SignificanceBiologists and social scientists have long tried to understand why some societies have more fluid and open interpersonal relationships—differences in relational mobility—and how those differences influence individual behaviors. We measure relational mobility in 39 societies and find that relationships are more stable and hard to form in east Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East, while they are more fluid in the West and Latin America. Results show that relationally mobile cultures tend to have higher interpersonal trust and intimacy. Exploring potential causes, we find greater environmental threats (like disease and warfare) and sedentary farming are associated with lower relational mobility. Our society-level index of relational mobility for 39 societies is a resource for future studies.

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Norm enforcement may be important for resolving conflicts and promoting cooperation. However, little is known about how preferred responses to norm violations vary across cultures and across domains. In a preregistered study of 57 countries (using convenience samples of 22,863 students and non-students), we measured perceptions of the appropriateness of various responses to a violation of a cooperative norm and to atypical social behaviors. Our findings highlight both cultural universals and cultural variation. We find a universal negative relation between appropriateness ratings of norm violations and appropriateness ratings of responses in the form of confrontation, social ostracism and gossip. Moreover, we find the country variation in the appropriateness of sanctions to be consistent across different norm violations but not across different sanctions. Specifically, in those countries where use of physical confrontation and social ostracism is rated as less appropriate, gossip is rated as more appropriate.

As with other cognitive phenomena that are based upon the capacity limitations of visual processing, it is thought that attentional blink (AB) cannot be eliminated, even after extensive training. We report in this paper that just 1 h of specific attentional training can completely eliminate AB, and that this effect is robust enough to persist for a few months after training. Results of subsequent behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments indicate that this learning effect is associated with improvements in temporal resolution, which are mainly due to processing in the prefrontal areas. Contrary to prior wisdom, we conclude that capacity limitations can be overcome by short-term training.learning in temporal attention | color-salient training | plasticity V isual information processing progresses hierarchically. In its early stages, the bulk of "raw" signals are processed in parallel. However, as signals are processed in higher stages, they become more abstract and cognitively meaningful, whereas the capacity of information processing becomes more limited in many respects, including visual short-term memory (1) and temporal attention (2). One of the best known phenomena that reflects the limited capacity of visual processing is attentional blink (AB), in which the identification of a second visual target (T2) is impaired in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) when that target is presented within 500 ms of the appearance of the first target (T1) (3-5). It is thought that AB occurs because the processing of T1 requires the full capacity of this portion of the visual system and does not allow for the processing of T2.If capacity limits could be increased, processing efficiency may be greatly improved in some cognitive tasks. There have been a number of attempts to eliminate AB through repetitive practice (2, 6, 7). However, so far none of these attempts have been successful in eliminating AB. These failures have led to the belief that it is impossible to eliminate the capacity limit associated with AB. In the current study, however, we developed a simple, short-term training method with which the AB capacity limitation can be entirely overcome. We also found that this learning effect lasts for a few months after training. Further results from behavioral and fMRI studies suggest that this elimination of AB is associated with an improvement in temporal resolution correlated with processing in the prefrontal areas. Overall, these results suggest that capacity limitations can be overcome by simple, short-term training. ResultsTo eliminate AB, we drew attention to T2 during training with a salient color. That is, T2 had a different color from all of the other items of the RSVP task. T2 thus captured the subjects' attention, such that it was easily identified and no longer subject to AB. We addressed the question as to whether repeating this task would bring about an improvement in the capacity of temporal attention.Experiment 1: Color-Salient Training Effect. Experiment 1 explores whethe...