http://www.biopsychology.com/news/ Recent news articles related to the field of Biological Psychology. A companion to the textbook Biological Psychology by S. Marc Breedlove, Mark R. Rosenzweig, Neil V. Watson. Published by Sinauer Associates https://www.npr.org/2026/06/11/nx-s1-5849937/child-brain-development-stress-sleep-neighborhood-economics Jon Hamilton The most powerful factors affecting a child's brain development involve socioeconomic opportunities, according to a study in the journal Science. The analysis of more than 2,300 9- and 10-year-olds found that environmental factors ranging from household income to education to neighborhood quality are associated with brain differences that can clearly be seen in MRI scans. The researchers also found that preteens who'd grown up in neighborhoods with lower incomes and limited social support had brain differences associated with less sleep and more stress. "Something is going on in these neighborhoods," says Scott Marek, the study's first author and an assistant professor of radiology at WashU School of Medicine. "We need to find out how socioeconomics is becoming biologically embedded." The research "highlights the fact that the environment in which we grow up and live has powerful impacts on our brain," says Russell Poldrack, a psychology professor at Stanford University who was not involved in the study. It also challenges earlier research that focused on links between brain development and factors like IQ and mental health. Those factors do appear to have a small influence on brain development, says Dr. Nico Dosenbach, an author of the new study and a professor at WashU Medicine in St. Louis. "But socioeconomics was, by a wide margin, absolutely the dominant variable," Dosenbach says. © 2026 npr https://www.thetransmitter.org/brain-imaging/iqs-link-to-brain-structure-function-in-children-may-be-a-mirage/ By Natalia Mesa IQ is one of the most-studied traits in brain imaging studies. And yet it has a weaker relationship with brain structure and function in children than socioeconomic status does, according to a study published today in Science. The apparent link between IQ and brain differences largely disappears once socioeconomic status is controlled for, the findings suggest. The results point to the importance of factoring in socioeconomic status in analyses of brain imaging datasets, the researchers say. “If you’re not properly taking into account [socioeconomic status]” in brain imaging experiments, “you’re going to fool yourself,” says study investigator Nico Dosenbach, professor of neurology at Washington University in St. Louis. Dosenbach and his colleagues analyzed MRI scans and behavioral data from roughly 12,000 children aged 9 to 10 in the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study, looking for correlations between measures of brain structure and function and 649 psychological, health, social and environmental factors. Socioeconomic variables—such as household income and where the child lives—were the most strongly associated with functional connectivity and cortical thickness. Differences in socioeconomics account for 16 percent of the variance in functional connectivity across the participants, the study found, which is among “the largest effects that are seen in these kinds of studies,” says Russ Poldrack, professor of psychology at Stanford University, who was not involved in the study. Socioeconomic status accounted for roughly 13 percent of the variance in cortical thickness. Sleep and screen time are also strongly linked to these brain features, although not as strongly as socioeconomics. © 2026 Simons Foundation https://www.sciencenews.org/article/songs-prep-unhatched-finches-hot-world By Jake Buehler Zebra finches sing their young into biological preparedness for hot weather, all before they even leave the egg. As the heat punishes sun-crisped Australian woodlands, the adult birds make a rapid, peeping “heat call”. That signal kicks off genetic changes in unhatched baby zebra finches’ brains, researchers report June 11 in the Journal of Experimental Biology. The tune appears to give developing finches a physiology-bending forecast, giving them a leg up once they emerge into the broiling conditions on the other side of the eggshell. A decade ago, behavioral ecologist Mylene Mariette and her colleagues discovered that exposure to these heat calls in the egg shortly before hatching changed how the chicks dealt with high temperatures. They grew more slowly, preferred warmer places to nest and seemed better equipped to handle hot conditions. But it was unknown how hearing a simple song could trigger these kinds of physical and behavioral changes in the young. Mariette, of Deakin University in Waurn Ponds, Australia and Julia George, a neuroscientist at Clemson University in South Carolina wanted to know if the songs might initiate changes in the hypothalamus, a small region of the brain heavily involved in regulating metabolism and responses to heat. Hear the finch’s heat-induced call This high-pitched, rapid peeping is the “heat call” of the Australian zebra finch. The effect the call has on the developing brain’s vasculature may make the chicks more resilient against heat stroke. But the impact lasts the birds’ entire life. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026. https://www.thetransmitter.org/pregnancy/maternity-induces-lasting-gene-expression-changes-in-mouse-brains/ By Amber Dance Motherhood creates a broad swath of long-term gene-expression changes in the brains of mice, according to a new study. This is accomplished by dopamine attaching to the histones of neuronal DNA and regulating gene expression, particularly in the hippocampus. The findings suggest that “pregnancy fundamentally changes the body and brain,” says study investigator Jennifer O’Chan, instructor in neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “And these are long-lasting effects.” Similar patterns of gene regulation appeared in postmortem samples from five women of varying ages who had all given birth in their past, O’Chan and her colleagues found. The work thus adds to a small but growing body of research on neurological changes linked to pregnancy, birth and parenting. “The maternal brain is woefully understudied, and so the molecular profiling that they do … it’s really an enormous resource,” says Catherine Peña, assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University, who was not involved with the paper. Of 11 brain regions linked to maternal behaviors in mice that the group studied, the dorsal hippocampus and associated subiculum—together called the dorsal hippocampal formation—exhibited the greatest differences in gene expression between virgin mice and those that experienced the full spectrum of motherhood, from mating to weaning. This region doesn’t usually top the list of brain areas linked with maternity, says Robert Froemke, professor of neuroscience at New York University Langone Health, who wasn’t involved in the study. But hippocampal functions such as temporal sequencing and synthesizing different memory streams could certainly apply to pup-rearing, he says. “It’s not a total surprise, but it’s fair to say this paper makes me consider its importance more strongly.” © 2026 Simons Foundation https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/11/science/researcher-huntingtons-disease-wexler.html By Gina Kolata On my second visit with Nancy Wexler at her Manhattan apartment, she had a gift for me. It was a copy of her newly published memoir, “My Life, My Science: Pursuing a Cure for Huntington’s Disease.” It had been signed with a stamp of her signature — she isn’t able to sign it herself. Nor could she rise from her brown faux-leather recliner to greet me — she can’t get up unassisted. Speaking requires effort. She can manage at most a few badly slurred words or phrases or, with great difficulty, a short sentence. On that bright windy afternoon, Nancy and her sister, Alice Wexler, sat side by side in recliners, their backs to windows that offered a stunning view of the Hudson River far below. Alice lives in California, but she visits Nancy every other month. At age 80, Nancy Wexler has Huntington’s disease, a dreaded brain disease that destroys a person’s ability to control movements. There is no treatment. There is no cure. The disease is inherited: Nancy’s grandfather, three uncles and mother had it. Alice, however, does not: If a parent has Huntington’s, each child has a 50 percent chance of getting it. Their mother attempted suicide, a path that others with the disease have chosen, but ultimately died from Huntington’s. Nancy is not just any Huntington’s disease patient. For decades, she led a research effort in a remote area of Venezuela that found the gene responsible for Huntington’s. That work yielded a blood test that enable at-risk people to find out if they are destined to get the disease. In honor of this work, Nancy has garnered numerous accolades and prizes, including a Lasker award, among the most prestigious in science. She devoted her life to understanding what it’s like to be at risk for Huntington’s disease, what it’s like to have it. © 2026 The New York Times Company https://www.thetransmitter.org/artificial-intelligence/the-illusion-of-ai-consciousness-lessons-from-human-unconscious-processing/ By Vanessa Hadid, Karim Jerbi, John W. Krakauer Late at night, in neighboring apartments, two people sit alone in front of glowing screens. A university student types into an artificial-intelligence (AI) companion he has started confiding in: “I feel like nobody really understands me.” Next door, a young professional opens a chatbot she has begun to rely on most evenings: “I tried following your advice today, but I still couldn’t finish everything I was supposed to do.” The responses appear instantly: reassuring, thoughtful, even caring. Over time, both people begin to feel these conversations are deeply genuine, as though something on the other side truly understands them. Yet nothing in these systems experiences loneliness, empathy, stress or care. They generate responses from statistical patterns learned across vast amounts of language data. As neuroscientists, we find this reaction unsurprising but concerning. It reveals something important not about machines, but about us. Humans are quick to infer the presence of a mind when behavior looks right. When language is fluent and emotionally attuned, we take it as evidence of inner experience. That intuition feels natural, but it is misleading. Today’s AI systems can sound perceptive and empathetic, yet there is no evidence that these systems are actually experiencing anything. As the use of AI companions and therapeutic tools spreads, this confusion carries real risks. The question is not whether AI is becoming conscious, but why it so easily seems that way. Here, we approach the AI consciousness debate through the lens of neuroscience. Research on nonconscious processing in the human brain shows that behavior that is complex, goal directed and even emotionally responsive can unfold without awareness. This reminds us that behavior and experience can come apart, and that we should resist treating AI’s fluent and seemingly empathetic performance as evidence of a mind. © 2026 Simons Foundation https://aeon.co/essays/why-being-autistic-can-be-a-lot-of-fun Sarah Hendrickx Being autistic can be a lot of fun. I say that as an adult-diagnosed autistic (and ADHD) adult who has spent the past 20 years working in the autism world, meeting thousands of autistic people and their families, writing books, and speaking publicly on the subject. It’s not always fun, that’s for sure, but given that the nature of being human comes with a whole plethora of complexities and contradictions, light and dark, it is, of course, highly possible that a package of atypical cognitive processes, perceptions and behaviours clinically categorised as dysfunctional and disabling can also bring a whole load of satisfaction and pleasure. Even so, I imagine that, for some people, the concept of being autistic as being joyful is a tough one to square, given that the diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder defines it as ‘characterised by varying but often marked and persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction’. Still not convinced? Let’s think of being autistic in the same way that we think of a socially driven person who may thrive and excel in a busy environment, and then struggle when alone, or of a highly moral person who may be jubilant when justice prevails, and then devastated when it does not – in other words, one natural tendency can bring us both challenges and elation, depending on the circumstances. The same is true for autistic characteristics. I should note that the following celebration of autistic delight does not negate or trivialise the very real and often disabling experience of living as an autistic person in a non-autistic world. I also recognise my own privilege as an autistic adult who is able to live relatively independently and with agency, but also as an autistic adult who – despite appearances – received my own diagnosis of autism by fair means, complete with the requisite impairments and deficits. © Aeon Media Group Ltd. 2012-2026. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/nightjar-birds-crack-wings-together By Jake Buehler A series of sharp cracks splits the nighttime air in a forest in the Andean foothills. But this isn’t the sound of boots snapping twigs underfoot. It’s a bird. Male scissor-tailed nightjars (Hydropsalis torquata) create these abrupt sounds by hitting the bones in their wings together in a forceful snap, researchers report in the May Journal of Avian Biology. Nightjars are largely nocturnal, insect-eating birds related to hummingbirds and swifts. H. torquata males are unusual for their exceptionally long, paired tail feathers. These males were already known to make explosive cracking noises at night as a mating signal to any nearby females. But little was understood about how they were doing it, says Juan Ignacio Areta, an evolutionary naturalist at Instituto de Bio y Geociencias del Noroeste Argentino in Salta, Argentina. “Many nocturnal animals are well known for being extremely silent, such as the ‘silent’ flight of owls,” Areta says. “We wanted to learn how it was possible for a nocturnal animal to make these loud sounds.” In late 2022, Areta and Christopher Clark — a behavioral ecologist at the University of California, Riverside — covertly filmed the male birds at night along a forest road near Salta. They used high-speed infrared cameras and then compared the footage to the sounds they were recording. Often, the nightjars would hop off the ground and swing their wings together behind their backs, creating a loud clack upon impact. Sometimes the males did this while flying or while mating with a female. The birds weren’t just hitting their feathers together. It was clear to the researchers that the snaps came from the wrist bones colliding just below the last bend in the wing. Areta and Clark think the bones vibrating from the forceful collision create the abrupt snapping sound. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026. https://www.quantamagazine.org/are-memories-transferable-or-edible-20260605/ By Claire L. Evans It was the dead of winter in Boston. The surface of the Charles River was frozen solid. But Zachary Kelso (opens a new tab) braved the biting cold to finally put to rest a mystery that has haunted neuroscience labs for over half a century. To do that, Kelso, a research assistant in the Harvard lab of the neuroscientist Sam Gershman (opens a new tab), needed some worms. Specifically, planarians: arrow-headed flatworms, which are among the simplest creatures to possess a brain and a nervous system with bilateral symmetry like ours. Normally, labs order these widely used model organisms from biological supply companies. But the mail-order worms weren’t up to snuff. So Gershman had dispatched Kelso to the Charles’ icy banks to catch some wild ones. “I thought, ‘I’m going to look crazy because I’m using a hammer to beat through the ice,’” Kelso recalled. “So I wore the more business end of business casual.” In philosophy, “qualia” refers to the subjective qualities of our experience: what it’s like for Alice to see blue or for Bob to feel delighted. Qualia are “the ways things seem to us,” as the late philosopher Daniel Dennett put it. In these essays, our columnists follow their curiosity, and explore important but not necessarily answerable scientific questions. It wouldn’t be the last time Kelso found himself in this situation. The Charles River planarians, it turned out, didn’t cut it either. Neither did the worms he sourced while stream-hopping around Eugene, Oregon, in March 2025. Nor did the ones he fished from Michigan lakes that June — this time in thigh-high waders — while picnicking families gawked from shore. Kelso diligently turned over rocks, angled with bits of meat tied to a string, and even followed maps from a vintage guidebook called The Fresh-Water Triclads of Michigan (opens a new tab). But his adventure was fruitless. Sure, he caught plenty of planarians. But back in Gershman’s lab, none of them would do what they were supposed to do. (C) Simons Foundation https://www.sciencenews.org/article/bumblebees-problem-solving-spontaneous By Erin Garcia de Jesús Buff-tailed bumblebees can figure out on their own how to use a ball as a ladder to nab sugar from an out-of-reach fake flower, researchers report in the June 4 Science. The insects worked out the trick without specific training for the solution, suggesting a remarkable capacity for solving problems. Bumblebees are brainy, with studies showing they may have emotions and can teach one another to score goals in a six-legged version of soccer. The new finding adds yet another skill to their repertoire. “Spontaneous problem-solving is something that has never been shown in any invertebrate before,” says Olli Loukola, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Oulu in Finland. Vertebrates including chimpanzees and parrots can problem solve on their own, although researchers typically focus on captive animals with plenty of experience working out puzzles. “Our study is the first one where we can be 100 percent sure that these individuals don’t have any prior experience about any problem-solving tasks,” Loukola says. Loukola and colleagues first taught bees two necessary associations: Balls are moveable objects and a blue ring — representing a flower — means food. The team then let the bees loose in plexiglass arenas too small for them to fly to reach a blue ring printed on the ceiling. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026. https://www.thetransmitter.org/systems-neuroscience/reward-learning-algorithm-hardwired-into-dopamine-circuit/ By Natalia Mesa Dopamine neurons register surprise: Their activity surges when an experience exceeds expectations and falls silent with disappointment. These prediction errors help brains and artificial-intelligence systems learn from experience by updating future expectations, according to a long-standing model. But because dopamine neurons receive input from several sources, the exact circuit mechanisms that compute the difference have remained mysterious, says Naoshige Uchida, professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University. It turns out that a circuit of just two types of neurons is central to this computation. Dopamine neurons in the ventral tegmental area calculate the error based on input originating from D1 medium spiny neurons in the striatum, according to unpublished mouse data Uchida and his team presented at this year’s Computational and Systems Neuroscience (COSYNE) annual meeting and reported in a preprint posted on bioRxiv in October 2025. This result suggests that “reward learning doesn’t necessarily involve higher-order computation,” says Kauê Costa, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who was not involved in the work. “The canonical view is that these types of computations would involve higher-order areas.” But it also bolsters the reward prediction error model, which has come under scrutiny in recent years, says Nathaniel Daw, professor of computational and theoretical neuroscience at Princeton University, who was not involved in the study. “It’s amazing” how much explanatory power the model has had in predicting neuronal responses, he adds. “It’s been a long road to get here. It’s a really beautiful study.” © 2026 Simons Foundation https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/mind/2026/why-we-crave-social-interaction By Elizabeth Preston To our human eyes, a mouse’s furred face doesn’t betray much emotion. But if you watch the body language of a mouse who’s reunited with one of her sisters after five days in a cage alone, you might suspect you know what she’s feeling. The formerly isolated mouse chatters in squeaks too high for a human to hear. She follows her sister, crawling beneath the other mouse’s body as if trying to get a hug. She looks like she’s feeling what you or I feel when meeting a long-lost friend or a family member — maybe with more sniffing. Loneliness isn’t just for humans, and neither are its harms. Over the past decade or so, some researchers have come to believe that an animal’s craving for the company of others isn’t just a preference, but a basic, deeply held need. When we don’t socialize enough, we feel the lack like hunger or thirst, they say. When we’ve had our fill of togetherness, we feel satisfied or quenched. The amount of socializing a creature needs may be particular to that species, and even to that individual. Scientists have found within-species social differences in birds, monkeys, fish and even cockroaches. Among humans, “you can feel lonely at a party, or you can feel fine alone in your office,” says Kay Tye, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in California. Whatever the ideal degree of togetherness, Tye and others think that an animal’s need to balance time alone and time with others represents a kind of homeostasis: an equilibrium that’s critical for survival. Today, they are on a hunt to find where, in the brain, this equilibrium is controlled — and hoping their work will hold dividends for lonely humans. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/jun/03/orlando-swayne-neurologist-stroke-head-injury-recovery-doctor-interview Ian Sample Claire was in bad shape. She had been brought to the ward on a stretcher and hoisted on to a bed where she lay curled up in a ball. She was unable to speak, her eyes flat and face expressionless. While she could move her right arm a little, her left arm and both legs were immobile. Life had changed dramatically for Claire, a mother of three in her late 30s, many months earlier, when she collapsed while on a night out with friends. A weakness in an artery at the base of her brain had ruptured, spilling blood around her frontal lobe. She was taken to hospital, where surgeons removed two side plate-sized pieces of bone from her skull to relieve the pressure on her brain. She spent months in intensive care. Can a patient with such profound impairment improve in any meaningful way, especially so long after the event? That was the question for Orlando Swayne, a consultant neurologist and co-lead of the pioneering neurorehabilitation unit at the National hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, a Victorian redbrick building in Queen Square, central London. It was a few years before the pandemic when Swayne first met Claire on the ward. She made eye contact but showed no other response. He knew from the referring hospital that she could write single-word answers to queries, but these revealed characteristic signs of the brain damage she had sustained. Before leaving her bedside to tend to other patients, Swayne asked if she had any questions. With a pencil clenched in her right hand, she wrote: “Questions, questions, questions,” and then tailed off into a wiggly line. The pathological repetition comes from a failure in the frontal lobe to keep actions moving along in sequence. “There are some patients who start off, when we first work with them, severely impaired – and I mean very severely impaired,” says Swayne. Claire (not her real name) was one such patient. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited https://www.npr.org/2026/06/03/nx-s1-5837620/brain-health-accelerator-gene-therapy-alzheimer Jon Hamilton Scientists who've spent decades learning how the brain works say they're now ready to start fixing it when it breaks. That's the premise of the Brain Health accelerator, a collaborative effort launched by the Allen Institute in Seattle, which has become a major player in brain research. The initiative includes plans to develop new genetic therapies — a term that includes gene editing as well as traditional gene therapy — for diseases including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS, and Huntington's. "The latest genetic treatments allow scientists to control the activity of particular genes," says Ed Lein, who directs the institute's brain health programs. "That opens up the possibility for very specific precision therapies for brain disorders." The accelerator is an outgrowth of the BRAIN Initiative, an ambitious research program unveiled by President Obama in 2013. The goal of this public-private partnership was to create tools that would allow scientists to see the brain's inner workings, and, eventually, to develop treatments. But the effort has progressed far faster than many scientists expected. "I am shocked at how far we've come in the last 10, 12 years," says John Ngai, a senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health who directs the BRAIN Initiative. "It's just been beyond my wildest imagination — and I've been accused of having a pretty good imagination." © 2026 npr https://www.thetransmitter.org/neuros-ark/learning-why-spiny-mice-play-well-with-others/ By Hannah Thomasy Prairie voles have a reputation as one of the most social rodents, but when Aubrey Kelly tried to use them to study the neurobiology of group dynamics, she discovered limits to their sociability. “Prairie voles are indeed super social with their pair-bond partner and with their offspring,” says Kelly, associate professor of psychology at Emory University. “But if an adult prairie vole encounters a stranger, they’re going to fight—oftentimes to the death.” She shifted her focus to paternal care in the voles but stayed on the lookout for a truly social rodent that lived in rich, complex communities. As a graduate student, she had studied the neural circuitry that contributes to such societies in zebra finches, and she hoped to make similar inroads in mammalian brains. “I got really into the idea of animal societies and how individuals can just get along in big groups, which is something that we do ourselves,” Kelly says. About four years later, a colleague introduced her to spiny mice. Despite their name, these animals are more closely related to gerbils than to laboratory mice. They live in large, flexible, mixed-sex groups and rarely brawl, the colleague told her. Kelly was intrigued—perhaps these groups were the miniature mammal societies she had been searching for. Her subsequent work has demonstrated that, indeed, these critters not only tolerate groups but actually prefer them: When given a choice between associating with two peers or eight peers, they spend the majority of their time with the larger group. Now Kelly is digging into the neural mechanisms underlying this communal lifestyle. Kelly spoke with The Transmitter about spiny mouse “friendships,” custom CRISPR tools and the neurobiology of coexistence. © 2026 Simons Foundation