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Cognitive skills predict academic performance, so schools that improve academic performance might also improve cognitive skills. To investigate the impact schools have on both academic performance and cognitive skills, we related standardized achievement-test scores to measures of cognitive skills in a large sample (N = 1,367) of eighth-grade students attending traditional, exam, and charter public schools. Test scores and gains in test scores over time correlated with measures of cognitive skills. Despite wide variation in test scores across schools, differences in cognitive skills across schools were negligible after we controlled for fourth-grade test scores. Random offers of enrollment to oversubscribed charter schools resulted in positive impacts of such school attendance on math achievement but had no impact on cognitive skills. These findings suggest that schools that improve standardized achievement-test scores do so primarily through channels other than improving cognitive skills.

Across the lifespan, individuals frequently choose between exploiting known rewarding options or exploring unknown alternatives. A large body of work has suggested that children may explore more than adults. However, because novelty and reward uncertainty are often correlated, it is unclear how they differentially influence decision-making across development. Here, children, adolescents, and adults (ages 8–27 years, N = 122) completed an adapted version of a recently developed value-guided decision-making task that decouples novelty and uncertainty. In line with prior studies, we found that exploration decreased with increasing age. Critically, participants of all ages demonstrated a similar bias to select choice options with greater novelty, whereas aversion to reward uncertainty increased into adulthood. Computational modeling of participant choices revealed that whereas adolescents and adults demonstrated attenuated uncertainty aversion for more novel choice options, children’s choices were not influenced by reward uncertainty.

A large corpus of research suggests that there are changes in the manner and degree to which the amygdala supports cognitive and emotional function across development. One possible basis for these developmental differences could be the maturation of amygdalar connections with the rest of the brain. Recent functional connectivity studies support this conclusion, but the structural connectivity of the developing amygdala and its different nuclei remains largely unstudied. We examined age related changes in the DWI connectivity fingerprints of the amygdala to the rest of the brain in 166 individuals of ages 5-30. We also developed a model to predict age based on individual-subject amygdala connectivity, and identified the connections that were most predictive of age. Finally, we segmented the amygdala into its four main nucleus groups, and examined the developmental changes in connectivity for each nucleus. We observed that with age, amygdalar connectivity becomes increasingly sparse and localized. Age related changes were largely localized to the subregions of the amygdala that are implicated in social inference and contextual memory (the basal and lateral nuclei). The central nucleus' connectivity also showed differences with age but these differences affected fewer target regions than the basal and lateral nuclei. The medial nucleus did not exhibit any age related changes. These findings demonstrate increasing specificity in the connectivity patterns of amygdalar nuclei across age.

We used self-report surveys to gather information on a broad set of non-cognitive skills from 1,368 eighth graders. At the student level, scales measuring conscientiousness, self-control, grit, and growth mindset are positively correlated with attendance, behavior, and test-score gains between fourth grade and eighth grade. Conscientiousness, self-control, and grit are unrelated to test-score gains at the school level, however, and students attending over-subscribed charter schools score lower on these scales than do students attending district schools. Exploiting admissions lotteries, we find positive impacts of charter school attendance on achievement and attendance but negative impacts on these non-cognitive skills. We provide suggestive evidence that these paradoxical results are driven by reference bias or the tendency for survey responses to be influenced by social context.

Well-informed individual and collective decision-making is aided by access to high-quality, factual information. What motivates people to share high-quality news, and how can these motives be leveraged to promote news sharing? Based on the theory that self-related and social motives encourage sharing behavior, we designed and tested interventions to increase news sharing. In the interventions, individuals were exposed to actual news stories and were prompted to identify why the content was relevant to themselves (self-relevance) or people they know (social relevance). Across four studies (Nparticipants = 2,559, Nobservations = 18,780), we systematically examined the effectiveness of these interventions, their generalizability across news topics (climate change and health) and cultures (the United States of America and the Netherlands), their translation to more naturalistic contexts, and their underlying neuropsychological mechanisms. In all studies, we observed expected positive correlations among perceived self and social relevance and sharing intentions. In a neuroimaging study, we also observed corresponding increases in activity in self-referential and social cognitive brain regions. Using the content-framing interventions to test causal relationships, we found that the interventions increased sharing intentions and behavior. Furthermore, we observed generalizability across news topics and cultural contexts and translation to an ecologically valid news exposure context. These findings advance theory by adding neural and behavioral evidence that self-related and social motives prompt people to share information, and demonstrate the ability of content-framing interventions to harness these motives to encourage high-quality news sharing.

Emotion is difficult to define, quantify, and measure yet it pervades almost all aspects of an individual’s life, from one’s internal motivations and feelings, to his or her external responses and decisions. This body of work tackles three major components contributing to the experience of emotion – development, social influences, and the underlying role of the brain. These three components shape emotion in a fundamental and intertwining way, and methods like brain imaging can provide new insights into how emotion changes and is expressed throughout one’s life. Study 1 showed that reactivity and regulation of craving changes with age and are supported by frontoparietal cortical maturation. Study 2 showed that the value estimations of food change across development and can be heavily influenced by social factors. Study 3 replicated the social influence effects observed in Study 2 and revealed the neural mechanisms contributing to this phenomenon. Additionally, this study used a broader range of stimuli including negative, neutral, and positive images, in order to expand the generalizability of the findings. Taken together this work uncovers neural, developmental, and social influences that shape how individuals experience emotions.

BARCELONA, Spain (FNS) -- The Textile Show, Spain's only trade show devoted exclusively to fashion fabrics, was marked by a strong increase in the number of foreign exhibitors targeting fabric sales in Spain

Over the past decade several studies have reported that the gut microbiomes of mammals with similar dietary niches exhibit similar compositional and functional traits. However, these studies rely heavily on samples from captive individuals and often confound host phylogeny, gut morphology, and diet. To more explicitly test the influence of host dietary niche on the mammalian gut microbiome we use 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing and shotgun metagenomics to compare the gut microbiota of 18 species of wild non-human primates classified as either folivores or closely related non-folivores, evenly distributed throughout the primate order and representing a range of gut morphological specializations. While folivory results in some convergent microbial traits, collectively we show that the influence of host phylogeny on both gut microbial composition and function is much stronger than that of host dietary niche. This pattern does not result from differences in host geographic location or actual dietary intake at the time of sampling, but instead appears to result from differences in host physiology. These findings indicate that mammalian gut microbiome plasticity in response to dietary shifts over both the lifespan of an individual host and the evolutionary history of a given host species is constrained by host physiological evolution. Therefore, the gut microbiome cannot be considered separately from host physiology when describing host nutritional strategies and the emergence of host dietary niches.