ArticleBehavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology
An evolutionary model of sensitive periods when the reliability of cues varies across ontogeny.
Article in Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 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.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed.
- 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
- The epigenetic impacts of pubertal acceleration following early caregiver disruptions.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Early life adversity has sex-dependent effects on survival across the lifespan in rhesus macaques.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Prenatal Stress and Maternal Role in Neurodevelopment.Annual review of developmental psychology · 2024Article
- Recalibration of the stress response system over adult development: Is there a perinatal recalibration period?Development and psychopathology · 2023Review
- Natural Animal Populations as Model Systems for Understanding Early Life Adversity Effects on Aging.Integrative and comparative biology · 2023Article
- Leveraging big data to uncover the eco-evolutionary factors shaping behavioural development.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Developmental feedbacks and the emergence of individuality.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Prediction in the Aging Brain: Merging Cognitive, Neurological, and Evolutionary Perspectives.The journals of gerontology. Series B, Psychological sciences and social sciences · 2022Article
- Applications of conceptual models from lifecourse epidemiology in ecology and evolutionary biology.Biology letters · 2022Review
- The double-edged sword of inducible defences: costs and benefits of maladaptive switching from the individual to the community level.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Sensitive periods, but not critical periods, evolve in a fluctuating environment: a model of incremental development.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Adrenocortical Responses to Daily Stressors Are Calibrated by Early Life Adversity: An Investigation of the Adaptive Calibration Model.Evolutionary psychology : an international journal of evolutionary approaches to psychology and behaviorArticle
- An evolutionary model of sensitive periods when the reliability of cues varies across ontogeny.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Sensitive periods are widespread in nature, but their evolution is not well understood. Recent mathematical modeling has illuminated the conditions favoring the evolution of sensitive periods early in ontogeny. However, sensitive periods also exist at later stages of ontogeny, such as adolescence. Here, we present a mathematical model that explores the conditions that favor sensitive periods at later developmental stages. In our model, organisms use environmental cues to incrementally construct a phenotype that matches their environment. Unlike in previous models, the reliability of cues varies across ontogeny. We use stochastic dynamic programming to compute optimal policies for a range of evolutionary ecologies and then simulate developmental trajectories to obtain mature phenotypes. We measure changes in plasticity across ontogeny using study paradigms inspired by empirical research: adoption and cross-fostering. Our results show that sensitive periods only evolve later in ontogeny if the reliability of cues increases across ontogeny. The onset, duration, and offset of sensitive periods-and the magnitude of plasticity-depend on the specific parameter settings. If the reliability of cues decreases across ontogeny, sensitive periods are favored only early in ontogeny. These results are robust across different paradigms suggesting that empirical findings might be comparable despite different experimental designs.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
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.