Ecological factors shape quantitative decision-making in coyotes.

Much research has focused on the development and evolution of cognition in the realm of numerical knowledge in human and nonhuman animals but often fails to take into account ecological realities that, over time, may influence and constrain cognitive abilities in real-life decision-making. Cognitive abilities such as enumerating and timing are central to many psychological and ecological models of behavior, yet our knowledge of how these are affected by environmental fluctuations remains incomplete. Our research bridges the gap between basic cognitive research and ecological decision-making. We used coyotes (Canis latrans) as a model animal system to study decision-making about smaller, more proximal food rewards and larger, more distant food rewards; we tested animals across their four reproductive cycle phases to examine effects of ecological factors such as breeding status and environmental risk on quantitative performance. Results show that coyotes, similar to other species, spatially discount food rewards while foraging. The degree to which coyotes were sensitive to the risk of obtaining the larger food reward, however, depended on the season in which they completed the foraging task, the presence of unfamiliar humans (i.e., risk), and the presence of conspecifics. Importantly, our results support that seasonal variations drive many differences in nonhuman animal behavior and cognition (e.g., hibernation, breeding, food resource availability). Further, it may be useful in the future to extend this work to humans because seasons may influence human cognition as well, and this remains unexplored in the realms of enumeration, timing, and spatial thinking.

The Value of Clean Air: Comparing Discounting of Delayed Air Quality and Money Across Magnitudes.

The detrimental health effects of exposure to air pollution are well established. Fostering behavioral change concerning air quality may be challenging because the detrimental health effects of exposure to air pollution are delayed. Delay discounting, a measure of impulsive choice, encapsulates this process of choosing between the immediate conveniences of behaviors that increase pollution and the delayed consequences of prolonged exposure to poor air quality. In Experiment 1, participants completed a series of delay-discounting tasks for air quality and money. We found that participants discounted delayed air quality more than money. In Experiment 2, we investigated whether the common finding that large amounts of money are discounted less steeply than small amounts of money generalized to larger and smaller improvements in air quality. Participants discounted larger improvements in air quality less steeply than smaller improvements, indicating that the discounting of air quality shares a similar process as the discounting of money. Our results indicate that the discounting of delayed money is strongly related to the discounting of delayed air quality and that similar mechanisms may be involved in the discounting of these qualitatively different outcomes. These data are also the first to demonstrate the malleability of delay discounting of air quality, and provide important public health implications for decreasing delay discounting of air quality.

Multiple visual quantitative cues enhance discrimination of dynamic stimuli during infancy.

Infants possess basic capabilities to assess various quantitative properties such as number, size, and time. Preverbal discriminations are approximate, however, and are similarly limited across these dimensions. Here, we present the first evidence that multiple sources of quantitative unisensory information about dynamic stimuli-namely, simultaneous visual cues to changes in both number and surface area-may accelerate 6-month-olds' quantitative competence. Using a habituation-dishabituation paradigm, results from Experiment 1 demonstrate that, when provided with such visual cues to multiple quantitative properties that occur in the same direction, infants make more precise discriminations than has been shown when they receive information about either cue alone. Moreover, Experiment 2 demonstrates that infants' discrimination also benefits from simultaneous visual cues to quantitative changes that occur in opposite directions. Finally, Experiment 3 demonstrates that these findings are not driven by infants' ability to discriminate a 2:3 ratio change in surface area of a dynamic stimulus alone. Thus, we hypothesize that enhanced quantitative discrimination occurs because simultaneous visual quantitative changes may be more salient than single-source information, which could better recruit attention and result in more precise learning and remembering.

Proofreading for word errors.

Proofreading (i.e., reading text for the purpose of detecting and correcting typographical errors) is viewed as a component of the activity of revising text and thus is a necessary (albeit not sufficient) procedural step for enhancing the quality of a written product. The purpose of the present research was to test competing accounts of word-error detection which predict factors that may influence reading and proofreading differently. Word errors, which change a word into another word (e.g., from --> form), were selected for examination because they are unlikely to be detected by automatic spell-checking functions. Consequently, their detection still rests mostly in the hands of the human proofreader. Findings highlighted the weaknesses of existing accounts of proofreading and identified factors, such as length and frequency of the error in the English language relative to frequency of the correct word, which might play a key role in detection of word errors.

The evolution of quantitative sensitivity.

The ability to represent approximate quantities appears to be phylogenetically widespread, but the selective pressures and proximate mechanisms favouring this ability remain unknown. We analysed quantity discrimination data from 672 subjects across 33 bird and mammal species, using a novel Bayesian model that combined phylogenetic regression with a model of number psychophysics and random effect components. This allowed us to combine data from 49 studies and calculate the Weber fraction (a measure of quantity representation precision) for each species. We then examined which cognitive, socioecological and biological factors were related to variance in Weber fraction. We found contributions of phylogeny to quantity discrimination performance across taxa. Of the neural, socioecological and general cognitive factors we tested, cortical neuron density and domain-general cognition were the strongest predictors of Weber fraction, controlling for phylogeny. Our study is a new demonstration of evolutionary constraints on cognition, as well as of a relation between species-specific neuron density and a particular cognitive ability. This article is part of the theme issue 'Systems neuroscience through the lens of evolutionary theory'.

Natural Categorization: Electrophysiological Responses to Viewing Natural Versus Built Environments.

Environments are unique in terms of structural composition and evoked human experience. Previous studies suggest that natural compared to built environments may increase positive emotions. Humans in natural environments also demonstrate greater performance on attention-based tasks. Few studies have investigated cortical mechanisms underlying these phenomena or probed these differences from a neural perspective. Using a temporally sensitive electrophysiological approach, we employ an event-related, implicit passive viewing task to demonstrate that in humans, a greater late positive potential (LPP) occurs with exposure to built than natural environments, resulting in a faster return of activation to pre-stimulus baseline levels when viewing natural environments. Our research thus provides new evidence suggesting natural environments are perceived differently from built environments, converging with previous behavioral findings and theoretical assumptions from environmental psychology.