Many worry that AI use will erode human cognition. We discuss evidence suggesting that offloading cognition to AI can impede skill acquisition and lead to skill decay, but risks depend on how AI is used. We also consider whether our basic cognitive abilities might prove more resilient to this erosion.

Why do some people remain mentally healthy under stress, while others develop symptoms? Recent observational and interventional evidence indicates that positive appraisal style-the tendency to interpret threats in a mildly positive fashion-is a key resilience factor and a promising target for preventive interventions.

Adolescence is a period of vulnerability for internalizing mental health disorders. One underappreciated mechanism of internalizing psychopathology is higher-order social cognition (i.e., cognitive processing of information about the self and others), which is highly salient during adolescence. We propose that the protracted development of social cognition during adolescence results in highly individualized, multidimensional profiles that can be characterized across four core dimensions (Propensity, Degree, Positivity, and Negativity). A social cognitive profile with greater Propensity, Degree, and Negativity, and decreased Positivity, along with associated decreases in Accuracy, may confer greater risk for internalizing psychopathology, particularly if applied inflexibly across contexts. Future research may test the utility of these profiles for stratification, prediction, or intervention targeting.

Noninvasive methods are making it possible to study neural replay in humans. Although focused on alignment with rodent findings, human research often tacitly assumes that replay is linked to conscious, deliberate thought. This assumption represents a missed opportunity to investigate the links between replay and consciousness, as well as cross-species differences more broadly.

Reciprocity theory holds a hallowed status in evolutionary social sciences because it provides a way to explain cooperation among unrelated individuals. Theorists have developed a large body of mathematical work based on the iterated prisoner's dilemma game that explores which strategies are evolutionarily stable in a range of conditions, including scenarios involving behavioral errors. However, there is a mismatch between the vigorous pace of theoretical research and the trickle of empirical studies that have tested predictions generated by the theoretical work. Furthermore, findings from the empirical work on dyadic cooperation in humans diverge from theoretical predictions in significant ways. This discrepancy indicates that the standard theoretical framework is poorly equipped to account for key aspects of real-world cooperation. To better align with real-world observations, theoretical explorations of reciprocity need to shift their focus toward understanding how actors choose partners and maintain relationships.

Misinformation influences cognition-shaping memory, beliefs, attitudes, reasoning, and decision-making. While intentionally disseminated misinformation (i.e., disinformation) has long served persuasive functions, its strategic use to generate epistemic uncertainty has grown in prominence. Such strategic manipulation by incentivised actors serves to construct 'alternative realities' that undermine shared truth and institutional trust. This review analyses recent evidence on the direct cognitive and behavioural impacts of misinformation, examines the transformative roles of social media and generative AI, and considers broader epistemological consequences, including the erosion of truth norms and implications for democratic discourse. Addressing these challenges requires coordinated individual and systemic interventions that integrate psychological, technological, educational, and regulatory approaches to strengthen epistemic resilience and safeguard evidence-informed public reasoning and decision-making.

Psychological traits are not uniformly distributed across space; they are geographically clustered. The emerging interdisciplinary field of geographical psychology integrates insights from psychology and the social sciences to understand the causes and consequences of this clustering. By leveraging big data, geospatial analysis, and computational modeling, researchers have identified robust geographical patterns across regions and nations in personality, values, well-being, and prejudice. This review synthesizes key findings on these geographical differences and how they relate to societal-level and individual-level outcomes. Opportunities and challenges for a cognitive science that incorporates a geographical perspective are discussed. Overall, a geographical perspective highlights the dynamic interplay between place and psychology, offering new insights into human behavior and pathways for integrating geography into cognitive science.

Multi-brain neurofeedback offers new possibilities for guiding social interaction by capturing and modulating interpersonal neural dynamics in real time. We propose a hierarchical framework where neurofeedback targets shared sensory dynamics (signal), socio-cognitive processes (functional), or social outcomes (system). We highlight key methodological challenges and potential real-world therapeutic and pedagogical applications.

Developmental voice change exposes a gap in models of self-voice processing: these models explain predictive control and self-voice recognition but not how vocal signals integrate into self-representations. I propose a hierarchical framework in which recursive interactions across sensorimotor predictions, self-voice representations, and higher-order self-representations support the emergence of the vocal self.

Visual search depends on attentional priority, shaped by stimulus salience, current goals, and prior experiences. Although overall search performance declines with age, it remains unclear to what extent this reflects impaired attentional guidance rather than other age-related changes. In this review article, we evaluate how each source of guidance operates across adulthood. Once perceptual factors and general slowing are accounted for, experience-based guidance is largely preserved across timescales, from intertrial priming to lifetime knowledge. Guidance by stable goals and physical salience is also broadly intact. However, specific age-related changes emerge: the influence of past experiences increases under demanding conditions, and goal-directed attention becomes less efficient when priorities must be rapidly reconfigured, pointing to difficulty in resolving conflicts between past and present priorities.

Understanding how humans select, rehearse, and transform internal representations 'in mind' is vital. Gaining access to these latent working-memory processes, however, is not trivial. Here, I review the recent discovery that working-memory processes 'leak' into spatial biases in minuscule eye movements known as microsaccades. I first unpack this central finding and position it alongside complementary findings from the literature on attention, memory, and eye movements. Next, I adopt a pragmatic perspective, showcasing how microsaccade biases can be leveraged as a versatile signal to 'track' working-memory processes, with benefits that complement traditional brain-imaging approaches. Finally, I outline opportunities and future avenues opened by this recently exposed and remarkably reliable association between externally accessible micro eye movements and internal working-memory processes.