Starting Young


People, in general, tend to be cooperative creatures and that is one of the major reasons for our success in the big scheme of things. The received wisdom is that traits such as fairness, altruism, and empathy make high levels of cooperation possible.

An interesting question is when do these traits become apparent? Do we have to be well into our childhood before we play fair? Well, some researchers have suggested this, but Schmidt and Sommerville have the results of a new study that suggests that this is not the case (1). These workers studied the responses of forty-seven 15-month old girls and boys to two basic situations.

The toddlers watched some videos where two people requested cookies or milk from a third person. In some cases the handouts were equal and in some they were clearly unequal. The young observers stared significantly longer at either the unfair division video picture or the fair division one, indicating their expected result. If an unfair division wasn’t what they expected from an adult, they stared longer – it was in violation of their expectation, VOE.

The next experimental set was designed to test their altruism. After being allowed to play with two toys and showing a preference for one, they were asked by an unfamiliar observer if they could have one. Here we have an interesting result. 32% of the toddlers ignored the request, 37% handed over their least preferred toy, while 32% handed over their preferred toy. These latter toddlers were classified as “altruistic sharers” as opposed to “selfish sharers” (the 37%) or “non-responders”.

Now the analysis becomes more interesting when the VOE preferences are tied in with the sharing behaviors. Our altruistic sharers were very heavily in the group staring in disbelief at the unfair cookie handout, while our selfish sharers were equally heavily glaring at the fair division. The non-responders had VOE preferences split between the two, but they weren’t interested in sharing with strangers anyway.

So what are we going to make of all this? Firstly Schmidt and Sommerville point out that altruism and fairness are already there at 15-months. But wouldn’t it be interesting to fast forward 50 years and see which ones had become lawyers, politicians, or aid workers?

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0023223

Facing Up To Things


From a very early age we learn to recognize faces and the significance of particular expressions. The signals take just a few milliseconds to read. Our dogs are very good at this too. They read us sufficiently accurately to convince us that “they understand every word I say” even when we really know that we’re not speaking dog.

Of course, we say (maybe), that such recognition skills are critical for survival and that we’d have never made it this far without them, but at the same time we can also scare ourselves on dark nights in the woods by seeing faces in vague, moving bushes. Seeing faces in the clouds moving across the sky or in the patterns on tiles on the bathroom floor are much more relaxing, of course. The question arises, though, what are the critical features of the pattern that causes us to think, “face”?

Immediately after that thought, comes the one about how to train one’s computerized camera to recognize faces. Currently the fastest algorithm for electronic face recognition is the ‘Viola-Jones’ algorithm developed by Paul Viola and Michael Jones ten years ago. The accuracy of face recognition is now good enough for the process to be found in digital cameras.

A current paper by Hart et al from Phillips U at Marburg explores the similarity for patterns, which are not faces, being seen as faces by both people and machines (1). The humans were two-dozen young students who were permitted a glance at a series of blurry pictures. Some were of faces and some weren’t. There was only one machine in the experiment. Machines, of course, don’t come with individual preferences, only algorithms (don’t they?)

It turned out that people and the machine were quite good at picking a real face when paired with an illusory face. Not perfect, but no surprises there.

If the images are partially obstructed by vertical bars, then the mistakes increase significantly. Could be good pointers here for camouflage experts and those putting on war paint. Of course, this wasn’t the discussion point of the paper, rather the authors suggest that our brains use a similar analysis tree in deciding on a face being a face.

So next time you’re scared by something lurking in the bushes on that dark stormy night, take a picture and see if your camera is correcting for ‘red-eye’. If it is, run! It’s always good to have a second opinion.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0025373

Flushed With Success


For all of who have read Kenneth Grahame’s ‘wind in the Willows” (or seen the movie), we fondly remember Mr. Toad’s discovery of the automobile after one had driven his new caravan off the road. Recall, he just sat in the road quietly murmuring “Poop, poop.”

He was more far seeing than I thought when I first read the story. Now the Japanese company TOTO has unveiled it new ultra green motor tricycle that any Mr. Toad would be proud to own. Ultra green? Which fuel? Human waste, so riders can go “poop, poop all the way down the High street.

It is equipped with a bio-digesting toilet as the seat so one can poop–and–go with the minimum of delay. No longer will you need to take your mother sage advice “to go before you go.”

The inaugural journey is a 600 mile marathon starting at Kyoto and pooping their way through Kobe to end up at Tokyo, pooped out I would guess. The machine is call the Toilet Bike Neo and just in case one might feel a little isolated riding one’s new Neo, it will talk to one and play music. I’m unsure when it will talk or play music, but it would make sense if it is sensitive to your performance at the time. After all, there is a time for a friendly chat and there is a time for loud background music.

  1. http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/10/poop-powered-toilet-bike-toto-japan.php
  2. http://tototalk.jp/top.html

Putting The Kids To Work


Our picture of a well-organized society is every member doing what needs to be done, smoothly without dispute. We usually point to a social insect society, such as ants, bees or termites as examples of how well things can work. Leaving aside the concept that the society is the unit rather than the individual insect, studying these societies is interesting in that the division of labor and the communication between individuals is apparently seamless.

Normally the division of labor goes with developmental age so, for example, young bees tend brood and build comb. The ambrosia beetle seems to be bucking this trend and is using a version of child labor to build its citadels.

The ambrosia beetle is one of the farming kind. It plants and tends fungi as a form of nutrient. It does this in recently dead or dying trees where it tunnels out long galleries and plants the fungi along these galleries, and everything goes along swimmingly.

Recent studies on this quiet living and previously neglected species by Biedermann and Taborsky of U of Bern, have shown that it is the juveniles who have to do the hard work of mining. The larvae tunnel away all day and the adult beetles plant the fungi. Of course an ambrosia larva’s work is never done. Not only do they have to take part in mining, but they also have to muck out the galleries and look after their younger siblings.

From time to time the colony splits up and founds new ones, but that decision seems to be governed more by the help needed in the nursery rather than on space constraints – a real family affair.

  1. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/09/26/1107758108.abstract

Fortune Favoring The Brave


A very large percentage of animal species have females making the final choice on important decisions such as mating partner. The popular theory is that the females use displays, social standing, size, etc. as a guide to who has the best genes and that governs their choice of mate. This all sounds very logical in a well-ordered world, but there isn’t much evidence to back it up.

The lack of evidence worried Chargé et al and they sought to dip a little deeper in the well (1). They chose the endangered Houbara bustard to play with. They use the lekking displays as a guide to male suitability – the more persistent, the better the genes would be judged. But they decided that the girlie bustards would be too bird brained to make reliable choices.

The experiments meant that the researchers acted as judges in the ‘come dancing’ displays. All fertilizations were then done in vitro and the eggs hatched by reliable, caring lab staff. The aim here was to remove the vagaries of fickle parenting.

However, to put greater pressure on the guys, they were given intramuscular injections of E coli polysaccharides to make it more difficult to put on a good display. The young hatchlings were fitted out with smart radio collars and they were followed to their demise. Note: not all died.

The results showed that the offspring of the toughest guys (those that shrugged off the sore muscles) that put on the best show, did better and had a greater chance of survival. So the ‘good genes’ go not to the fanciest dancers but to the toughest who could power through the pain barrier. Life changes very little.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0025305