructions of how to make a human slightly, helping explain our bigger brains and complex cognition," he said.

The researchers used a technology called Massively Parallel Reporter Assays (MPRA), which can simultaneously screen and measure the function of thousands of genetic changes among species.

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Why fish look down when they swim

Just as you might look down at the sidewalk as you walk, fish look downward when they swim, a new study by a Northwestern University-led international collaboration has confirmed.

The study is the first to combine simulations of zebrafish's brain, native environment and spatially-varying swimming behavior into one computational model. By analyzing this model, the researchers concluded that this quirk -- looking down while swimming forward -- is an adaptive behavior that evolved to help the fish self-stabilize, as when swimming against a current.

As water moves, fish are constantly trying to self-stabilize in order to stay in place -- rather than getting swept away in a moving stream. Focusing on other fish, plants or debris might give the fish a false sensation that it's moving. The stable riverbed below them, however, gives fish more reliable information about their swimming direction and speed.

"It's similar to sitting on a train car that isn't moving. If the train next to yours starts to pull to away from the station, it can trick you into thinking you are moving too," said Northwestern's Emma Alexander, who led the study. "The visual cue from the other train is so strong that it overrides the fact that all of your other senses are telling you that you are sitting still. That's exactly the same phenomenon that we are studying in fish. There are many misleading motion cues above them, but the most abundant and reliable signals are from the bottom of the river."

The study will be published Nov. 2 in the journal Current Biology.

Alexander is an assistant professor of computer science in Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering, where she runs the Bio Inspired Vision Lab.

Going 'back to the source'

To conduct the research, Alexander and her collaborators focused on zebrafish, a well-studied model organism. But, although many laboratories have tanks full of zebrafish, the team wanted to focus on the fish's native environment in India.

"It was recently discovered that fish respond to motion below them more strongly than motion above them. We wanted to dig into that mystery and understand why," Alexander explained. "Many zebrafish that we study grow up in lab tanks, but their native habitats shaped the evolution of their brains and behaviors, so we needed to go back to the source to investigate the context for where the organism developed."

Armed with camera equipment, the team visited seven sites across India to gather video data of shallow rivers, where zebrafish naturally live. The field team encased a 360-degree camera inside a waterproof diving case and attached it to a remotely-controlled robotic arm. Then, they used the robotic arm to plunge the camera into the water and move it around.

"It allowed us to put our eyes where the fish eyes would be, so it's seeing what the fish see," Alexander said. "From the video data, we were able to model hypothetical scenarios where a simulated fish moved arbitrarily through a realistic environment."

'Wait for me!'

Back in the lab, the team also tracked zebrafish's motions inside a ball of LEDs. Because fish have a large field of view, they do not have to move their eyes to look around like people do. So, the researchers played motion stimuli across the lights and watched the fishes' responses. When patterns appeared on the bottom of the tank, the fish swam along with the moving patterns -- more evidence that the fish were taking their visual cues from looking downward.

"If you play a video with moving stripes, the fish will move along with the stripes," Alexander said. "It's like they are saying 'wait for me!' In the behavioral experiment, we counted their tail beats. The more they wagged their tails, the more they wanted to keep up with the moving stripes."

The team then abstracted data from its videos and combined it with data from how motion signals get encoded into the fish's brain. They fed the datasets into two pre-existing algorithms used for studying optic flow (or the movement of the world across our eyes or camera lenses).

Ultimately, they discovered that in both scenarios -- in the wild and in the lab -- zebrafish look down when swimming forward. The researchers concluded that fish look down to understand their environment's motion and then swim to counteract it -- to avoid being swept away.

"We tied everything together into a simulation that showed that, in fact, this is an adaptive behavior," said Alexander, who led the computational part of the study. "The water surface is constantly moving, and other fish and plants are moving by. Fish are better off omitting that information and focusing on the information below them. Riverbeds have a lot of texture, so fish are seeing strong features they can track."

Building better robots

Not only does this information gives some insight into fishes' behavior, it could also inform designs for artificial vision systems and sophisticated bio-inspired robots.

"If you were making a fish-inspired robot and you just looked at its anatomy, you might think 'the eyes are pointing sideways, so I'm going to point my cameras sideways,'" Alexander said. "But it turns out that the eyes are pointing sideways because they are balancing several tasks. We think they point sideways because it's a compromise -- they look upward to hunt and downward to swim."

Read more at Science Daily

New model for predicting belief change

A new kind of predictive network model could help determine which people will change their minds about contentious scientific issues when presented with evidence-based information.

A study in Science Advances presents a framework to accurately predict if a person will change their opinion about a certain topic. The approach estimates the amount of dissonance, or mental discomfort, a person has from holding conflicting beliefs about a topic.

Santa Fe Institute Postdoctoral Fellows Jonas Dalege and Tamara van der Does built on previous efforts to model belief change by integrating both moral and social beliefs into a statistical physics framework of 20 interacting beliefs.

They then used this cognitive network model to predict how the beliefs of a group of nearly 1,000 people, who were at least somewhat skeptical about the efficacy of genetically modified foods and childhood vaccines, would change as the result of an educational intervention.

Study participants were shown a message about the scientific consensus on genetic modification and vaccines. Those who began the study with a lot of dissonance in their interwoven network of beliefs were more likely to change their beliefs after viewing the messaging, but not necessarily in accordance with the message. On the other hand, people with little dissonance showed little change following the intervention.

"For example, if you believe that scientists are inherently trustworthy, but your family and friends tell you that vaccines are unsafe, this is going to create some dissonance in your mind," van der Does says. "We found that if you were already kind of anti-GM foods or vaccines to begin with, you would just move more towards that direction when presented with new information even if that wasn't the intention of the intervention."

While still in an early stage, the research could ultimately have important implications for communicating scientific, evidence-based information to the public.

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Quantum cryptography: Hacking is futile

The Internet is teeming with highly sensitive information. Sophisticated encryption techniques generally ensure that such content cannot be intercepted and read. But in the future high-performance quantum computers could crack these keys in a matter of seconds. It is just as well, then, that quantum mechanical techniques not only enable new, much faster algorithms, but also exceedingly effective cryptography.

Quantum key distribution (QKD) -- as the jargon has it -- is secure against attacks on the communication channel, but not against attacks on or manipulations of the devices themselves. The devices could therefore output a key which the manufacturer had previously saved and might conceivably have forwarded to a hacker. With device- independent QKD (abbreviated to DIQKD), it is a different story. Here, the cryptographic protocol is independent of the device used. Theoretically known since the 1990s, this method has now been experimentally realized for the first time, by an international research group led by LMU physicist Harald Weinfurter and Charles Lim from the National University of Singapore (NUS).

For exchanging quantum mechanical keys, there are different approaches available. Either light signals are sent by the transmitter to the receiver, or entangled quantum systems are used. In the present experiment, the physicists used two quantum mechanically entangled rubidium atoms, situated in two laboratories located 400 meters from each other on the LMU campus. The two locations are connected via a fiber optic cable 700 meters in length, which runs beneath Geschwister Scholl Square in front of the main building.

To create an entanglement, first the scientists excite each of the atoms with a laser pulse. After this, the atoms spontaneously fall back into their ground state, each thereby emitting a photon. Due to the conservation of angular momentum, the spin of the atom is entangled with the polarization of its emitted photon. The two light particles travel along the fiber optic cable to a receiver station, where a joint measurement of the photons indicates an entanglement of the atomic quantum memories.

To exchange a key, Alice und Bob -- as the two parties are usually dubbed by cryptographers -- measure the quantum states of their respective atom. In each case, this is done randomly in two or four directions. If the directions correspond, the measurement results are identical on account of entanglement and can be used to generate a secret key. With the other measurement results, a so-called Bell inequality can be evaluated. Physicist John Stewart Bell originally developed these inequalities to test whether nature can be described with hidden variables. "It turned out that it cannot," says Weinfurter. In DIQKD, the test is used "specifically to ensure that there are no manipulations at the devices -- that is to say, for example, that hidden measurement results have not been saved in the devices beforehand," explains Weinfurter.

In contrast to earlier approaches, the implemented protocol, which was developed by researchers at NUS, uses two measurement settings for key generation instead of one: "By introducing the additional setting for key generation, it becomes more difficult to intercept information, and therefore the protocol can tolerate more noise and generate secret keys even for lower-quality entangled states," says Charles Lim.

With conventional QKD methods, by contrast, security is guaranteed only when the quantum devices used have been characterized sufficiently well. "And so, users of such protocols have to rely on the specifications furnished by the QKD providers and trust that the device will not switch into another operating mode during the key distribution," explains Tim van Leent, one of the four lead authors of the paper alongside Wei Zhang and Kai Redeker. It has been known for at least a decade that older QKD devices could easily be hacked from outside, continues van Leent.

"With our method, we can now generate secret keys with uncharacterized and potentially untrustworthy devices," explains Weinfurter. In fact, he had his doubts initially whether the experiment would work. But his team proved his misgivings were unfounded and significantly improved the quality of the experiment, as he happily admits. Alongside the cooperation project between LMU and NUS, another research group from the University of Oxford demonstrated the device-independent key distribution. To do this, the researchers used a system comprising two entangled ions in the same laboratory. "These two projects lay the foundation for future quantum networks, in which absolutely secure communication is possible between far distant locations," says Charles Lim.

Read more at Science Daily

Whether people inform themselves or remain ignorant is due to three factors

People choose whether to seek or avoid information about their health, finances and personal traits based on how they think it will make them feel, how useful it is, and if it relates to things they think about often, finds a new study by UCL researchers.

Most people fall into one of three 'information-seeking types': those that mostly consider the impact of information on their feelings when deciding whether to get informed, those that mostly consider how useful information will be for making decisions, and those that mostly seek information about issues they think about often, according to the findings published in Nature Communications.

Co-lead author Professor Tali Sharot (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences and Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research) said: "Vast amounts of information are now available to individuals. This includes everything from information about your genetic make-up to information about social issues and the economy. We wanted to find out: how do people decide what they want to know? And why do some people actively seek out information, for example about COVID vaccines, financial inequality and climate change, and others don't?

"The information people decide to expose themselves to has important consequences for their health, finance and relationships. By better understanding why people choose to get informed, we could develop ways to convince people to educate themselves."

The researchers conducted five experiments with 543 research participants, to gauge what factors influence information-seeking.

In one of the experiments, participants were asked how much they would like to know about health information, such as whether they had an Alzheimer's risk gene or a gene conferring a strong immune system. In another experiment, they were asked whether they wanted to see financial information, such as exchange rates or what income percentile they fall into, and in another one, whether they would have liked to learn how their family and friends rated them on traits such as intelligence and laziness.

Later, participants were asked how useful they thought the information would be, how they expected it would make them feel, and how often they thought about each subject matter in question.

The researchers found that people choose to seek information based on these three factors: expected utility, emotional impact, and whether it was relevant to things they thought of often. This three-factor model best explained decisions to seek or avoid information compared to a range of other alternative models tested.

Some participants repeated the experiments a couple of times, months apart. The researchers found that most people prioritise one of the three motives (feelings, usefulness, frequency of thought) over the others, and their specific tendency remained relatively stable across time and domains, suggesting that what drives each person to seek information is 'trait-like'.

In two experiments, participants also filled out a questionnaire to gauge their general mental health. The researchers found that when people sought information about their own traits, participants who mostly wanted to know about traits they thought about often, reported better mental health.

Co-lead author, PhD student Christopher Kelly (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences and Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research) said: "By understanding people's motivations to seek information, policy makers may be able to increase the likelihood that people will engage with and benefit from vital information. For example, if policy makers highlight the potential usefulness of their message and the positive feelings that it may elicit, they may improve the effectiveness of their message.

Read more at Science Daily

Brief 5:2 diet advice is as effective as traditional GP advice, but people like it better, according to new study

A clinical trial has found people prefer receiving information on the 5:2 diet than standard GP weight management advice despite both interventions achieving similar modest weight loss results.

The trial, funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and led by Queen Mary University of London, is the first randomised evaluation of the 5:2 diet, a popular type of intermittent fasting regime. Researchers studied the long-term effects of providing 5:2 diet instructions compared to traditional weight loss advice in 300 UK adults with obesity over a one-year period.

The findings show that long-term weight loss was similar for those who received 5:2 diet or standard weight management advice with 18 per cent and 15 per cent of participants respectively losing at least five per cent of their body weight at one year. However, when asked to rate each intervention, participants in the 5:2 diet group were more likely to recommend the intervention to others or be willing to continue with their diet.

Previous evidence suggests that peer support could be important for encouraging dieters to adhere to and realise the effects of the 5:2 diet. To test this, the researchers studied the impact of a weekly support group in addition to the simple 5:2 diet advice. They found that whilst initially face-to-face support generated better early effects and improved adherence to the 5:2 diet, these effects weakened over time.

Together, the findings suggest that providing brief advice on the 5:2 diet could extend the options clinicians can offer to patients.

Dr Katie Myers Smith, Chartered Health Psychologist and Senior Research Fellow at Queen Mary, said:"Here we've been able to provide the first results on the effectiveness of simple 5:2 diet advice in a real-life setting. We found that although the 5:2 diet wasn't superior to traditional approaches in terms of weight loss, users preferred this approach as it was simpler and more attractive. Based on these findings, GPs may consider recommending the 5:2 diet as part of their standard weight management advice."

The 5:2 diet is popular intermittent fasting weight loss intervention whereby dieters restrict their caloric intake on two non-consecutive days a week and then apply sensible eating on the remaining days. It first became popular in the UK through a BBC Horizon documentary and follow-up bestselling book.

Read more at Science Daily

How the brain ignores distracting information to coordinate movements

As you read this article, touch receptors in your skin are sensing your environment. Your clothes and jewelry, the chair you're sitting on, the computer keyboard or mobile device you're using, even your fingers as they brush one another unintentionally -- each touch activates collections of nerve cells. But, unless a stimulus is particularly unexpected or required to help you orient your own movements, your brain ignores many of these inputs.

Now, Salk researchers have discovered how neurons in a small area of the mammalian brain help filter distracting or disruptive signals -- specifically from the hands -- to coordinate dexterous movements. Their results, published in the journal Science on October 14, 2021, may hold lessons in how the brain filters other sensory information as well.

"These findings have implications not only for gaining a better understanding of how our nervous system interacts with the world, but also for teaching us how to build better prosthetics and robots, and how to more effectively repair neural circuitry after disease or injury," says Eiman Azim, assistant professor in Salk's Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory and the William Scandling Developmental Chair.

Scientists have long known that input from the hands is needed to coordinate dexterous movements, from throwing a ball to playing a musical instrument. In one classic experiment, volunteers with anesthetized, numb fingertips found it extremely difficult to pick up and light a match.

"There's a common misconception that the brain sends a signal and you just perform the resulting movement," says Azim. "But in reality, the brain is constantly incorporating feedback information about the state of your limbs and fingers and adjusting its output in response."

If the brain responded to every signal from the body, it would quickly become overwhelmed -- as happens with some sensory processing disorders. Azim and his colleagues wanted to identify exactly how a healthy brain manages to pick and choose which tactile signals to take into account to coordinate dexterous movements like manipulating objects.

They used a combination of tools in mice to study cells within a small area in the brainstem called the cuneate nucleus, which is the first area signals from the hand enter the brain. While it was known that sensory information passes through the cuneate nucleus, the team discovered that a set of neurons in this region actually controls how much information from the hands eventually passes on to other parts of the brain. By manipulating those circuits to allow more or less tactile feedback through, Azim's team could influence how mice perform dexterous tasks -- such as pulling a rope or learning to distinguish textures -- to earn rewards.

"The cuneate nucleus is often referred to as a relay station, as if information was just passing through it," says Staff Researcher James Conner, first author of the new paper. "But it turns out that sensory information is actually being modulated in this structure."

Conner and Azim went on to show how different parts of the cortex in mice -- the region responsible for more complex, adaptive behavior -- can in turn control the neurons of the cuneate to dictate how strongly they're filtering sensory information from the hands.

Today, despite decades of work, most prosthetics and robots struggle to be nimble-fingered and carry out small, precise hand movements. Azim and Conner say their work could help inform the design of better processes to integrate sensory information from artificial fingers into these kinds of systems to improve their dexterity. It also could have implications for understanding sensory processing disorders or troubleshooting what goes wrong in the brain when the flow of sensory information is thrown out of balance.

"Sensory systems have evolved to have very high sensitivity in order to maximize protective responses to external threats. But our own actions can activate these sensory systems, thereby generating feedback signals that can be disruptive to our intended actions," says Conner.

"We're constantly bombarded with information from the world, and the brain needs ways to decide what comes through and what doesn't," says Azim. "It's not just tactile feedback, but visual and olfactory and auditory, temperature and pain -- the lessons we're learning about this circuitry likely apply in general ways to how the brain modulates these types of feedback as well."

Read more at Science Daily

Just enough information will motivate young children to learn, drive curiosity

Preschool children are sensitive to the gap between how much they know and how much there is to learn, according to a Rutgers University-New Brunswick study.

The research, published in the journal Psychological Science, found preschool children are more likely to choose to gather more information about something if they know just enough about it to find it interesting, but not too much that it becomes boring.

Researchers say this "optimal" amount of existing knowledge creates the perfect mix of uncertainty and curiosity in children and motivates them to learn more.

"There is an infinite amount of information in the real world," said lead author Jenny Wang, an assistant professor of cognitive psychology at Rutgers. "Yet despite having to learn so much in such a short amount of time, young children seem to learn happily and effectively. We wanted to understand what drives their curiosity."

The study focused on how children's knowledge level influences what information they find interesting. The findings suggest that children are not simply attracted to information by its novelty.

According to Wang, children are naturally curious but the difficult question is how to harness this natural curiosity.

"Ultimately, findings like this will help parents and educators better support children when they actively explore and learn about the world," Wang said.

In a series of experiments, Wang and her coauthors designed in-person and online storybooks to measure how much 3- to 5-year-old preschool children know about different "knowledge domains." The experiment also assessed their ability to understand and comprehend a specific topic, such as contagion, and asked how children's current knowledge level predicts their interest in learning more about it, including whether someone will get sick after playing with a sneezing friend.

"Intuitively, curiosity seems to belong to those who know the most, like scientists, and those who know the least, like babies," said Wang, who directs the Rutgers Cognition and Learning Center (CALC). "But what we found here is quite surprising: it was children in the middle who showed the most interest in learning more about contagion, compared to children who knew too little or too much."

Read more at Science Daily

Study finds brain areas involved in seeking information about bad possibilities

The term "doomscrolling" describes the act of endlessly scrolling through bad news on social media and reading every worrisome tidbit that pops up, a habit that unfortunately seems to have become common during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The biology of our brains may play a role in that. Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified specific areas and cells in the brain that become active when an individual is faced with the choice to learn or hide from information about an unwanted aversive event the individual likely has no power to prevent.

The findings, published June 11 in Neuron, could shed light on the processes underlying psychiatric conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety -- not to mention how all of us cope with the deluge of information that is a feature of modern life.

"People's brains aren't well equipped to deal with the information age," said senior author Ilya Monosov, PhD, an associate professor of neuroscience, of neurosurgery and of biomedical engineering. "People are constantly checking, checking, checking for news, and some of that checking is totally unhelpful. Our modern lifestyles could be resculpting the circuits in our brain that have evolved over millions of years to help us survive in an uncertain and ever-changing world."

In 2019, studying monkeys, Monosov laboratory members J. Kael White, PhD, then a graduate student, and senior scientist Ethan S. Bromberg-Martin, PhD, identified two brain areas involved in tracking uncertainty about positively anticipated events, such as rewards. Activity in those areas drove the monkeys' motivation to find information about good things that may happen.

But it wasn't clear whether the same circuits were involved in seeking information about negatively anticipated events, like punishments. After all, most people want to know whether, for example, a bet on a horse race is likely to pay off big. Not so for bad news.

"In the clinic, when you give some patients the opportunity to get a genetic test to find out if they have, for example, Huntington's disease, some people will go ahead and get the test as soon as they can, while other people will refuse to be tested until symptoms occur," Monosov said. "Clinicians see information-seeking behavior in some people and dread behavior in others."

To find the neural circuits involved in deciding whether to seek information about unwelcome possibilities, first author Ahmad Jezzini, PhD, and Monosov taught two monkeys to recognize when something unpleasant might be headed their way. They trained the monkeys to recognize symbols that indicated they might be about to get an irritating puff of air to the face. For example, the monkeys first were shown one symbol that told them a puff might be coming but with varying degrees of certainty. A few seconds after the first symbol was shown, a second symbol was shown that resolved the animals' uncertainty. It told the monkeys that the puff was definitely coming, or it wasn't.

The researchers measured whether the animals wanted to know what was going to happen by whether they watched for the second signal or averted their eyes or, in separate experiments, letting the monkeys choose among different symbols and their outcomes.

Much like people, the two monkeys had different attitudes toward bad news: One wanted to know; the other preferred not to. The difference in their attitudes toward bad news was striking because they were of like mind when it came to good news. When they were given the option of finding out whether they were about to receive something they liked -- a drop of juice -- they both consistently chose to find out.

"We found that attitudes toward seeking information about negative events can go both ways, even between animals that have the same attitude about positive rewarding events," said Jezzini, who is an instructor in neuroscience. "To us, that was a sign that the two attitudes may be guided by different neural processes."

By precisely measuring neural activity in the brain while the monkeys were faced with these choices, the researchers identified one brain area, the anterior cingulate cortex, that encodes information about attitudes toward good and bad possibilities separately. They found a second brain area, the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, that contains individual cells whose activity reflects the monkeys' overall attitudes: yes for info on either good or bad possibilities vs. yes for intel on good possibilities only.

Understanding the neural circuits underlying uncertainty is a step toward better therapies for people with conditions such as anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, which involve an inability to tolerate uncertainty.

"We started this study because we wanted to know how the brain encodes our desire to know what our future has in store for us," Monosov said. "We're living in a world our brains didn't evolve for. The constant availability of information is a new challenge for us to deal with. I think understanding the mechanisms of information seeking is quite important for society and for mental health at a population level."

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How does the brain flexibly process complex information?

Human decision-making depends on the flexible processing of complex information, but how the brain may adapt processing to momentary task demands has remained unclear. In a new article published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development have now outlined several crucial neural processes revealing that our brain networks may rapidly and flexibly shift from a rhythmic to a "noisy" state when the need to process information increases.

Driving a car, deliberating over different financial options, or even pondering different life paths requires us to process an overwhelming amount of information. But not all decisions pose equal demands. In some situations, decisions are easier because we already know which pieces of information are relevant. In other situations, uncertainty about which information is relevant for our decision requires us to get a broader picture of all available information sources. The mechanisms by which the brain flexibly adapts information processing in such situations were previously unknown.

To reveal these mechanisms, researchers from the Lifespan Neural Dynamics Group (LNDG) at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research designed a visual task. Participants were asked to view a moving cloud of small squares that differed from each other along the four visual dimensions: color, size, brightness, and movement direction. Participants were then asked a question about one of the four visual dimensions. For example, "Were more squares moving to the left, or right?." Prior to seeing the squares, the study authors manipulated "uncertainty" by informing participants which feature(s) they could be asked about; the more features that were relevant, the more uncertain participants were expected to become about which features to focus upon. Throughout the task, brain activity was measured using electroencephalography (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

First, the authors found that when participants were more uncertain about the relevant feature in the upcoming choice, participants' EEG signals shifted from a rhythmic mode (present when participants could focus on a single feature) to a more arrhythmic, "noisy" mode. "Brain rhythms may be particularly useful when we need to select relevant over irrelevant inputs, while increased neural 'noise' could make our brains more receptive to multiple sources of information. Our results suggest that the ability to shift back and forth between these rhythmic and 'noisy' states may enable flexible information processing in the human brain," says Julian Q. Kosciessa, LNDG post-doc and the article's first author.

Additionally, the authors found that the extent to which participants shifted from a rhythmic to a noisy mode in their EEG signals was dominantly coupled with increased fMRI activity in the thalamus, a deep brain structure largely inaccessible by EEG. The thalamus is often thought of primarily as an interface for sensory and motor signals, while its potential role in flexibility has remained elusive. The findings of the study may thus have broad implications for our current understanding of the brain structures required for us to adapt to an ever-changing world. "When neuroscientists think about how the brain enables behavioral flexibility, we often focus exclusively on networks in the cortex, while the thalamus is traditionally considered a simple relay for sensorimotor information. Instead, our results argue that the thalamus may support neural dynamics in general and could optimize brain states according to environmental demands, allowing us to make better decisions," says Douglas Garrett, senior author of the study and LNDG group leader.

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Dogmatic people seek less information even when uncertain

 People who are dogmatic about their views seek less information and make less accurate judgements as a result, even on simple matters unrelated to politics, according to a study led by UCL and Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics researchers.

The researchers say their findings, published in PNAS, point to differences in thinking patterns that lead people to hold rigid opinions.

First author Lion Schulz, a PhD candidate at the Max Planck Institute in Germany who began the research while at UCL, said: "Anecdotally, it seems that dogmatic people are less interested in information that might change their mind. However, it was unclear if this is because a specific opinion is of high importance to them or if more fundamental processes are at play that transcend specific opinions."

Dogmatic people are characterised by a belief that their worldview reflects an absolute truth and are often resistant to change their mind, for example when it comes to partisan issues. This tendency can have societal impacts by polarising political, scientific and religious debates. However, the cognitive drivers of dogmatism are still poorly understood.

To investigate this, the researchers asked over 700 people to perform a simple decision-making task. Participants saw two boxes with flickering dots and had to decide which box contained more of the dots. Critically, after the participants had made an initial choice, the researchers gave them the chance to view another, clearer version of the boxes. They then made a final decision.

Schulz explained: "This mirrors many real-life situations -- for example, when we hear a rumour but aren't sure if it's true. Do we share it, or do we check a credible source beforehand?"

Joint first author, Dr Max Rollwage (Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging at UCL and Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry & Ageing Research) said: "By using simple tasks, we were able to minimise motivational or social influences and pin down drivers of altered evidence processing that contribute to dogmatic beliefs."

The task was followed by a comprehensive set of questionnaires that allowed the researchers to measure participants' political orientation and levels of dogmatism.

Dogmatic individuals and moderates did not differ in their accuracy or confidence of their decisions. However, the researchers found that more dogmatic participants were more likely to decline the helpful additional information.

The differences between more and less dogmatic participants were especially large when participants had little confidence in a decision. Senior author Dr Steve Fleming (Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging at UCL, Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry & Ageing Research and UCL Experimental Psychology) said: "Previous work has found that there is a close link between how confident we feel and whether or not we seek out new information. In the current study we found that this link was weaker in more dogmatic individuals."

In general, the reduced search was detrimental, with more dogmatic people being less accurate in their final judgements.

Dr Fleming added: "It is striking that we could detect links between dogmatism about issues such as politics, and information-seeking in a simple online game. This tells us that real-world dogmatism isn't just a feature of specific groups or opinions but may be associated with more fundamental cognitive processes."

The study highlights that simply having corrective information available does not necessarily mean people will consume it.

Schulz said: "This is particularly relevant today. We have never been so free to decide if we have enough evidence about something or whether we should seek out further information from a reliable source before believing it.

"It is also important to stress that the differences between more and less dogmatic people were subtle, and we don't know yet how they would manifest when considering real-world information such as news about political parties. In the end, it's a cautionary tale, whether we think of ourselves as dogmatic or not: when uncertain, it might be wise to check the information again."

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