Innate Bias Research Articles

The influence of past experience with flower reward quality on social learning in bumblebees

Foraging decisions can be influenced by innate biases, previous individual experience and social information acquired from conspecifics. We examined how these factors interact to affect flower colour preference in the large earth bumblebee, Bombus terrestris dalmatinus. Individual bees with no experience foraging on coloured flowers were first tested for innate colour biases on an unrewarded array of blue and yellow artificial flowers. Depending on treatment, bees then acquired individual experience foraging on a colour (either blue or yellow) associated with high-quality sucrose rewards, or a colour with low-quality sucrose rewards, or they did not acquire any individual experience. Bees were then exposed to the alternative colour associated with conspecific demonstrator bees (social information) or the alternative colour with no social information. Bees that had no individual experience visited flower colours that were associated with conspecific demonstrators (social information) but only significantly if the socially demonstrated colour was one for which bees had an innate bias. When bees had individual experience foraging on a colour with high-quality rewards they continued foraging on that colour, and generally did not visit the socially demonstrated alternative colour, regardless of innate colour bias. Alternatively, when bees had individual experience foraging on colours with low-quality rewards, they made more visits to the socially demonstrated alternative flower colour, but only when the alternative colour was the colour for which they had an innate bias. Bees that had no access to social information continued to forage on low-reward coloured flowers. Thus we show that reward quality of resources with which bees have individual experience affects the use of social information but with an important role of innate biases.

Innate and Conditioned Responses to Chemosensory and Visual Cues in Asian Citrus Psyllid, Diaphorina citri (Hemiptera: Liviidae), Vector of Huanglongbing Pathogens.

Asian citrus psyllid (Diaphorina citri) transmits Huanglongbing, a devastating disease that threatens citrus trees worldwide. A better understanding of the psyllid’s host-plant selection process may lead to the development of more efficient means of monitoring it and predicting its movements. Since behavioral adaptations, such as associative learning, may facilitate recognition of suitable host-plants, we examined whether adult D. citri could be conditioned to visual and chemosensory stimuli from host and non-host-plant sources. Response was measured as the frequency of salivary sheaths, the residue of psyllid probing activity, in a line of emulsified wax on the surface of a test arena. The psyllids displayed both appetitive and aversive conditioning to two different chemosensory stimuli. They could also be conditioned to recognize a blue-colored probing substrate and their response to neutral visual cues was enhanced by chemosensory stimuli. Conditioned psyllids were sensitive to the proportion of chemosensory components present in binary mixtures. Naïve psyllids displayed strong to moderate innate biases to several of the test compounds. While innate responses are probably the psyllid’s primary behavioral mechanism for selecting host-plants, conditioning may enhance its ability to select host-plants during seasonal transitions and dispersal.

Resistance to truthful revelation in bargaining: Persistent bid shading and the play of dominated strategies

We report results from a simultaneous bilateral bargaining experiment with attention to the effects of a settlement bonus on strategic decision-making behavior. In instances with a sufficiently large settlement bonus, truthful revelation emerges as the dominant strategy. However previous work (Parco & Rapoport, 2004) has experimentally tested this “Bonus Effect” and found that although the presence of a settlement bonus improves efficiency, behavior falls drastically short of the normative predictions. This finding illustrates the persistent tendency of decision makers to bid strategically, i.e. shading their bids, even when truthful revelation is a strictly dominant strategy. Herein we investigate the influence of the framing of information and look for ways to nudge decision makers toward making better choices in these strategic environments. Additional results from an adaptive reinforcement-based learning model are discussed as they relate to a potential innate bias for strategic misrepresentation even when contrary to self-interest and collective-interest.

Does Prosodic Bootstrapping Play Any Role in the Acquisition of Auxiliary Fronting in English?

. In his broad criticism of the biolinguistic approach to the theory of grammar, Everett (2005, 2006) discusses, among other things, the classical instance of the Poverty of the Stimulus Argument drawn from auxiliary fronting in English, originally made by Chomsky. Everett claims that: (i) the rule responsible for the attested pattern would not be structure-dependent, as it could be defined without making reference to hierarchical notions like “matrix clause” or “subordinate clause”; (ii) such rule requires no domain-specific innate bias in order to be learned, given that the stimulus in the primary linguistic data would be “rich” enough for the child to figure out the relevant grammatical mechanism at work; and (iii) such “richness” would lie in prosodic information present in the data, which, according to him, has been largely neglected by generativists. The aim of this article is to show that all three parts of Everett’s alternative analysis are conceptually problematic and empirically unsupported. As a matter of logic, the very idea that children rely on prosodic cues to learn the lexicon and the syntax presupposes UG. Moreover, I offer new experimental evidence that a significant portion of the facts is incompatible with Everett’s account. Therefore, his attempt to refute linguistic nativism misses the target.

Social Interactions through the Eyes of Macaques and Humans

Group-living primates frequently interact with each other to maintain social bonds as well as to compete for valuable resources. Observing such social interactions between group members provides individuals with essential information (e.g. on the fighting ability or altruistic attitude of group companions) to guide their social tactics and choice of social partners. This process requires individuals to selectively attend to the most informative content within a social scene. It is unclear how non-human primates allocate attention to social interactions in different contexts, and whether they share similar patterns of social attention to humans. Here we compared the gaze behaviour of rhesus macaques and humans when free-viewing the same set of naturalistic images. The images contained positive or negative social interactions between two conspecifics of different phylogenetic distance from the observer; i.e. affiliation or aggression exchanged by two humans, rhesus macaques, Barbary macaques, baboons or lions. Monkeys directed a variable amount of gaze at the two conspecific individuals in the images according to their roles in the interaction (i.e. giver or receiver of affiliation/aggression). Their gaze distribution to non-conspecific individuals was systematically varied according to the viewed species and the nature of interactions, suggesting a contribution of both prior experience and innate bias in guiding social attention. Furthermore, the monkeys’ gaze behavior was qualitatively similar to that of humans, especially when viewing negative interactions. Detailed analysis revealed that both species directed more gaze at the face than the body region when inspecting individuals, and attended more to the body region in negative than in positive social interactions. Our study suggests that monkeys and humans share a similar pattern of role-sensitive, species- and context-dependent social attention, implying a homologous cognitive mechanism of social attention between rhesus macaques and humans.

Neural basis of a pollinator's buffet: olfactory specialization and learning in Manduca sexta.

Pollinators exhibit a range of innate and learned behaviors that mediate interactions with flowers, but the olfactory bases of these responses in a naturalistic context remain poorly understood. The hawkmoth Manduca sexta is an important pollinator for many night-blooming flowers but can learn--through olfactory conditioning--to visit other nectar resources. Analysis of the flowers that are innately attractive to moths shows that the scents all have converged on a similar chemical profile that, in turn, is uniquely represented in the moth's antennal (olfactory) lobe. Flexibility in visitation to nonattractive flowers, however, is mediated by octopamine-associated modulation of antennal-lobe neurons during learning. Furthermore, this flexibility does not extinguish the innate preferences. Such processing of stimuli through two olfactory channels, one involving an innate bias and the other a learned association, allows the moths to exist within a dynamic floral environment while maintaining specialized associations.

Resistance to Truthful Revelation in Bargaining: Persistent Bid Shading and the Play of Dominated Strategies

We report results from a simultaneous bilateral bargaining experiment with attention to the effects of a settlement bonus on strategic decision-making behavior. In instances with a sufficiently large settlement bonus, truthful revelation emerges as the dominant strategy. However previous work (Parco and Rapoport, 2004) has experimentally tested this ― Bonus Effect and found that although the presence of a settlement bonus improves efficiency, behavior falls drastically short of the normative predictions. This finding illustrates the persistent tendency of decision makers to bid strategically, i.e. shading their bids, even when truthful revelation is a strictly dominant strategy. Herein we investigate the influence of the framing of information and look for ways to nudge decision makers toward making better choices in these strategic environments. Additional results from an adaptive reinforcement-based learning model are discussed as they relate to a potential innate bias for strategic misrepresentation even when contrary to self-interest and collective interest.

Action as an innate bias for visual learning

Babies are faced at birth with a buzzing blooming confusion of visual stimuli (1). The set of all possible images is truly enormous (2), and simple calculations suggest that only a small fraction of all possible images have ever been seen over the entire history and prehistory of mankind. Moreover, the world consists of an estimated number of 30,000 objects (3), which occur in more than 1,000 different types of scenes. How can an infant start making sense of the visual world?

Critical period for acoustic preference in mice

Preference behaviors are often established during early life, but the underlying neural circuit mechanisms remain unknown. Adapting a unique nesting behavior assay, we confirmed a "critical period" for developing music preference in C57BL/6 mice. Early music exposure between postnatal days 15 and 24 reversed their innate bias for silent shelter, which typically could not be altered in adulthood. Instead, exposing adult mice treated acutely with valproic acid or carrying a targeted deletion of the Nogo receptor (NgR(-/-)) unmasked a strong plasticity of preference consistent with a reopening of the critical period as seen in other systems. Imaging of cFos expression revealed a prominent neuronal activation in response to the exposed music in the prelimbic and infralimbic medial prefrontal cortex only under conditions of open plasticity. Neither behavioral changes nor selective medial prefrontal cortex activation was observed in response to pure tone exposure, indicating a music-specific effect. Open-field center crossings were increased concomitant with shifts in music preference, suggesting a potential anxiolytic effect. Thus, music may offer both a unique window into the emotional state of mice and a potentially efficient assay for molecular "brakes" on critical period plasticity common to sensory and higher order brain areas.

From simple innate biases to complex visual concepts.

Early in development, infants learn to solve visual problems that are highly challenging for current computational methods. We present a model that deals with two fundamental problems in which the gap between computational difficulty and infant learning is particularly striking: learning to recognize hands and learning to recognize gaze direction. The model is shown a stream of natural videos and learns without any supervision to detect human hands by appearance and by context, as well as direction of gaze, in complex natural scenes. The algorithm is guided by an empirically motivated innate mechanism--the detection of "mover" events in dynamic images, which are the events of a moving image region causing a stationary region to move or change after contact. Mover events provide an internal teaching signal, which is shown to be more effective than alternative cues and sufficient for the efficient acquisition of hand and gaze representations. The implications go beyond the specific tasks, by showing how domain-specific "proto concepts" can guide the system to acquire meaningful concepts, which are significant to the observer but statistically inconspicuous in the sensory input.

Does the US Media Have a Liberal Bias?

In Left Turn: How Liberal Bias Distorts The American Mind, Tim Groseclose argues that media effects play a crucial role in American politics. His case rests on three arguments: (1) that journalists tend overwhelmingly to be liberal rather than conservative; (2) that their innate political bias slants their views in empirically measurable ways; and (3) that this bias fundamentally shapes American politics, by bringing US citizens further to the left than they would naturally be. According to Groseclose, in a world where media bias did not exist, American citizens would on average hold views close to those of Ben Stein or Bill O'Reilly. In such a world, John McCain would have defeated Barack Obama by a popular vote margin of 56%—42% in the 2008 presidential election.In making these claims, Groseclose draws on his own research, and on recent media scholarship by both political scientists and economists, making the broader claim that peer-reviewed social science—which seeks to deal with problems such as endogeneity and selection bias—should be the starting point for public arguments about the role of the media. His book, then, is clearly an effort to bring social scientific arguments into mainstream debates. Groseclose makes no secret of his conservative political leanings—but recent books from left-leaning political scientists such as Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson are equally unapologetic. It is at least plausible that political scientists' typical unwillingness to engage directly in political arguments has weakened the discipline's capacity for public engagement.In this symposium a diverse group of contributors have been invited to engage with Groseclose's arguments in ways that bring together specific empirical and/or theoretical points and arguments aimed at the broader “political science public sphere” that Perspectives on Politics seeks to nurture. Contributors were asked to consider these five questions: (1): How do we best measure media effects? (2): If media bias exists, what are its plausible sources? (3): Can one use work on media effects to determine what people's views would be in the absence of such bias? (4): Do you agree that American politics is insufficiently representative, and if so what do you consider the primary sources of this problem? (5): What kinds of political and/or media institutions or practices might enhance democratic discourse?—Henry Farrell, Associate Editor

Does the US Media Have a Liberal Bias?

In Left Turn: How Liberal Bias Distorts The American Mind, Tim Groseclose argues that media effects play a crucial role in American politics. His case rests on three arguments: (1) that journalists tend overwhelmingly to be liberal rather than conservative; (2) that their innate political bias slants their views in empirically measurable ways; and (3) that this bias fundamentally shapes American politics, by bringing US citizens further to the left than they would naturally be. According to Groseclose, in a world where media bias did not exist, American citizens would on average hold views close to those of Ben Stein or Bill O'Reilly. In such a world, John McCain would have defeated Barack Obama by a popular vote margin of 56%—42% in the 2008 presidential election.In making these claims, Groseclose draws on his own research, and on recent media scholarship by both political scientists and economists, making the broader claim that peer-reviewed social science—which seeks to deal with problems such as endogeneity and selection bias—should be the starting point for public arguments about the role of the media. His book, then, is clearly an effort to bring social scientific arguments into mainstream debates. Groseclose makes no secret of his conservative political leanings—but recent books from left-leaning political scientists such as Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson are equally unapologetic. It is at least plausible that political scientists' typical unwillingness to engage directly in political arguments has weakened the discipline's capacity for public engagement.In this symposium a diverse group of contributors have been invited to engage with Groseclose's arguments in ways that bring together specific empirical and/or theoretical points and arguments aimed at the broader “political science public sphere” that Perspectives on Politics seeks to nurture. Contributors were asked to consider these five questions: (1): How do we best measure media effects? (2): If media bias exists, what are its plausible sources? (3): Can one use work on media effects to determine what people's views would be in the absence of such bias? (4): Do you agree that American politics is insufficiently representative, and if so what do you consider the primary sources of this problem? (5): What kinds of political and/or media institutions or practices might enhance democratic discourse?—Henry Farrell, Associate Editor

Does the US Media Have a Liberal Bias?

InLeft Turn: How Liberal Bias Distorts The American Mind,Tim Groseclose argues that media effects play a crucial role in American politics. His case rests on three arguments: (1) that journalists tend overwhelmingly to be liberal rather than conservative; (2) that their innate political bias slants their views in empirically measurable ways; and (3) that this bias fundamentally shapes American politics, by bringing US citizens further to the left than they would naturally be. According to Groseclose, in a world where media bias did not exist, American citizens would on average hold views close to those of Ben Stein or Bill O'Reilly. In such a world, John McCain would have defeated Barack Obama by a popular vote margin of 56%—42% in the 2008 presidential election.In making these claims, Groseclose draws on his own research, and on recent media scholarship by both political scientists and economists, making the broader claim that peer-reviewed social science—which seeks to deal with problems such as endogeneity and selection bias—should be the starting point for public arguments about the role of the media. His book, then, is clearly an effort to bring social scientific arguments into mainstream debates. Groseclose makes no secret of his conservative political leanings—but recent books from left-leaning political scientists such as Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson are equally unapologetic. It is at least plausible that political scientists' typical unwillingness to engage directly in political arguments has weakened the discipline's capacity for public engagement.In this symposium a diverse group of contributors have been invited to engage with Groseclose's arguments in ways that bring together specific empirical and/or theoretical points and arguments aimed at the broader “political science public sphere” thatPerspectives on Politicsseeks to nurture. Contributors were asked to consider these five questions: (1): How do we best measure media effects? (2): If media bias exists, what are its plausible sources? (3): Can one use work on media effects to determine what people's views would be in the absence of such bias? (4): Do you agree that American politics is insufficiently representative, and if so what do you consider the primary sources of this problem? (5): What kinds of political and/or media institutions or practices might enhance democratic discourse?—Henry Farrell, Associate Editor

Innate Measurement Bias in EVA and How to Fix It: The Story of TRI and ORI

Economic value added (EVA) is the performance metric bound to be biased by design. The measurement bias comes from contrasting NOPAT, which is a purely operating profit, with the capital charge on the money investors have put into the firm, which is calculated by applying the after tax WACC made-up to incorporate the financing side effects. Such a synthetic construct can be uninformative or even misleading, and therefore is doubtfully eligible to be the period measure of either operating or total performance.To eliminate distortions in measuring performance we have to (A) recognize the two sources of income attributable to the providers of funds, primary is the NOPAT generated by the firm’s core assets, and another is the financial side effects, generally the interest tax shield subsidy from the government; and (B) use the cost of unlevered equity (i.e. the risk of assets) as a hurdle rate to calculate the charge on the book invested capital. Splitting the aggregate financial result into the operating and side effect financing components enables an undistorted concurrent assessment of the operating and the overall performance by means of the Operating EVA (OEVA) and the Total EVA (TEVA) metrics respectively. TEVA is a better choice than the EVA for the purpose of measuring corporate performance, and OEVA is the index giving an informative snapshot of the ongoing operations. The TEVA and OEVA analysis is consistent with the free cash flow valuation and provides additional managerially relevant information for the performance evaluation.

The General Age of Leadership: Older-Looking Presidential Candidates Win Elections during War

As nation-state leaders age they increasingly engage in inter-state militarized disputes yet in industrialized societies a steady decrease in testosterone associated with aging is observed – which suggests a decrease in dominance behavior. The current paper points out that from modern societies to Old World monkeys increasing both in age and social status encourages dominant strategies to maintain acquired rank. Moreover, it is argued this consistency has shaped an implicit prototype causing followers to associate older age with dominance leadership. It is shown that (i) faces of older leaders are preferred during intergroup conflict and (ii) morphing U.S. Presidential candidates to appear older or younger has an overriding effect on actual election outcomes. This indicates that democratic voting can be systematically adjusted by activating innate biases. These findings appear to create a new line of research regarding the biology of leadership and contextual cues of age.

The effect of handedness on the shape of the central sulcus

Sinistrals differ from dextrals in the size of certain cortical folds. For instance, handedness has an impact on central sulcus surface area: the sulcus is larger in the dominant left hemisphere of dextrals and vice versa for sinistrals. However, the impact of handedness on the shape of the central sulcus is largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose first an original strategy based on manifold learning to quantify the shape of the central sulcus. Using this approach we show that the "hand knob", a major landmark of the hand motor representation, is sited more dorsally in the left hemisphere in dextrals than in sinistrals. Sinistrals forced to write with their non-preferred right hand display a pattern of central sulcus size asymmetry which is typical of dextrals, yet forced dextrality does not shift the handedness-specific location of the "hand knob". Hence, cortical morphology in adults holds an accumulated record of both innate biases and early developmental experience. Characterizing normal variation of cortical morphology provides a means of systematically correlating behavior with cortical development.

Synthetic Biology: Modulating the MAP Kinase Module

In a recent study, the MAP kinase module involved in many human cancers has been reconstructed in yeast, in order to tinker with its behavior.

Trust Working in Interpersonal Relationships:A Comparative Cultural Perspective with a Focus on East Asian Culture

AbstractSociological analysis of interpersonal trust has focused primarily on general trust, neglecting the role of particular trust. Some analysis of social capital in Asian countries, however, reveals that activities in voluntary associations are grounded on particular trust, posing an important question to Putnam’s thesis linking general trust to democracy and economic development. In order to understand the working of particular trust, we took a comparative cultural perspective to trust. Based on the cultural psychology of Korean trust, trust is characterized as a corollary to the intimacy of relationship. Different degrees of interpersonal trust work through the mediating process of caring mind (maum in Korean vernacular) which is afforded when we see social acts directed upon us. Granting an innate bias of granting trust toward close others, we postulate that human beings engage in activities of trust working. Four types of tactics typically employed in forming trust were provided. Subsequently, a comparative cultural analysis of trust was presented by analyzing indigenous concepts (trust, guanxi, amae, & woori) characteristically representing cultural aspects of trust in different cultures with emphasis on East Asian countries. This comparative analysis characterizes that trust in East Asia is laden heavily with relational affective properties, while trust in theWest relies on cognitive properties. Despite these differences, common features allow meaningful understanding of how trust is constructed and maneuvered in each culture.

Multi-Modal Anchoring in Infants and Artificial Systems

Multi-Modal Anchoring in Infants and Artificial Systems

Multi-Modal Anchoring in Infants and Artificial Systems

Multi-Modal Anchoring in Infants and Artificial Systems