In the past decade, decision neuroscience and neuroeconomics have developed many new insights in the study of decision making. This review provides an overarching update on how the field has advanced in this time period. Although our initial review a decade ago outlined several theoretical, conceptual, methodological, empirical, and practical challenges, there has only been limited progress in resolving these challenges. We summarize significant trends in decision neuroscience through the lens of the challenges outlined for the field and review examples where the field has had significant, direct, and applicable impacts across economics and psychology. First, we review progress on topics including reward learning, explore-exploit decisions, risk and ambiguity, intertemporal choice, and valuation. Next, we assess the impacts of emotion, social rewards, and social context on decision making. Then, we follow up with how individual differences impact choices and new exciting developments in the prediction and neuroforecasting of future decisions. Finally, we consider how trends in decision-neuroscience research reflect progress toward resolving past challenges, discuss new and exciting applications of recent research, and identify new challenges for the field. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Reasoning and Decision Making Psychology > Emotion and Motivation.
Working memory (WM), the ability to maintain information in service to a task, is characterized by its limited capacity. Several influential models attribute this limitation in a large extent to proactive interference (PI), the phenomenon that previously encoded, now-irrelevant information competes with relevant information. Here, we look back at the adult PI literature, spanning over 60 years, as well as recent results linking the ability to cope with PI to WM capacity. In early development, WM capacity is even more limited, yet an accounting for the role of PI has been lacking. Our Focus Article aims to address this through an integrative account: since PI resolution is mediated by networks involving the frontal cortex (particularly, the left inferior frontal gyrus) and the posterior parietal cortex, and since children have protracted development and less recruitment of these areas, the increase in the ability to cope with PI is a major factor underlying the increase in WM capacity in early development. Given this, we suggest that future research should focus on mechanistic studies of PI resolution in children. Finally, we note a crucial methodological implication: typical WM paradigms repeat stimuli from trial-to-trial, facilitating, inadvertently, PI and reducing performance; we may be fundamentally underestimating children's WM capacity. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Memory Neuroscience > Cognition Neuroscience > Development.
There is a substantial body of literature showing that men and women speak differently and that these differences are endemic to the speech signal. However, the psycholinguistic mechanisms underlying the integration of social category perception and language are still poorly understood. Speaker attributes such as emotional state, age, sex, and race have often been treated in the literature as dissociable, but perceptual systems for social categories demonstrably rely on interdependent cognitive processes. We introduce a diversity science framework for evaluating the existing literature on gender and speech perception, arguing that differences in beliefs about gender may be defined as differences in beliefs about differences. Treating individual, group, and societal level contrasts in ideological patterns as phenomenologically distinctive, we enumerate six ideological arenas which define claims about gender and examine the literature for treatment of these issues. We argue that both participants and investigators predictably show evidence of differences in ideological attitudes toward the normative definition of persons. The influence of social knowledge on linguistic perception therefore occurs in the context of predictable variation in both attention and inattention to people and the distinguishing features which mark them salient as kinds. We link experiences of visibility, invisibility, and hypervisibility with ideological variation regarding the significance of physiological, linguistic, and social features, concluding that gender ideologies are implicated both in linguistic processing and in social judgments of value between groups. We conclude with a summary of the key gaps in the current literature and recommendations for best practices studies that may use in future investigations of socially meaningful variation in speech perception. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language in Mind and Brain Psychology > Language Linguistics > Language Acquisition Psychology > Perception and Psychophysics.