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  • psychology  (24)
  • evolution  (22)
  • behaviour, cognition  (19)
  • Royal Society  (65)
  • Springer
  • 2015-2019  (65)
  • 1
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    Face recognition in macaques (2015)
    Royal Society
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    Publication Date: 2015-05-30
    Description: Many species use facial features to identify conspecifics, which is necessary to navigate a complex social environment. The fundamental mechanisms underlying face processing are starting to be well understood in a variety of primate species. However, most studies focus on a limited subset of species tested with unfamiliar faces. As well as limiting our understanding of how widely distributed across species these skills are, this also limits our understanding of how primates process faces of individuals they know, and whether social factors (e.g. dominance and social bonds) influence how readily they recognize others. In this study, socially housed crested macaques voluntarily participated in a series of computerized matching-to-sample tasks investigating their ability to discriminate (i) unfamiliar individuals and (ii) members of their own social group. The macaques performed above chance on all tasks. Familiar faces were not easier to discriminate than unfamiliar faces. However, the subjects were better at discriminating higher ranking familiar individuals, but not unfamiliar ones. This suggests that our subjects applied their knowledge of their dominance hierarchies to the pictorial representation of their group mates. Faces of high-ranking individuals garner more social attention, and therefore might be more deeply encoded than other individuals. Our results extend the study of face recognition to a novel species, and consequently provide valuable data for future comparative studies.
    Keywords: behaviour, cognition
    Electronic ISSN: 2054-5703
    Topics: Natural Sciences in General
    Published by Royal Society
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  • 2
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    Colour vision in the zebra finch (2016)
    Royal Society
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    Publication Date: 2016-09-16
    Description: Today, there is good knowledge of the physiological basis of bird colour vision and how mathematical models can be used to predict visual thresholds. However, we still know only little about how colour vision changes between different viewing conditions. This limits the understanding of how colour signalling is configured in habitats where the light of the illumination and the background may shift dramatically. I examined how colour discrimination in zebra finch ( Taeniopygia guttata ) is affected by adaptation to different backgrounds. I trained finches in a two-alternative choice task, to choose between red discs displayed on backgrounds with different colours. I found that discrimination thresholds correlate with stimulus contrast to the background. Thresholds are low, and in agreement with model predictions, for a background with a red colour similar to the discs. For the most contrasting green background, thresholds are about five times higher than this. Subsequently, I trained the finches for the detection of single discs on a grey background. Detection thresholds are about 2.5 to 3 times higher than discrimination thresholds. This study demonstrates close similarities in human and bird colour vision, and the quantitative data offer a new possibility to account for shifting viewing conditions in colour vision models.
    Keywords: behaviour, cognition
    Electronic ISSN: 2054-5703
    Topics: Natural Sciences in General
    Published by Royal Society
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  • 3
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    Zebra stripes (2015)
    Royal Society
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    Publication Date: 2015-10-01
    Keywords: evolution
    Electronic ISSN: 2054-5703
    Topics: Natural Sciences in General
    Published by Royal Society
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  • 4
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    Myrmica ant nests are pathogen poor (2015)
    Royal Society
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    Publication Date: 2015-10-31
    Description: Social insects such as ants have evolved collective rather than individual immune defence strategies against diseases and parasites at the level of their societies (colonies), known as social immunity. Ants frequently host other arthropods, so-called myrmecophiles, in their nests. Here, we tested the hypothesis that myrmecophily may partly arise from selection for exploiting the ants’ social immunity. We used larvae of the wax moth Galleria mellonella as ‘model myrmecophiles’ (baits) to test this hypothesis. We found significantly reduced abundance of entomopathogens in ant nests compared with the surrounding environment. Specific entomopathogen groups ( Isaria fumosorosea and nematodes) were also found to be significantly less abundant inside than outside ant nests, whereas one entomopathogen ( Beauveria brongniartii ) was significantly more abundant inside nests. We therefore hypothesize that immunological benefits of entering ant nests may provide us a new explanation of why natural selection acts in favour of such a life-history strategy.
    Keywords: evolution
    Electronic ISSN: 2054-5703
    Topics: Natural Sciences in General
    Published by Royal Society
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  • 5
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    Are generalists more innovative than specialists? A comparison of innovative abilities in two wild sympatric mouse lemur species (2018)
    Royal Society
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    Publication Date: 2018-08-16
    Description: The propensity to flexibly innovate behavioural variants might advantage animals when dealing with novel or modified ecological or social challenges. Interspecific innovative abilities can be predicted by the degree of ecological generalism and intraspecific variation is predicted by personality traits. To examine the effects of these factors on innovation, we compared problem-solving abilities in the generalist grey mouse lemurs ( Microcebus murinus ) and the more specialized Madame Berthe's mouse lemurs ( Microcebus berthae ) in western Madagascar. We examined personality traits by testing 54 individuals in open field and novel object tests, and we assessed problem-solving abilities by presenting an artificial feeding-box that could be opened by three different techniques. The first two techniques presented novel problems and the third technique a modified problem to the more complex second novel problem. In both species, motivation, early success and better inhibitory control characterized innovators and predicted superior problem-solving performance. Although both species performed equally well in finding a solution to the novel problems, the specialist species was more efficient in finding a novel solution to a familiar problem. Since the ecological specialist also exhibited more inhibitory control in this task than the generalist, we propose that specialists may dispose of more efficient problem-solving behaviour.
    Keywords: behaviour, cognition
    Electronic ISSN: 2054-5703
    Topics: Natural Sciences in General
    Published by Royal Society
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  • 6
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    Parasites and politics: why cross-cultural studies must control for relatedness, proximity and covariation (2018)
    Royal Society
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    Publication Date: 2018-08-30
    Description: A growing number of studies seek to identify predictors of broad-scale patterns in human cultural diversity, but three sources of non-independence in human cultural variables can bias the results of cross-cultural studies. First, related cultures tend to have many traits in common, regardless of whether those traits are functionally linked. Second, societies in geographical proximity will share many aspects of culture, environment and demography. Third, many cultural traits covary, leading to spurious relationships between traits. Here, we demonstrate tractable methods for dealing with all three sources of bias. We use cross-cultural analyses of proposed associations between human cultural traits and parasite load to illustrate the potential problems of failing to correct for these three forms of statistical non-independence. Associations between parasite stress and sociosexuality, authoritarianism, democracy and language diversity are weak or absent once relatedness and proximity are taken into account, and parasite load has no more power to explain variation in traditionalism, religiosity and collectivism than other measures of biodiversity, climate or population size do. Without correction for statistical non-independence and covariation in cross-cultural analyses, we risk misinterpreting associations between culture and environment.
    Keywords: evolution
    Electronic ISSN: 2054-5703
    Topics: Natural Sciences in General
    Published by Royal Society
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  • 7
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    The influence of evaluative right/wrong feedback on phonological and semantic processes in word learning (2018)
    Royal Society
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    Publication Date: 2018-09-06
    Description: Feedback is typically incorporated in word learning paradigms, in both research studies and commercial language learning apps. While the common-sense view is that feedback is helpful during learning, relatively little empirical evidence exists about the role of feedback in spoken vocabulary learning. Some work has suggested that long-term word learning is not enhanced by the presence of feedback, and that words are best learned implicitly. It is also plausible that feedback might have differential effects when learners focus on learning semantic facts, or when they focus on learning a new phonological sequence of sounds. In this study, we assess how providing evaluative (right/wrong) feedback on a spoken response influences two different components of vocabulary learning, the learning of a new phonological form, and the learning of a semantic property of the phonological form. We find that receiving evaluative feedback improves retention of phonological forms, but not of semantic facts.
    Keywords: psychology
    Electronic ISSN: 2054-5703
    Topics: Natural Sciences in General
    Published by Royal Society
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  • 8
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    Causal Meaning Hamilton's Rule (2016)
    Royal Society
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    Publication Date: 2016-03-18
    Description: Hamilton’s original derivation of his rule for the spread of an altruistic gene ( rb 〉 c ) assumed additivity of costs and benefits. Recently, it has been argued that an exact version of the rule holds under non-additive pay-offs, so long as the cost and benefit terms are suitably defined, as partial regression coefficients. However, critics have questioned both the biological significance and the causal meaning of the resulting rule. This paper examines the causal meaning of the generalized Hamilton’s rule in a simple model, by computing the effect of a hypothetical experiment to assess the cost of a social action and comparing it to the partial regression definition. The two do not agree. A possible way of salvaging the causal meaning of Hamilton’s rule is explored, by appeal to R. A. Fisher’s ‘average effect of a gene substitution’.
    Keywords: evolution
    Electronic ISSN: 2054-5703
    Topics: Natural Sciences in General
    Published by Royal Society
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  • 9
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    Grandparents and child height (2016)
    Royal Society
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    Publication Date: 2016-04-28
    Description: Previous research has found that the presence of grandparents, particularly grandmothers, is often positively associated with child survival. Little research has explored the potential mechanisms driving these associations. We use data from rural Guatemala to test whether contact with and direct investment (advice and financial) from grandparents is associated with child health, proxied by height. Our results demonstrate the complexity of family relationships and their influence on child health, suggesting that both cooperative and competitive relationships exist within the family. The clearest evidence we find for grandparental influence is that having a living paternal grandmother tends to be negatively associated with child height. By contrast, contact with maternal kin appears broadly to be beneficial for child height, although these relationships are weaker. These patterns are mirrored in maternal body mass index, suggesting grandparental influence acts partly through maternal health. These findings support the hypotheses that, under conditions of limited resources, family relationships may be competitive within the family lineage which shares the same resource base, but cooperative when there are few costs to cooperation. Finally, financial assistance from maternal grandfathers is positively correlated with infant length but negatively with the height of older children, perhaps because the receipt of financial support is an indication of need. The provision of advice shows no associations with child height.
    Keywords: evolution
    Electronic ISSN: 2054-5703
    Topics: Natural Sciences in General
    Published by Royal Society
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  • 10
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    The SNARC effect is associated with worse mathematical intelligence and poorer time estimation (2018)
    Royal Society
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    Publication Date: 2018-08-09
    Description: Interactions between the ways we process space, numbers and time may arise from shared and innate generic magnitude representations. Alternatively or concurrently, such interactions could be due to the use of physical magnitudes, like spatial extent, as metaphors for more abstract ones, like number and duration. That numbers might be spatially represented along a mental number line is suggested by the SNARC effect: faster left-side responses to small single digits, like 1 or 2, and faster right-side responses to large ones, like 8 or 9. Previously, we found that time estimation predicts mathematical intelligence and speculated that it may predict spatial ability too. Here, addressing this issue, we test—on a relatively large sample of adults and entirely within subjects—the relationships between (a) time: proficiency at producing and evaluating durations shorter than one second, (b) space: the ability to mentally rotate objects, (c) numbers: mathematical reasoning skills, and (d) space–number associations: the SNARC effect. Better time estimation was linked to greater mathematical intelligence and better spatial skills. Strikingly, however, stronger associations between space and numbers predicted worse mathematical intelligence and poorer time estimation.
    Keywords: psychology
    Electronic ISSN: 2054-5703
    Topics: Natural Sciences in General
    Published by Royal Society
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