The Nature of Nurturant Niches in Ontogeny

Curiosity constructs communicative competence through social feedback loops

One of the most important challenges for a developing infant is learning how best to allocate their attention and forage for information in the midst of a great deal of novel stimulation. We propose that infants of altricial species solve this challenge by learning selectively from events that are contingent on their immature behavior, such as babbling. Such a contingency filter would focus attention and learning on the behavior of social partners, because social behavior reliably fits infants' sensitivity to contingency. In this way a contingent response by a caregiver to an immature behavior becomes a source of learnable information - feedback - to the infant. Social interactions with responsive caregivers afford infants opportunities to explore the impacts of their immature behavior on their environment, which facilitates the development of socially guided learning. Furthermore, contingent interactions are opportunities to make and test predictions about the efficacy of their social behaviors and those of others. In this chapter, we will use prelinguistic vocal learning to exemplify how infants use their developing vocal abilities to elicit learnable information about language from their social partners. Specifically, we review how caregivers' contingent responses to babbling create information that facilitates infant vocal learning and drives the development of communication. Infants play an active role in this process, as their developing predictions about the consequences of their actions serve to further refine their allocation of attention and drive increases in the maturity of their vocal behavior.

Prairie vole offspring only prefer mothers over fathers when mothers are a unique resource, yet fathers are the primary source of variation in parental care

In biparental species, each parent represents a semi-independent source of variable caregiving. The nature of care may differ between parents, and the type of care offspring seek is likely to change across development. We asked if caregiving differed between prairie vole (Microtus ochrogaster) mothers and fathers, and which parent pups prefer over development. We categorized parents as high- or low-contact based on daily recordings of grooming and brooding behavior. Pups were tested for their preferences between parents on postnatal days 10, 14, 18, 22, and 26. We expected individual parents would vary in the amount of care they gave, with pups preferring the parent that gives the most care and/or that most meets their needs at each developmental timepoint. Mothers spent more time in contact with pups than fathers. Mothers were consistent in the amount of care they gave, whereas fathers were variable caregivers. Pups never preferred fathers over mothers, but only demonstrated a preference for mothers before weaning. Lastly, the amount of contact did not influence pup preferences. Our data indicate that mothers are consistent sources of caregiving relative to fathers, and pups show little evidence of attachment to a specific parent beyond meeting its own immediate needs.

The human newborn's umwelt: Unexplored pathways and perspectives

Historically, newborns, and especially premature newborns, were thought to "feel nothing." However, over the past decades, a growing body of evidence has shown that newborns are aware of their environment, but the extent and the onset of some sensory capacities remain largely unknown. The goal of this review is to update our current knowledge concerning newborns' perceptual world and how ready they are to cope with an entirely different sensory environment following birth. We aim to establish not only how and when each sensory ability arises during the pre-/postbirth period but also discuss how senses are studied. We conclude that although many studies converge to show that newborns are clearly sentient beings, much is still unknown. Further, we identify a series of internal and external factors that could explain discrepancies between studies, and we propose perspectives for future studies. Finally, through examples from animal studies, we illustrate the importance of this detailed knowledge to pursue the enhancement of newborns' daily living conditions. Indeed, this is a prerequisite for assessing the effects of the physical environment and routine procedures on newborns' welfare.

Age-specific and context-specific responses of the medial extended amygdala in the developing prairie vole

The social needs of organisms change as they mature. Yet, little is known about the mechanisms that subserve processing social interactions or how these systems develop. The medial extended amygdala (meEA) is comprised of the medial bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BSTm) and the medial amygdala (MeA). This neural complex holds great promise for understanding how the social brain processes information. We assessed expression of the immediate early gene cFos and the enzyme tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) at three developmental time-points (postnatal day [PND] 2, 9, and 21) to determine how developing prairie voles process familial social contact, separation, and reunion. We demonstrate that (1) BSTm cFos responses were sensitive to separation from family units at PND 9 and PND 21, but not at PND 2; (2) MeA cFos responses were sensitive to reunion with the family, but only in PND 21 pups; (3) BSTm TH neurons did not exhibit differential responses to social condition at any age; and (4) MeA TH neurons responded strongly to social contact (remaining with family or following reunion), but only at PND 21. Our results suggest that the sub-units of the meEA become functionally responsive at different developmental time points, and are differentially activated in response to distinct social contexts. Overall, our results support the notion that interconnected regions of the meEA follow divergent developmental timelines and are sensitive to distinct properties of social contexts.

Why developmental niche construction is not selective niche construction: and why it matters

In the last decade, niche construction has been heralded as the neglected process in evolution. But niche construction is just one way in which the organism's interaction with and construction of the environment can have potential evolutionary significance. The constructed environment does not just select for, it also produces new variation. Nearly 3 decades ago, and in parallel with Odling-Smee's article ‘Niche-constructing phenotypes', West and King introduced the ‘ontogenetic niche’ to give the phenomena of exogenetic inheritance a formal name. Since then, a range of fields in the life sciences and medicine has amassed evidence that parents influence their offspring by means other than DNA (parental effects), and proposed mechanisms for how heritable variation can be environmentally induced and developmentally regulated. The concept of ‘developmental niche construction’ (DNC) elucidates how a diverse range of mechanisms contributes to the transgenerational transfer of developmental resources. My most central of claims is that whereas the selective niche of niche construction theory is primarily used to explain the active role of the organism in its selective environment, DNC is meant to indicate the active role of the organism in its developmental environment. The paper highlights the differences between the construction of the selective and the developmental niche, and explores the overall significance of DNC for evolutionary theory.

Extended evolutionary psychology: the importance of transgenerational developmental plasticity

What kind mechanisms one deems central for the evolutionary process deeply influences one's understanding of the nature of organisms, including cognition. Reversely, adopting a certain approach to the nature of life and cognition and the relationship between them or between the organism and its environment should affect one's view of evolutionary theory. This paper explores this reciprocal relationship in more detail. In particular it argues that the view of living and cognitive systems, especially humans, as deeply integrated beings embedded in and transformed by their genetic, epigenetic (molecular and cellular), behavioral, ecological, socio-cultural and cognitive-symbolic legacies calls for an extended evolutionary synthesis that goes beyond either a theory of genes juxtaposed against a theory of cultural evolution and or even more sophisticated theories of gene-culture coevolution and niche construction. Environments, particularly in the form of developmental environments, do not just select for variation, they also create new variation by influencing development through the reliable transmission of non-genetic but heritable information. This paper stresses particularly views of embodied, embedded, enacted and extended cognition, and their relationship to those aspects of extended inheritance that lie between genetic and cultural inheritance, the still gray area of epigenetic and behavioral inheritance systems that play a role in parental effect. These are the processes that can be regarded as transgenerational developmental plasticity and that I think can most fruitfully contribute to, and be investigated by, developmental psychology.