ReviewFrontiers in zoology2015
Adaptive explanations for sensitive windows in development.
Review in Frontiers in zoology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 85 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
85 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Food insecurity as a driver of obesity in humans: The insurance hypothesis.The Behavioral and brain sciences · 2017Pooled it
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- Embryonic Hormetic Priming Modulates Later-Life Thermal Tolerance.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Embryos are largely understudied in a representative sample of journals in conservation physiology.Conservation physiology · 2026Article
- Article
- The evolution of reversible plasticity in stable environments.Evolution letters · 2025Article
- Personality development in non-domesticated house mice: evidence for a nutrition-dependent sensitive period early in life.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Genetic and Environmental Factors Shape Rates of Plasticity: The Temporal Dynamics of Opsin Gene Expression in Aquatic Environments.Molecular biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Life Course Timing of Mortality Exposure and Fertility Behavior.Population research and policy review · 2025Article
- The flexibility of social learning and its conservation implications in mammals and beyond.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Helping niches may trigger the development of task specialization and division of labour.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Variable stressor exposure shapes fitness within and across generations.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Genetic Correlations Among Dental, Mandibular, and Postcranial Dimensions in Rhesus Macaques (Macaca mulatta).American journal of biological anthropology · 2025Article
- Early prenatal but not postnatal glucocorticoid exposure is associated with enhanced HPA axis activity into adulthood in a wild primate.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Developmental Shifts in Amygdala Function.Current topics in behavioral neurosciences · 2025Review
- Life Stage- and Sex-Specific Sensitivity to Nutritional Stress in a Holometabolous Insect.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Early social isolation disrupts adult personality expression in group-living mites.The Journal of animal ecology · 2025Article
- No sensitive period for the development of individual face learning inBehavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2024Article
- Fake news? The impact of information mismatch on mating behaviour.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
25 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Development in many organisms appears to show evidence of sensitive windows-periods or stages in ontogeny in which individual experience has a particularly strong influence on the phenotype (compared to other periods or stages). Despite great interest in sensitive windows from both fundamental and applied perspectives, the functional (adaptive) reasons why they have evolved are unclear. Here we outline a conceptual framework for understanding when natural selection should favour changes in plasticity across development. Our approach builds on previous theory on the evolution of phenotypic plasticity, which relates individual and population differences in plasticity to two factors: the degree of uncertainty about the environmental conditions and the extent to which experiences during development ('cues') provide information about those conditions. We argue that systematic variation in these two factors often occurs within the lifetime of a single individual, which will select for developmental changes in plasticity. Of central importance is how informational properties of the environment interact with the life history of the organism. Phenotypes may be more or less sensitive to environmental cues at different points in development because of systematic changes in (i) the frequency of cues, (ii) the informativeness of cues, (iii) the fitness benefits of information and/or (iv) the constraints on plasticity. In relatively stable environments, a sensible null expectation is that plasticity will gradually decline with age as the developing individual gathers information. We review recent models on the evolution of developmental changes in plasticity and explain how they fit into our conceptual framework. Our aim is to encourage an adaptive perspective on sensitive windows in development.
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