Sleep promoting neurons remodel their response properties to calibrate sleep drive with environmental demands.

Falling asleep at the wrong time can place an individual at risk of immediate physical harm. However, not sleeping degrades cognition and adaptive behavior. To understand how animals match sleep need with environmental demands, we used live-brain imaging to examine the physiological response properties of the Drosophila sleep homeostat (dFB) following interventions that modify sleep (sleep deprivation, starvation, time-restricted feeding, memory consolidation). We report that dFB neurons can distinguish between different types of waking and can change their physiological response-properties accordingly. That is, dFB neurons are not simply passive components of a hard-wired circuit. Rather, the dFB neurons themselves can determine their response to the activity from upstream circuits. Finally, we show that the dFB appears to contain a memory trace of prior exposure to metabolic challenges induced by starvation or time-restricted feeding. Together these data highlight that the sleep homeostat is plastic and suggests an underlying mechanism.

The Infertility Trap: The Fertility Costs of Group-Living in Mammalian Social Evolution

Mammal social groups vary considerably in size from single individuals to very large herds. In some taxa, these groups are extremely stable, with at least some individuals being members of the same group throughout their lives; in other taxa, groups are unstable, with membership changing by the day. We argue that this variability in grouping patterns reflects a tradeoff between group size as a solution to environmental demands and the costs created by stress-induced infertility (creating an infertility trap). These costs are so steep that, all else equal, they will limit group size in mammals to ∼15 individuals. A species will only be able to live in larger groups if it evolves strategies that mitigate these costs. We suggest that mammals have opted for one of two solutions. One option (fission-fusion herding) is low cost but high risk; the other (bonded social groups) is risk-averse, but costly in terms of cognitive requirements.

Social and Personality Perspectives on Parenting in an Evolutionary Context

This chapter evaluates the dominant social-personality theories of parenting. It highlights the limitations inherent in the literature, particularly the lack of integration between the domains of parenting and attachment as well as the inability to make claims about the specific causes and effects of parent–child dynamics. The chapter then explains how an evolutionary life history perspective allows for a better understanding of parenting and attachment patterns and overcomes these limitations by grounding parent–child dynamics in a functional context. An evolutionary perspective stresses that different parenting styles and attachment types represent facultative responses to environmental demands, thereby facilitating adaptive responses to anticipated interpersonal interactions in the interest of individual fitness. Ultimately, parenting and attachment behaviors reflect life strategies on a fast–slow continuum that aim to maximize ancestral reproductive success in response to environmental harshness and unpredictability.

GESTIÓN DEL CONOCIMIENTO, ACTIVOS INTANGIBLES Y CAPITALES INTELECTUALES EN LA ERA DE COVID-19

The psychological studies of organizations, about human capital, have shown that this factor increases to the extent that the environmental demands are intensified, but it is the intellectual trait that acquires the greatest value when considered as the main intangible asset. of an organization. In this way, the objective of this paper was to expose the theoretical, conceptual and empirical frameworks related to human capital in order to establish discussion scenarios related to the value chain of an organization based on its intangible assets. A documentary study was carried out with a non-probabilistic selection of sources indexed to repositories, considering the year of publication and relationship between the concepts of organization and human capital. There are lines of research around empathy, trust, commitment, satisfaction and happiness as inherent factors of human capital as an intellectual asset of an organization.

Threat impairs flexible use of a cognitive map

Goal-directed behavior requires adaptive systems that respond to environmental demands. In the absence of threat (or presence of reward), individuals are free to explore a large number of behavioral trajectories, effectively interrogating the environment across many dimensions. This leads to flexible, relational memory encoding and retrieval. In the presence of imminent danger, motivation shifts to an imperative state characterized by a narrow focus of attention on threatening information. This impairs flexible, relational memory. Here, we test how these proposed motivational shifts (Murty & Adcock, 2017) affect behavioral flexibility and memory. Participants learned the structure of a maze-like environment and navigated to the location of everyday objects in both safe and threatening contexts. The latter contained a predator that could ‘capture’ participants, leading to electric shock. After learning, the path to some objects was blocked, forcing a detour for which one route was significantly shorter. We predicted that the threatening environment would push participants toward an imperative state, leading to less efficient and less flexible navigation. Across 3 studies, we found that threat caused participants to take longer paths to goal objects and less efficient detours when obstacles were encountered. Navigation was less efficient despite no impairment in recognition memory for the maps learned in safe vs threatening contexts. These results provide ecologically valid evidence that imperative states, triggered by threat, reduce the ability to flexibly use cognitive maps to guide behavior.

Extraversion level predicts perceived benefits from social resources and tool use

Social baseline theory states that there are differences in how humans integrate social resources into their economy of action when they face environmental demands. However, although several authors suggested that extraversion may be an indicator of the social baseline, no study has demonstrated it. The present study aims to test this hypothesis and, in particular, examines whether extraversion is a specific indicator of the social baseline. In two experiments, participants were asked to move rolls either alone (with their hands), or with the help of a social resource (Experiment 1), or a tool (Experiment 2). Results showed that extraversion predicted the choice to use both types of resource. Specifically, the more participants were extraverted, the more they tended to consider the use of the social resource or the tool as beneficial. We argue that these results indicate that extraversion is not specifically an indicator of the social baseline, but rather an indicator of how individuals integrate technical and social resources into their economy of action. In addition, this study encourages future research endeavors to define what constitutes a resource and how it could fit into the Social Baseline Theory.