The natural environment provides a flux of concurrent stimulation to all our senses, and the integration of information from different sensory systems is a fundamental feature of perception and ...cognition. How information from the different senses is integrated has long been of concern to several scientific disciplines, including psychology, cognitive science, and the neurosciences, each with different questions and methodologies. In this article, I briefly explore some of these recent advances in the understanding of the development of sensory integration and organization and discuss implications of these advances for the care and management of the preterm infant.
Because of the variability of relevant developmental resources across different environments, and because only a portion of the genome is expressed in any individual organism as a result of its ...specific developmental context and experience, what is actually realized during the course of individual development represents only one of many possibilities. One conclusion to be drawn from this insight is that the origin of phenotypic traits and their variation can be traced to the process of development. In this conceptual overview, I briefly explore how recent efforts to integrate genetic, epigenetic, and environmental levels of analysis through a developmental lens is advancing our understanding of the generation of the stability
variability of phenotypic outcomes observed within and across generations. A growing body of evidence indicates that phenotypes are the outcomes of the whole developmental system, comprised of the organism, with its particular genetic and cellular make-up in its specific physical, biological, and social environments. I conclude that the emergent products of development are epigenetic, not just genetic, and evolutionary explanation cannot be complete without a developmental mode of analysis.
Although research has demonstrated impressive face perception skills of young infants, little attention has focused on conditions that enhance versus impair infant face perception. The present ...studies tested the prediction, generated from the intersensory redundancy hypothesis (IRH), that face discrimination, which relies on detection of visual featural information, would be impaired in the context of intersensory redundancy provided by audiovisual speech and enhanced in the absence of intersensory redundancy (unimodal visual and asynchronous audiovisual speech) in early development. Later in development, following improvements in attention, faces should be discriminated in both redundant audiovisual and nonredundant stimulation. Results supported these predictions. Two-month-old infants discriminated a novel face in unimodal visual and asynchronous audiovisual speech but not in synchronous audiovisual speech. By 3 months, face discrimination was evident even during synchronous audiovisual speech. These findings indicate that infant face perception is enhanced and emerges developmentally earlier following unimodal visual than synchronous audiovisual exposure and that intersensory redundancy generated by naturalistic audiovisual speech can interfere with face processing.
Lickliter comments on Ken Richardson's book Genes, Brains, and Human Potential (2017), about an intelligent guide to human intelligence. The debates surrounding intelligence have been contentious, ...raising issues of race, gender, class, and human potential. The book makes clear that these long-standing debates go well beyond psychological science and are based on serious misconceptions about the nature of genes, the nature of the environment, and the nature of development. In light with, it seems apparent that successfully sorting out the scientific, sociological, and political issues surrounding the thorny notion of intelligence will require a critical analysis of the ideology behind theories of human intelligence and potential.
Biologists and psychologists are re‐thinking the long‐standing premise of genes as the primary cause of development, a view widely embraced in 20th‐century biology. This shift in thinking is based in ...large part on: (1) the growing appreciation of the complex, distributed regulatory dynamics of gene expression; and (2) the growing appreciation of the probabilistic, contingent, and situated nature of development. We now appreciate that what actually unfolds during individual development represents only one of many possibilities. This expanded focus on the developmental process, often referred to as a developmental systems approach, has far‐reaching implications for developmental and evolutionary theory, including new ways of thinking about the consequences of activity and experience, the emergence of novel properties or traits, the nature and extent of heredity, and the origins of phenotypic variability. WIREs Cogn Sci 2017, 8:e1422. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1422
This article is categorized under:
Cognitive Biology > Genes and Environment
Neuroscience > Development
Neuroscience > Plasticity
The notion that phenotypic traits, including behavior, can be predetermined has slowly given way in biology and psychology over the last two decades. This shift in thinking is due in large part to ...the growing evidence for the fundamental role of developmental processes in the generation of the stability and variations in phenotype that researchers in developmental and evolutionary sciences seek to understand. Here I review the tenets of a metatheoretical model of development called probabilistic epigenesis (PE) and explore its implications for furthering our understanding of developmental and evolutionary processes. The PE framework emphasizes the reciprocity of influences within and between levels of an organism's developmental manifold (genetic activity, neural activity, behavior, and the physical, social, and cultural influences of the external environment) and the ubiquity of gene–environment interaction in the realization of all phenotypes.
Gaze following allows individuals to detect the locus of attention of both conspecifics and other species. However, little is known about how this ability develops. We explored the emergence of ...bobwhite quail hatchlings’ ability to track human gaze by assessing their avoidance behavior in an open arena under five testing conditions: (1) a Direct Gaze condition, in which an experimenter looking down was positioned above one of two approach areas; (2) a Gaze Follow condition in which an experimenter, positioned equidistant between two approach areas, directed his/her gaze towards one of the areas; (3) a Masked Gaze Follow condition, in which the experimenter wore a mask during the Gaze Follow test; (4) a Deprived Face Experience condition, in which hatchlings were deprived of experience with human faces prior to the Gaze Follow test; and (5) a Control condition in which no experimenter was present during testing. Results revealed that hatchlings from the Direct Gaze condition preferred the non-gazed approach area at all ages tested. Hatchlings from the Gaze Follow condition preferred the non-gazed approach area at 48 and 72 h, but not at 24 h of age. In contrast, hatchlings from the Masked Gaze Follow, Deprived Face and Control conditions did not prefer either approach area at any age tested. These results indicate that experience with human faces plays a key role in the rapid emergence of gaze following behavior in bobwhite quail hatchlings.
In the predominately gene-centered view of 20th century biology, the relationship between genotype and phenotype was essentially a relationship between cause and effect, between a plan and a product. ...Abandoning the idea of genes as inherited instructions or blueprints for phenotypes raises the question of how to best account for observed phenotypic stability and variability within and across generations of a population. We argue that the processes responsible for phenotypic stability and the processes responsible for phenotypic variability are one and the same, namely, the dynamics of development. This argument proposes that stability of phenotypic form is found not because of the transmission of genotypes, genetic programs, or the transfer of internal blueprints, but because similar internal and external conditions—collectively conceptualized as resources of development—can be reliably reconstituted in each generation. Variability of phenotypic form, which is an indispensable feature of any evolving system, relies on these same resources, but because the internal and external conditions of development are not reconstituted identically in succeeding generations, these conditions—and the phenotypes to which they give rise—will always be characterized by at least some variability.
Blair and Raver (2012)
have provided an organism-in-environment conceptualization of the development of stress response physiology and its relation to the development of self-regulation. They argue ...that we must consider the context in which self-regulation and stress reactivity occur to understand their implications for developmental outcome. More generally, they present a cogent argument for why it is necessary to think developmentally when considering the effects of early experience on subsequent physical, emotional, cognitive, and social development. Blair and Raver's article also highlights a persistent challenge for developmental theory-how to make sense of the relationship among the various timescales over which phenotypes develop and change occurs. Their efforts to identify the factors involved in the variability and stability of self-regulation over different timescales demonstrate the dividends of integrating developmental and evolutionary perspectives to better understand the malleability of phenotypic development.
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