ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2019
A case for environmental statistics of early-life effects.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- A single brief cue leaves a day-long internal state imprint in planarians.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Testing early life effects frameworks: developmental constraints and adaptive response hypotheses do not explain fertility outcomes in wild female baboons.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Life Stage- and Sex-Specific Sensitivity to Nutritional Stress in a Holometabolous Insect.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- The impact of pandemic threats on intertemporal choices in Chinese and Americans.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Leveraging big data to uncover the eco-evolutionary factors shaping behavioural development.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Effects of developmental and adult environments on ageing.Evolution; international journal of organic evolution · 2022Article
- Socioecology shapes child and adolescent time allocation in twelve hunter-gatherer and mixed-subsistence forager societies.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Early experience unpredictability in child development as a model for understanding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic: A translational neuroscience perspective.Developmental cognitive neuroscience · 2022Article
- Matrilateral bias of grandparental investment in grandchildren persists despite the grandchildren's adverse early life experiences.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Sensitive periods, but not critical periods, evolve in a fluctuating environment: a model of incremental development.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Daylong Mobile Audio Recordings Reveal Multitimescale Dynamics in Infants' Vocal Productions and Auditory Experiences.Current directions in psychological science · 2022Article
- Everyday music in infancy.Developmental science · 2021Article
- Animal cognition in an urbanised world.Frontiers in ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Combining information from parental and personal experiences: Simple processes generate diverse outcomes.PloS one · 2021Article
- Quantifying Everyday Ecologies: Principles for Manual Annotation of Many Hours of Infants' Lives.Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- The influence of developmental diet on reproduction and metabolism in Drosophila.BMC evolutionary biology · 2020Article
- The developmental support hypothesis: adaptive plasticity in neural development in response to cues of social support.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
- Life-history theory in psychology and evolutionary biology: one research programme or two?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Review
- The impact of learning opportunities on the development of learning and decision-making: an experiment with passerine birds.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Introduction to special issue: 'Life history and learning: how childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals'.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
There is enduring debate over the question of which early-life effects are adaptive and which ones are not. Mathematical modelling shows that early-life effects can be adaptive in environments that have particular statistical properties, such as reliable cues to current conditions and high autocorrelation of environmental states. However, few empirical studies have measured these properties, leading to an impasse. Progress, therefore, depends on research that quantifies cue reliability and autocorrelation of environmental parameters in real environments. These statistics may be different for social and non-social aspects of the environment. In this paper, we summarize evolutionary models of early-life effects. Then, we discuss empirical data on environmental statistics from a range of disciplines. We highlight cases where data on environmental statistics have been used to test competing explanations of early-life effects. We conclude by providing guidelines for new data collection and reflections on future directions. This article is part of the theme issue 'Developing differences: early-life effects and evolutionary medicine'.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.