R. Shayna Rosenbaum

Co-creation has become an increasingly promiment approach to collaborative research in domains including health, education, sustainability, and design. Yet existing frameworks aredesigned for discipline-specific settings, offering limited guidance for research that spans heterogeneous epistemic traditions, institutional contexts, and value systems. This scopingreview examines peer-reviewed articles to map dominant co-creation practices, rationales, and evaluation strategies. It reveals that most existing approaches are applied in relatively stable epistemic contexts, where problems, values, methods, and success criteria are well established. Drawing on science and technology studies and adjacent critical traditions, we argue that the central challenge of transdisciplinary co-creation is not simply expanding participation but negotiating epistemic plurality. Building on this diagnosis, we propose five complementary conceptual lenses (boundary objects, co-production, situated knowledge, critical institutional reflexivity, and multi-scalar evaluation) that together provide a theoretical and practical framework for organizing co-creation in transdisciplinary research settings. This framework reconceptualizes co-creation as an ongoing practice of negotiating problems, authority, evidence, and evaluation across heterogeneous systems of knowledge.

Instrumental music performance is associated with enhanced perceptual processing as evidenced by auditory discrimination and speech‐in‐noise perception. However, little is known about the extent to which auditory perceptual processes support cognition in aging. We investigated whether music training enhances perceptual precision in 26 older amateur and professional musicians (62–85 years, 16 females) and 25 older nonmusicians (61–82 years, 13 females). Participants completed a novel auditory mnemonic discrimination paradigm while electroencephalography (EEG) was recorded. The mismatch negativity (MMN), an event‐related potential of change detection, was measured during a passive auditory oddball paradigm with standard and deviant pure‐tone sequences differing in pitch contour. Participants subsequently completed an incidental memory test for oddball stimuli (i.e., targets) among similar lure sequences (matched for frequency but differing in contour) and dissimilar foil sequences (differing in frequency and contour), as well as a back‐to‐back perceptual discrimination task. Musicians showed enhanced amplitudes, left‐lateralized MMN source activity, and increased memory discriminability for targets relative to lures and foils, effects that were not explained by perceptual discrimination ability or MMN amplitude. No group differences were found in neural or behavioral measures on a mnemonic discrimination task involving everyday visual objects. Our results clarify the role of music training on precision in perception and auditory memory in older musicians compared with nonmusicians. Our findings underscore the contribution of musical engagement to perception and memory to the development of cognitive reserve in aging.

There is an indisputable relationship between autobiographical memory (AM) and the self. Yet debate remains over whether episodic and semantic AM differentially supports one’s mental representation of the past and present self, known as the Me-self. We examined this question by assessing two facets of the Me-self – self-knowledge and semantic continuity – in episodic amnesia, a condition marked by impaired episodic AM alongside relatively preserved semantic AM. Three individuals with varying degrees of episodic amnesia secondary to medial lobe damage (DG, 54 years; BL, 58 years; DA, 68 years) were compared with age-matched controls on two measures of self-knowledge (Twenty Statements Test, Head Injury Semantic Differential Scale), and several semantic continuity measures derived from the Life Story Interview. Results showed that some, but not all, aspects of the Me-self were affected in episodic amnesia. The ability to generate self-descriptive statements scaled with the severity of episodic impairment, whereas trait self-knowledge was only affected in one individual with more severe amnesia. Performance on the life story measures indicated that semantic continuity was not uniformly affected, with preserved usage of cultural life script events within life stories. The narrative staging of life stories was reduced in the two individuals with more severe episodic amnesia, whereas reductions in narrative coherence did not scale with the severity of episodic memory impairment. Overall, these findings align with theories positing that episodic autobiographical memory makes important contributions to self-knowledge, and extend this role to other aspects of the Me-self such as the narrative processes underlying semantic continuity.

The mismatch negativity (MMN) is elicited by infrequent acoustic changes (such as pitch, frequency, and duration of tones) and by violations of higher‐order, abstract auditory patterns. In these latter cases, the MMN can be accompanied by a lesser‐known event‐related potential termed the late discriminative negativity (LDN). To date, examination of the LDN has been primarily centered on childhood development; whether the LDN is reliably elicited across the adult lifespan and how its functional significance differs from the MMN remain unclear. This study examined the MMN and LDN recorded from 92 adults (18–86 years, 47 females) elicited by changes in pitch contour within short (500 ms) five‐tone sequences. Subsequent incidental memory for the standard and deviant tone sequences was tested against similar lures and dissimilar foils. Data‐driven analyses showed that the LDN was reliably visible from young to older adulthood and remained stable through adulthood, in contrast to age‐related declines in MMN. Furthermore, MMN amplitude was robustly associated with age and subsequent memory performance, whereas LDN amplitude showed weak and inconsistent associations with age and hearing acuity. Results extend prior developmental work by revealing a reliable LDN throughout adulthood and are consistent with the LDN as a marker of prediction error for higher‐order, gestalt properties of auditory perception. Taken together, the MMN and LDN are both generated by discrepancies between incoming sensory input and predicted regularities but are temporally distinct and show differential associations with age and memory performance, suggesting a functional dissociation between early and late indices of oddball detection.

Traditionally considered a memory structure, the hippocampus may contribute to visual perception in fundamental ways. Recent evidence suggests that the abi

Population-wide mass testing with affordable self-tests can drastically reduce lives lost and minimize economic and societal costs during pandemics, especially if deployed before vaccines. During COVID-19, however, the development of self-test manufacturing and distribution capacity lagged behind vaccine rollout and was dismantled once surges subsided, returning us to a pre-pandemic state. As no new capacity has since been secured, future mass testing would again face costly delays. To mitigate this risk, we propose a policy roadmap for an economically viable mass-testing system that can be sustained between crises and rapidly scaled during emergencies. Public investment in R&D to improve the sensitivity of affordable self-tests—not to achieve a single benchmark, but to advance point-of-need (PoN) technologies across medical and non-medical applications—is essential. Improved sensitivity would enable new uses in routine health screening, food safety, and environmental monitoring, generating steady demand and production capacity that can expand as needed. This demand would support a robust system anchored by four mutually reinforcing pillars: scalable manufacturing, real-time data infrastructure, predictive analytics, and sustainable financing. Prioritizing sensitivity can transform mass testing from a reactive measure into a durable public health foundation.

Path integration (PI) allows organisms to navigate home by updating their location in reference to the route’s starting point. We previously demonstrated a PI-like process in eye movements using an eyetracking version of commonly used PI tasks. As the medial temporal lobe (MTL), and specifically, the entorhinal cortex (ERC), is implicated in updating self-position via whole-body PI, we investigated its role in updating gaze position. Two individuals with hippocampal lesions, DA and BL, were tested on our eyetracking PI-analog task in which participants followed routes with their eyes guided by visual onsets and, when subsequently cued, returned to the starting point or mid-route location. As DA’s MTL damage was extensive, encompassing the ERC and hippocampus, we expected DA’s performance to be impaired compared to that of his controls. However, DA’s accuracy was comparable to that of control participants, and he showed little to no gaze revisits to enroute locations when returning to the start location. BL’s performance was expected to be impaired due to hippocampal dysfunction affecting mnemonic and perceptual discrimination (involving the dentate gyrus), with additional signs of visuospatial compromise, possibly in relation to volume loss in the parietal cortex that may otherwise support PI. Indeed, BL’s accuracy was reduced relative to that of the control participants, and he demonstrated an increased reliance on overt, enroute, revisits. These findings suggest that processes underlying spatial updating of gaze position overlap with those supporting whole-body movement that may depend on contributions from the MTL and/or parietal cortex. In the case of DA, residual executive function abilities and/or visuospatial strategies supported by frontal or parietal cortices may support eye movement-based spatial updating and compensate for MTL damage.

Developing ways to predict and encourage vaccine booster uptake are necessary for durable immunity responses. In a multi-nation sample, recruited in June–August 2021, we assessed delay discounting (one’s tendency to choose smaller immediate rewards over larger future rewards), COVID-19 vaccination status, demographics, and distress level. Participants who reported being vaccinated were invited back one year later (n = 2547) to report their willingness to receive a booster dose, along with reasons for their decision. After controlling for demographic variables and distress level, a greater tendency to discount future rewards was associated with reduced willingness to receive a booster dose. Thematic coding revealed that the most common reason for booster willingness was protection against COVID-19, and for unwillingness was non-necessity. The results identify delay discounting as a behavioral predictor of booster willingness that may be used to inform tailored approaches to increase booster uptake (e.g., trust in science vs. vaccine mandates).