On the realness of people who do not exist: The social processing of artificial faces.

Today more than ever, we are asked to evaluate the realness, truthfulness and trustworthiness of our social world. Here, we focus on how people evaluate realistic-looking faces of non-existing people generated by generative adversarial networks (GANs). GANs are increasingly used in marketing, journalism, social media, and political propaganda. In three studies, we investigated if and how participants can distinguish between GAN and REAL faces and the social consequences of their exposure to artificial faces. GAN faces were more likely to be perceived as real than REAL faces, a pattern partly explained by intrinsic stimulus characteristics. Moreover, participants' realness judgments influenced their behavior because they displayed increased social conformity toward faces perceived as real, independently of their actual realness. Lastly, knowledge about the presence of GAN faces eroded social trust. Our findings point to potentially far-reaching consequences for the pervasive use of GAN faces in a culture powered by images at unprecedented levels.

Visceral politics: a theoretical and empirical proof of concept.

While the study of affect and emotion has a long history in psychological sciences and neuroscience, the very question of how visceral states have come to the forefront of politics remains poorly understood. The concept of visceral politics captures how the physiological nature of our engagement with the social world influences how we make decisions, just as socio-political forces recruit our physiology to influence our socio-political behaviour. This line of research attempts to bridge the psychophysiological mechanisms that are responsible for our affective states with the historical socio-cultural context in which such states are experienced. We review findings and hypotheses at the intersections of life sciences, social sciences and humanities to shed light on how and why people come to experience such emotions in politics and what if any are their behavioural consequences. To answer these questions, we provide insights from predictive coding accounts of interoception and emotion and a proof of concept experiment to highlight the role of visceral states in political behaviour. This article is part of the theme issue 'The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms'.

Episodic memory retrieval success is associated with rapid replay of episode content.

Retrieval of everyday experiences is fundamental for informing our future decisions. The fine-grained neurophysiological mechanisms that support such memory retrieval are largely unknown. We studied participants who first experienced, without repetition, unique multicomponent 40-80-s episodes. One day later, they engaged in cued retrieval of these episodes while undergoing magnetoencephalography. By decoding individual episode elements, we found that trial-by-trial successful retrieval was supported by the sequential replay of episode elements, with a temporal compression factor of >60. The direction of replay supporting retrieval, either backward or forward, depended on whether the task goal was to retrieve elements of an episode that followed or preceded, respectively, a retrieval cue. This sequential replay was weaker in very-high-performing participants, in whom instead we found evidence for simultaneous clustered reactivation. Our results demonstrate that memory-mediated decisions are supported by a rapid replay mechanism that can flexibly shift in direction in response to task goals.