IMF magazine publishing paper about a replacement for GDP or the HDI with a less arbitrary (they believe) personal well-being index

Authors in 2021 re-publishing their cherished table from 2014... Their proposal is to replace the very defective GDP index with a composite of the indicators below. From Measuring the Essence of the Good Life, by Daniel Benjamin, Kristen Cooper, Ori Heffetz, and Miles Kimball. F&D Magazine, Winter 2021. https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2021/12/Measuring-Essence-Good-Life-Benjamin-Cooper-Heffetz-Kimball.htm

Excerpts:
 

Constructing the HDI

On its website, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) describes the HDI as “created to emphasize that people and their capabilities should be the ultimate criteria for assessing the development of a country, not economic growth alone.” But after those lofty words, the description turns to technical detail: “HDI is a summary measure of average achievement in key dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, being knowledgeable, and having a decent standard of living. The HDI is the geometric mean of normalized indices for each of the three dimensions.” 

The technical details determine how the UNDP puts into practice its lofty goal: which dimensions of well-being (or capabilities) the HDI tracks, what it leaves out, and what relative importance it gives to the things it does track. For example, according to the geometric mean used by the HDI, a percentage change in HDI is the equally weighted average of the percentage changes of its components.

The HDI is surely the best-known practical application of Sen’s capabilities approach. It provides a single, simple number that both summarizes the state of a country at a point in time and is easy to construct and explain.  

Getting to less arbitrary

Still, although it captures more dimensions of well-being than GDP does, the HDI is arbitrary in its choice of what to include and how to weight what it does cover. The goal of an enhanced well-being index is to include many more than three dimensions of well-being and to weight them based on the values of the people in the country. 

A major reason the HDI focuses on longevity, education, and income is that when the index was introduced in 1990, these important dimensions of a good life were among the few variables being widely measured across countries in a reasonably comparable way. Unavailability of data has similarly constrained the reach of other Beyond GDP initiatives—such as the Genuine Progress Indicator and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD’s) Better Life Index. But lack of current data should not constrain our vision of what a good index should look like.

Some Beyond GDP initiatives have gotten around these data constraints by using surveys, which can be conducted relatively cheaply around the world in real time. Indeed, real time is crucial to policymaking. For example, how the HDI performed during the pandemic is still unknown because, at the time of this writing, the latest numbers available are for 2019.

Some researchers have proposed using single-question survey measures of happiness or life satisfaction. However, research, including some of our own with Alex Rees-Jones of the University of Pennsylvania, suggests that answers to these survey questions do not capture the full range of what people care about when they make choices. Partly to address this shortcoming, other Beyond GDP initiatives, such as those of the OECD and the UK Office of National Statistics, ask additional survey questions to measure dimensions of well-being other than happiness or life satisfaction. But multiple survey questions reintroduce the question of how to weight the dimensions of well-being relative to one another. 

Our research makes clear the importance including multiple components in a measure of national well-being and the importance of getting the weighting right. Those issues are at the core of our efforts to construct a theoretically sound well-being index. The weights we recommend are relative marginal utilities—traditionally defined as the additional satisfaction an individual realizes from one more unit of a good or service, but in this case from one more unit of an aspect of well-being. We propose to estimate marginal utilities based on stated preferences in specially designed surveys, described below. 

Some older results illustrate our approach, which we are still developing. In Benjamin, Heffetz, Kimball, and Szembrot (2014) we asked survey questions about 136 aspects of well-being—a list that aimed to comprehensively reflect all proposed aspects of well-being. (An actual index should comprise fewer aspects of well-being and avoid, or adjust for, conceptual overlaps.) The table shows estimated weights based on policy choices—described as “national policy questions that you and everyone else in your nation vote on.” Respondents chose between pairs of hypothetical policies, which involved trade-offs between aspects of well-being. Our statistical procedure inferred weights for the aspects of well-being based on respondents’ choices, so that an aspect of well-being is assigned higher weight if it has a bigger impact on the policy respondents preferred. Because of space constraints, the table illustrates the results using 18 of the 136 aspects of well-being: the three with the highest weights, other interesting aspects in the top 10, every aspect that seems closely related to HDI components, other aspects for which data are widely collected, and an aspect on the natural environment. We normalize the weight on the top aspect—freedom from corruption, injustice, and abuse of power—to 1.00.

Although many things could be said about the table, we limit ourselves to three points. 

Many of the top aspects are clearly capabilities in Sen’s sense, including the first one, which does not guarantee a good life, but helps make one possible.

A number of important aspects of well-being—with weights of at least 75 percent of the top aspect—are missing from many measures of national well-being, such as the HDI. 

The weights for many aspects of well-being that have received much attention are well below the weights for those at the top. For example, “people not feeling anxious”—one of four aspects collected in large samples of individuals by the UK Office of National Statistics—is weighted less than a quarter of the top aspect. For those relevant to the HDI, “people’s health” and “people’s financial security” have almost three-quarters the weight of the top aspect, but others—knowledge, skills, and access to information; understanding the world; long lives; and average income—have weights no higher than 54 percent of the top aspect. 

Sweden: Intellectual disability was substantially heritable with 93pct–98pct of the variance in liability attributed to genetic influences

Familial risk and heritability of intellectual disability: a population-based cohort study in Sweden. Paul Lichtenstein et al. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, December 18 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/jcpp.13560

Abstract

Background: Intellectual disability (ID) aggregates in families, but factors affecting individual risk and heritability estimates remain unknown.

Methods: A population-based family cohort study of 4,165,785 individuals born 1973–2013 in Sweden, including 37,787 ID individuals and their relatives. The relative risks (RR) of ID with 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) were obtained from stratified Cox proportional-hazards models. Relatives of ID individuals were compared to relatives of unaffected individuals. Structural equation modeling was used to estimate heritability.

Results: Relatives of ID individuals were at increased risk of ID compared to individuals with unaffected relatives. The RR of ID among relatives increased proportionally to the degree of genetic relatedness with ID probands; 256.70(95% CI 161.30–408.53) for monozygotic twins, 16.47(13.32–20.38) for parents, 14.88(12.19–18.16) for children, 7.04(4.67–10.61) for dizygotic twins, 8.38(7.97–8.83) for full siblings, 4.56(4.02–5.16) for maternal, 2.90(2.49–3.37) for paternal half-siblings, 3.03(2.61–3.50) for nephews/nieces, 2.84(2.45–3.29) for uncles/aunts, and 2.04(1.91–2.20) for cousins. Lower RRs were observed for siblings of probands with chromosomal abnormalities (RR 5.53, 4.74–6.46) and more severe ID (mild RR 9.15, 8.55–9.78, moderate RR 8.13, 7.28–9.08, severe RR 6.80, 5.74–8.07, and profound RR 5.88, 4.52–7.65). Male sex of relative and maternal line of relationship with proband was related to higher risk (RR 1.33, 1.25–1.41 for brothers vs. sisters and RR 1.49, 1.34–1.68 for maternal vs. paternal half-siblings). ID was substantially heritable with 0.95(95% CI 0.93–0.98) of the variance in liability attributed to genetic influences.

Conclusions: The risk estimates will benefit researchers, clinicians, families in understanding the risk of ID in the family and the whole population. The higher risk of ID related to male sex and maternal linage will be of value for planning and interpreting etiological studies in ID.

Discussion

Main findings

In this nationwide population-based study, we evaluated familial risk and heritability of ID. The sample of ID probands is 100 times bigger compared to the largest previous study on risk among siblings from British Columbia (Herbst & Baird, 1982). The use of several types of relatives allows evaluating the importance of genetic and environmental risk factors in the etiology of ID.

There are four main findings from our investigation. First, our 20-years risk and frequency of ID in full-siblings are comparable to old reports (Angeli & Kirman, 1975; Becker et al., 1977; Bundey & Carter, 1974; Bundey et al., 1989; Costeff & Weller, 1987; Durkin et al., 1976; Herbst & Baird, 1982; Laxova, Ridler, Bowen-Bravery, & Opitz, 1977; Turner et al., 1971; Turner & Partington, 2000). Now, we provide estimates with narrow confidence intervals also for halfsiblings and other relatives. Moreover, our study is first to report RR for ID comparing relatives of ID probands with relatives of unaffected individuals. High RR for monozygotic twins reflects ID characteristics with 0.9% prevalence and high heritability. Similar RR were reported for autism (Sandin et al., 2014), a disability with similar prevalence (1%–2%) and high (85%) heritability (Sandin et al., 2017).

Second, similar to the study by Bundey et al. (1989), we found no evidence for differences in familial risks related to comorbid medical conditions and adverse birth events, two probable biological mechanisms of ID. It is possible, that some of the birth complications traditionally considered as environmental risk factors reflect the response to genetic abnormalities in the fetus (Bolton et al., 1994; Simonoff, Bolton, & Rutter, 1996).

Third, our findings of an inverse relation between ID severity and the familial risk estimates are in accordance with older studies on siblings (Angeli & Kirman, 1975; Bundey & Carter, 1974; Durkin et al., 1976). We have observed a similar pattern of inheritance in second-degree relatives. A previous study by Reichenberg et al. (2016) showed a normal distribution of intellectual abilities among military conscripts who had siblings with severe ID. But those results are limited by the fact that individuals with medical diagnosis of ID are exempted from military assessment in Sweden and were not likely to be covered by the study. Our results showed a gradual risk decline in relation to level of intellectual impairment with shared etiological links across different levels of severity suggesting that the arbitrary cut-off for classifying ID severity into binary measure seems to be an oversimplification.

Forth, our data provide compelling evidence for the role of sex in familial risk of ID. In our study, we not only confirmed the higher risk for males compared to females in siblings of ID probands, but we also showed that similar sex differences were present in more distant relatives (Table S10). Higher prevalence of ID among males in comparison to females has been reported in population studies (Maulik et al., 2011) but studies in relatives produced ambiguous results, probably due to small sample size (Table S1). Our study confirms that, the sex differences observed in the general population are present in the relatives of ID probands, with males being more predisposed to ID. Matrilineallity was related to a higher risk in half-siblings and cousins of ID individuals in accordance with X-linked ID inheritance pattern.

Previous quantitative genetic methods focused on heritability of general (Kovas et al., 2013; Plomin & Deary, 2015) or low cognitive abilities within the normal range (Reichenberg et al., 2016). Heritability of ID as medical diagnosis has not been estimated before. The concordance in our study was as high as 73% for monozygotic, but relatively low of 9% for dizygotic twins. However, concordance is a measure on an absolute scale and depends on the disease prevalence in the population (Tenesa & Haley, 2013). With ID prevalence of 0.9%, genetic liability may be more accurately measured on a transformed scale by tetrachoric correlations where the liability for a disease is assumed to follow a standard normal distribution. The threshold on the liability distribution is estimated from the observed prevalence of the disease. Individuals are assumed to have a disease if they are above this threshold.

Further, severe ID is often linked to distinct genetic etiology caused by de novo mutations rather than polygenic traits associated with mild ID. In our study, tetrachoric correlations calculated separately for all ID levels and after exclusion of individuals with severe ID resulted in almost identical estimates, suggesting a low contribution of those phenotypes in ID heritability at the population level.

Heritability of ID was estimated to be 95%, considerably higher than 66%–86% reported for cognitive abilities in adulthood (Haworth et al., 2010; Panizzon et al., 2014). Those findings further highlighting importance of familial factors in diagnostics and etiological studies on ID. For future studies on the heritability of ID It is important to consider ‘maternal-effects in etiology’, previously described in quantitative genetic studies on general cognitive abilities (Devlin, Daniels, & Roeder, 1997). Substantially higher RR and 20-years risk estimates for maternal compared with paternal half-siblings were found in our study, suggesting that maternal factors may play an essential role also in clinically diagnosed ID.

Strengths and limitations

This study has several strengths, including the sample size, nationwide coverage, and access to both health and educational records. The ID prevalence of 0.9% in our study is close to 1% provided by the meta-analysis (Maulik et al., 2011). Swedish pediatric healthcare is publically funded with universal access to both primary and nonprimary healthcare (Wettergren, Blennow, Hjern, Soder, & Ludvigsson, 2016). A large number of relatives of ID probands allowed us to provide precise estimates of familial risk for several types of kinship. The RRs in this article are the first estimated for ID using a reference from the general population. We do however acknowledge some limitations. First, our study focused only on Swedish born individuals, not including immigrants. Second, despite the universal access to health care we cannot eliminate the possibility that socially disadvantaged groups such as individuals with substance misuse, experiencing homelessness or involved with justice system, could be less likely to seek psychiatric care and ID can remain underdiagnosed. Also, differences in behavioral manifestation and comorbid disorders between females and males with ID may diminish the likelihood of diagnosing ID in females.

Third, data retrieved from registers are subject to left-censoring with missing data prior to data collection. In our study, the actual time point for ID diagnosis might be earlier then the first record of ID diagnosis. For example, HURPID provides information on the date of graduation from upper secondary schools for pupils with ID (typically after the age of 18 year), not the genuine date of ID diagnosis. Similarly, the precise date of diagnosis is not available for ID individuals diagnosed in outpatient care prior to 2001, when those data has been included in NPR. Those factors can lead to either over-or underestimation of familial risk. Some bias towards higher risk estimates may be present due to assortative mating described for cognitive abilities (Plomin & Deary, 2015).

Conclusions and clinical implications

The findings are of value for planning and interpreting etiological studies in ID. This study provided strong evidence on the familial etiology of ID, mostly related to genetic factors. Precise and up-to-date risk estimates provided by this study will benefit clinicians and families in understanding the risk of ID in the family and the whole population. The significant familial loading in ID suggests that the vulnerabilities of family members should be taken into account in intervention programs in ID.

Gender differences in fresh vegetable intake from 1979 to 2017 in low sex-inequality Finland: The magnitude of the gap between genders doubled across the study period

Kähäri, A. (2021), "Gender differences in fresh vegetable intake from 1979 to 2017 in Finland", British Food Journal, Dec 28 2021. https://doi.org/10.1108/BFJ-09-2021-1004

Abstract

Purpose: Previous research has shown that in contemporary societies, women have a healthier dietary intake than men. However, no research has examined how this gender gap develops over the long term. The present study examined how gender differences in fresh vegetable intake frequency have evolved from 1979 to 2017 in Finland and whether differences are affected by age or educational level.

Design/methodology/approach: The data were derived from annually repeated, nationally representative “Health Behaviour and Health among the Finnish Adult Population” and “Regional Health and Well-being (RHW)” surveys on the health habits of the Finnish population. The dataset is a time series of repeated cross-sectional surveys. In total, the data sample comprised 161,996 Finns aged 20–64 years. Descriptive methods and logistic regression were used for the analysis.

Findings: During 1979–2017, the prevalence of daily vegetable intake increased from 12 to 35% among men and from 18 to 56% among women. Thus, the magnitude of the gap between genders doubled across the study period. The increased vegetable intake was partly explained by the changing education and age structures of society. Potential explanations and avenues for future research are also discussed. Policy implications depend on whether the findings are interpreted as a case of health differences or health inequality.

Originality/value: This study used a long time series to analyse how gender differences in vegetable intake have evolved in a Nordic welfare state context. It showed that the gap in fresh vegetable intake between men and women has widened.

There exist fundamental geometrical principles that result from the inherent interplay between movement and organisms’ internal representation of space: Animals spontaneously reduce the world into a series of sequential binary decisions

The geometry of decision-making in individuals and collectives. Vivek H. Sridhare et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, December 14, 2021 118 (50) e2102157118; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2102157118

Significance: Almost all animals must make decisions on the move. Here, employing an approach that integrates theory and high-throughput experiments (using state-of-the-art virtual reality), we reveal that there exist fundamental geometrical principles that result from the inherent interplay between movement and organisms’ internal representation of space. Specifically, we find that animals spontaneously reduce the world into a series of sequential binary decisions, a response that facilitates effective decision-making and is robust both to the number of options available and to context, such as whether options are static (e.g., refuges) or mobile (e.g., other animals). We present evidence that these same principles, hitherto overlooked, apply across scales of biological organization, from individual to collective decision-making.

Abstract: Choosing among spatially distributed options is a central challenge for animals, from deciding among alternative potential food sources or refuges to choosing with whom to associate. Using an integrated theoretical and experimental approach (employing immersive virtual reality), we consider the interplay between movement and vectorial integration during decision-making regarding two, or more, options in space. In computational models of this process, we reveal the occurrence of spontaneous and abrupt “critical” transitions (associated with specific geometrical relationships) whereby organisms spontaneously switch from averaging vectorial information among, to suddenly excluding one among, the remaining options. This bifurcation process repeats until only one option—the one ultimately selected—remains. Thus, we predict that the brain repeatedly breaks multichoice decisions into a series of binary decisions in space–time. Experiments with fruit flies, desert locusts, and larval zebrafish reveal that they exhibit these same bifurcations, demonstrating that across taxa and ecological contexts, there exist fundamental geometric principles that are essential to explain how, and why, animals move the way they do.

Keywords: ring attractormovement ecologynavigationcollective behaviorembodied choice

      Model Features That Determine Network Behavior

There are key features that are essential to produce the bifurcation patterns observed in our data (i.e., for any decision-making system to break multichoice decisions to a series of binary decisions).

• 1) Feedback processes that provide the system directional persistence and drive such bifurcations are crucial to exhibit the observed spatiotemporal dynamics. In the neural system, this is present in the form of local excitation and long-range/global inhibition (7, 18, 19). However, as shown in our model of collective animal behavior below, we expect that similar dynamics will be observed if the necessary feedbacks are also incorporated into other models of decision-making, such as to PDF sum–based models, for example (20).

• 2) Observing similar decision dynamics requires a recursive (embodied) interplay between neural dynamics and motion in continuous space. Here, the animal’s geometrical relationship with the targets changes as it moves through physical space. Since neural interactions depend on this changing relationship, space provides a continuous variable by which the individual traverses the time-varying landscape of neural firing rates.

These essential features, along with the observed animal trajectories in the two-choice context, are reminiscent of collective decision-making in animal groups [models (41⇓⇓⇓–45), fish schools (46), bird flocks (47), and baboon troops (26)]. Below, we consider an established model of collective decision-making (41) to draw links between these two scales of biological organization—decision-making in the brain and decision-making in animal groups.

Why It Is Hard to Be Happy with What We Have... Habituation to positive changes in lifestyle and constant comparisons leave us unhappy even in the best of conditions. Why?

Dubey, Rachit, Tom Griffiths, and Peter Dayan. 2021. “Why It Is Hard to Be Happy with What We Have: A Reinforcement Learning Perspective.” PsyArXiv. December 31. doi:10.31234/osf.io/8jd2x

Abstract: The pursuit of happiness is not easy. Habituation to positive changes in lifestyle and constant comparisons leave us unhappy even in the best of conditions. Given their disruptive impact, it remains a puzzle why habituation and comparisons have come to be a part of cognition in the first place. Here, we present computational evidence that suggests that these features might play an important role in promoting adaptive behavior. Using the framework of reinforcement learning, we explore the benefit of employing a reward function that, in addition to the reward provided by the underlying task, also depends on prior expectations and relative comparisons. We find that while agents equipped with this reward function are less "happy", they learn faster and significantly outperform standard reward-based agents in a wide range of environments. The fact that these features provide considerable adaptive benefits might explain why we have the propensity to keep wanting more, even if it contributes to depression, materialism, and overconsumption.

Discussion

Sensibly or not, people often find it hard to remain happy with what they have. One enjoys a newly bought car for a time, but over time it brings fewer positive feelings and one eventually begins dreaming of the next rewarding thing to pursue. As a consequence, we keep getting lured by the promise of unfathomable future happiness whilst hardly enjoying the riches of the present. Here, we have presented a series of simulations that suggest that these seemingly maladaptive “flaws” might perhaps play an important role in promoting adaptive behavior. Using the idea of reward design, we explored the value of adaptive expectations and relative comparisons as a useful reward signal and found that across a wide range of environments, these features help an agent learn faster and be more robust to changes in the environment. Thus, even though comparisons to the past and future often induce unhappiness, they might still motivate one to strive to escape the unpleasant or (even worse) mundane present.

While relative comparisons were generally advantageous, we also found that they can be quite harmful in certain settings. For instance, in an environment with many similar options, comparisons resulted in constant dissatisfaction without any improvement in performance (Exp 2a). Thus, one lesson that can be taken from our results is that when presented with many similar choices, a decision-maker is better off curtailing comparisons and making decisions without relying on them. This also accords with the view that given the explosion of choices in modern times, learning to accept good enough will increase satisfaction and simplify decision-making35, 67. However, this leaves an open question about how a decision-maker can come to manage and curtail comparisons in the first place. Future research should investigate possible mechanisms via which an agent can set and learn its own aspiration level, which can then provide insights on how to design interventions to reduce comparisons. A promising direction in this vein could be studying how aspiration levels might be shaped via a functional relationship between a model-free and model-based system68, 69. For instance, a model-based system might alter the aspiration level of the model-free system based on fluctuations in the environment. This in turn could also be helpful to understand what leads someone to develop unreasonably high aspirations70–72 .

We observed that an agent’s internal happiness was not necessarily reflective about their performance in the environment and both being ‘too happy’ and ‘too unhappy’ led to unwanted outcomes. Agents with unreasonably high aspiration levels developed sub-optimal behavior and were also very ‘unhappy’ in their lifetimes (due to unmet aspirations). Similarly, agents that had a very low aspiration level also performed poorly as they were prone to getting stuck at a local minimum. However, these agents, despite accumulating very low objective rewards, were ‘very happy’ in their lifetimes. Together, these findings provide computational support to a growing body of research which documents the “dark side” of being too happy and are consistent with early philosophical ideas that extreme levels of any emotion, including happiness, can be undesirable73–75. Further, our finding that ‘moderately unhappy’ agents obtain the highest objective rewards can be loosely compared to the finding that people who experience slightly 21/31 lower levels of happiness are more successful in terms of income and education level compared to people with the highest levels of happiness76 .

Our results also speak to a literature in economics that explores the types of evolutionary pressures that could have produced habituation and relative consumption77–80. Similar to our work, these studies model happiness using the metaphorical principal-agent framework, where the principal (evolution) wishes the agent to be maximally fit and has the ability to choose the utility function of the agent to her best advantage. One such study shows that when an agent has limited ability to make fine distinctions (i.e., it cannot tell apart two values that are within a small distance from each other) and when it has a limited range of utility levels (i.e., it has a bound on the minimum and maximum level of happiness it can experience), then evolution would favor a utility function that is adaptive and depends on relative comparisons78.In our view, the primary contribution of these studies is showing how cognitive limitations could have favored a happiness function that depends on prior expectations and relative comparisons, and our work complements these studies by suggesting that, regardless of the agent’s constraints, this function could have also been favored because of the learning advantages it confers.

Closely related to our research is recent work that posits a role for mood in learning81–84. In these proposals, mood is formalized as the moving average of reward prediction errors (and more recently, an estimate of the Advantage function84), and is considered to represent environmental momentum. Momentum indicates whether an environment is improving or worsening and can be an important variable for adaptive behavior. Our results augment these studies by showing how (myopic) reward prediction errors (in the form of prior expectations) are a valuable aid to relative comparisons and accelerate learning in a wide variety of environments. Studying the interaction of mood with prior expectations and relative comparisons is an important question for future work.

One observation in the context of mood is that the sorts of adaptive relativities for learning that we have discussed can lead to instabilities in evaluation - modeling aspects of dynamic diseases, such as bipolar disorder81. Certainly, the subjective values of states that are taught by the subjective reward functions can vary greatly from their objective values, which is problematic if, for instance, the parameters of the subjective reward function change over time. More generally, it would be worth exploring whether dysfunctions such as anhedonic depression85–87 partly arise because of problems with subjective rather than objective components of reward sensitivity. The same issues might be more broadly relevant, given the chain of reasoning that leads from disturbed average rates of reward88 to altered motivation in depression89, potentially negative symptoms in schizophrenia90, and indeed transdiagonistically across a number of psychiatric and neurological conditions91. Nevertheless, it would be remiss not to point out the careful distinctions made between hedonic and motivational aspects of rewards, as between ’liking’ and ’wanting’52, 53, that we have blurred.

Our work has several limitations which should be addressed in order to draw more concrete parallels between our simulation-based results and psychological research on happiness. For one, we assumed that the agent designer directly provided the reward function to the agent and the agent had no say in what reward function it received. This simplification meant that we were not able to study how an agent might develop biased expectations or aspirations as well as study the consequences of an agent being able to control its own happiness. A productive avenue for future research could be studying reward design using the meta-learning framework, such that an agent learns to choose the parameters of its happiness function in response to the environment it faces92, 93. Relatedly, we also did not investigate in detail the potential interaction of discounting with prior expectations and relative comparisons (since we kept a fixed value for the discount factor in our experiments). Studying this further would be an important question for the future. 22/31 Another limitation of our work is that we did not consider how aspirations can be influenced by social comparisons. Future research could address this by conducting multi-agent simulations wherein agents also compare themselves to other agents in the environment. This could also help understand how relative comparisons might interact with other components of happiness such as guilt and jealousy. Future work should also consider how the components of happiness we have considered here might interact with other affective states such as anxiety94 and boredom95. Lastly, while our choice of environments was driven in part due to their popularity within the RL community, it is not completely clear how much our results will generalize to more real-world situations and therefore, caution must be exercised when generalizing our simulation results.

We conclude by providing some perspective on the problem of overconsumption, an extremely pressing issue that severely threatens future generations. Constant habituation to modern luxuries and ever-rising aspirations are leading us to consume Earth’s natural resources at an alarming rate and resulting in rapid deterioration of our planet96–100. Paradoxically, people in modern societies are hardly more satisfied than previous generations101–104, yet we keep becoming caught in the rat race of consumption and continuing the modern obsession of growth at all costs105–109. One implication of our results is that given how advantageous habituation and relative comparisons are in promoting adaptive behavior, it could be possible that these features might be very deeply entrenched in our minds. Thus, any steps to reduce overconsumption will also need serious considerations on how to tackle these biases of the human mind and will require the expertise of scientists from multiple disciplines. For better or worse, we are prone to becoming trapped in a cycle of never-ending wants and desires, and it is more urgent than ever to develop concrete policies and large-scale interventions to reduce habituation and comparisons.

US Economists: Increased consensus on many economic propositions, specifically the appropriate role of fiscal policy in macroeconomics and issues surrounding income distribution; another area of consensus is concern with climate change

Consensus among economists 2020 – A sharpening of the picture. Doris Geide-Stevenson and Alvaro La Parra Perez. Weber State Univ, December 2021. https://t.co/NdkWtZOUQH

Abstract: Based on an extensive survey of the members of the American Economic Association this paper compares consensus among economists on a number of economic propositions over four decades. The main result is an increased consensus on many economic propositions, specifically the appropriate role of fiscal policy in macroeconomics and issues surrounding income distribution. Economists now embrace the role of fiscal policy in a way not obvious in previous surveys and are largely supportive of government policies that mitigate income inequality. Another area of consensus is concern with climate change and the use of appropriate policy tools to address climate change.

Airbnb: Within the same neighborhood, hosts from minority groups charge 3.2 percent less for comparable listings

Laouénan, Morgane, and Roland Rathelot. 2022. "Can Information Reduce Ethnic Discrimination? Evidence from Airbnb." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 14 (1): 107-32. Dec 2021. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.20190188

Abstract: We use data from Airbnb to identify the mechanisms underlying discrimination against ethnic minority hosts. Within the same neighborhood, hosts from minority groups charge 3.2 percent less for comparable listings. Since ratings provide guests with increasingly rich information about a listing's quality, we can measure the contribution of statistical discrimination, building upon Altonji and Pierret (2001). We find that statistical discrimination can account for the whole ethnic price gap: ethnic gaps would disappear if all unobservables were revealed. Also, three-quarters (2.5 points) of the initial ethnic gap can be attributed to inaccurate beliefs of potential guests about hosts' average group quality.

The COVID-19 pandemic was associated with a decline in reported injuries related to high-heeled shoes among US women

Pandemic-related decline in injuries related to women wearing high-heeled shoes: Analysis of U.S. data for 2016-2020. Philip N. Cohen. medRxiv, Dec 27 2021. https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.12.26.21268426

Abstract

Background: Wearing high-heeled shoes is associated with injury risk. During the COVID-19 pandemic, changes in work and social behavior may have reduced women's use of such footwear.

Methods: This study assessed the trend in high-heel related injuries among U.S. women, using 2016-2020 data from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission's National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS).

Results: In 2020 there were an estimated 6,290 high-heel related emergency department visits involving women ages 15-69, down from 16,000 per year in 2016-2019. The 2020 decline began after the start of the COVID-19 shutdowns on March 15. There was no significant change in the percentage of fractures or hospital admissions.

Conclusions: The COVID-19 pandemic was associated with a decline in reported injuries related to high-heeled shoes among US women. If this resulted from fewer women wearing such shoes, and such habits influence future behavior, the result may be fewer injuries in the future.

The Science of Visual Data Communication: What Works

The Science of Visual Data Communication: What Works. Steven L. Franconeri et al. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, December 15, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/15291006211051956

Abstract: Effectively designed data visualizations allow viewers to use their powerful visual systems to understand patterns in data across science, education, health, and public policy. But ineffectively designed visualizations can cause confusion, misunderstanding, or even distrust—especially among viewers with low graphical literacy. We review research-backed guidelines for creating effective and intuitive visualizations oriented toward communicating data to students, coworkers, and the general public. We describe how the visual system can quickly extract broad statistics from a display, whereas poorly designed displays can lead to misperceptions and illusions. Extracting global statistics is fast, but comparing between subsets of values is slow. Effective graphics avoid taxing working memory, guide attention, and respect familiar conventions. Data visualizations can play a critical role in teaching and communication, provided that designers tailor those visualizations to their audience.

Keywords: visual communication, graph comprehension, reasoning, statistical cognition, uncertainty communication, data visualization

Summary of Key Guidelines

• A viewer’s visual system can extract broad statistics about the data within a display, such as the mean and extrema, within a fraction of a second. Visualize your data with histograms and scatterplots before trusting statistical summaries.

• Beware common visual illusions and confusions. Failing to start axes at zero can cause viewers to overestimate differences. When plotting data with circles or squares, map the data to their areas, not their diameters. The differences between lines in a line graph are increasingly perceptually distorted as the lines increase in slope. Do not plot intensities on intensities, which causes contrast illusions. Mapping a continuous set of numbers to a spectrum of different hues exaggerates differences that happen to straddle the hue boundaries. For accessibility of color-blind viewers, pair red with blue instead of green.

• Although extracting global statistics is fast, comparisons between subsets of values are slow—limited to only a handful per second. So use visual grouping cues to control which set of comparisons a viewer should make, and use annotation and highlighting to narrow that set to the single most important comparison that supports your message. In a live presentation, rely on language and gesture to illustrate what you see. Do this even when you feel it is not needed: Presenters suffer from a “curse of knowledge” that causes them to overestimate how well others see what they see.

• Avoid taxing working memory by converting legends into direct labels. When possible, integrate relevant text into visualizations as direct annotations. Avoid animations, which typically lead to confusion. Graphical embellishments, sometimes derided as “chart junk,” can distract if unrelated to the data, but if they are related, they can improve viewers’ memory and engagement.

• New visualization formats must be learned, so try to rely on formats that are familiar to your audience. Respect common associations, such as “up” mapping to “more” for vertical position and “more opaque” mapping to “more” for intensity.

• Graph comprehension depends on both bottom-up and top-down factors. Use bottom-up visual salience and top-down direct labels to drive attention to relevant features. Use a graph format that guides viewers to the conceptual message you are trying to convey, respecting their previous experience with graphs.

• When communicating uncertainty to a lay audience, avoid error bars, which can be misinterpreted as data ranges. Instead, show examples of discrete outcomes, either simultaneously or over time.

• When communicating risk to low-numeracy audiences, rely on absolute instead of relative rates, convey probabilities with frequencies (e.g., 3 out of 10) instead of percentages (e.g., 30%), and use well-constructed icon arrays with the same denominator.

• Supporting comprehension and understanding is especially important when the intended audience may have low domain knowledge, knowledge about graphing conventions, numeracy, or working memory capacity.

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A Bioecological Theory of Sexual Harassment of Girls

A Bioecological Theory of Sexual Harassment of Girls: Research Synthesis and Proposed Model. Christia Spears Brown, Sharla D. Biefeld, Nan Elpers. Review of General Psychology, September 10, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1177/1089268020954363

Abstract: In the United States, many adolescent girls experience sexual harassment before they leave high school, and between 20% and 25% of college women are survivors of sexual assault. Despite the many negative consequences associated with these experiences, perpetrating sexual harassment and assault is often viewed as normative. Using Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theoretical framework, we propose a bioecological theory of the perpetration and tolerance of sexual harassment of girls. We propose children’s proximal and distal contexts contribute to the endorsement of sexualized gender stereotypes, which in turn impacts high rates of both perpetration and acceptance of sexual harassment. We discuss the ways that three important microsystems—parents, peers, and schools—contribute to this acceptance. We also propose that key components of media within the exosystem work to further normalize sexual harassment of girls and women. These contexts inform children’s development, creating a culture that is permissive of sexual harassment, resulting in high rates of sexual harassment and assault in adolescence and emerging adulthood. Implications of our proposed theory for policymakers, teachers, parents, and researchers are discussed.

Keywords: sexual harassment, bioecological theory, development, sexualized gender stereotypes, gender socialization

Women avoid asking for more time to complete work tasks, even when deadlines are explicitly adjustable, undermining their well-being and task performance

Extension request avoidance predicts greater time stress among women. Ashley V. Whillans et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, November 9, 2021 118 (45) e2105622118; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2105622118

Significance: Time stress—the feeling of having too many things to do and not enough time to do them—is a societal epidemic that compromises productivity, physical health, and emotional well-being. Past research shows that women experience disproportionately greater time stress than men and has illuminated a variety of contributing factors. Across nine studies, we identify a previously unexplored predictor of this gender difference. Women avoid asking for more time to complete work tasks, even when deadlines are explicitly adjustable, undermining their well-being and task performance. We shed light on a possible solution: the implementation of formal policies to facilitate deadline extension requests. These findings advance our understanding of the gendered experience of time stress and provide a scalable organizational intervention.

Abstract: In nine studies using archival data, surveys, and experiments, we identify a factor that predicts gender differences in time stress and burnout. Across academic and professional settings, women are less likely to ask for more time when working under adjustable deadlines (studies 1 to 4a). Women’s discomfort in asking for more time on adjustable deadlines uniquely predicts time stress and burnout, controlling for marital status, industry, tenure, and delegation preferences (study 1). Women are less likely to ask for more time to complete their tasks because they hold stronger beliefs that they will be penalized for these requests and worry more about burdening others (studies 1 to 2d). We find no evidence that women are judged more harshly than men (study 3). We also document a simple organizational intervention: formal processes for requesting deadline extensions reduce gender differences in asking for more time (studies 4a to 5).

Keywords: genderburnoutwell-beingworkplace practicestime stress

Discussion

Across nine studies with over 5,000 participants using diverse populations, including online panels of working adults and undergraduate students, women were less likely to request workplace extensions, even for deadlines that were explicitly feasible and helpful to adjust. Working women expressed less comfort with requesting extensions on adjustable deadlines compared to male peers, which significantly predicted greater feelings of time pressure and burnout (studies 1 to 2d). Female students were also less likely to request an extension on an important assignment, forgoing the opportunity to improve their performance (study 4a). Our studies offered an intervention to reduce this gender difference: having formal policies to request extensions led women to feel as comfortable as men about making extension requests (studies 4b to 5).

Women were more prone to avoid extension requests than men due to their greater relational orientation, which led women to perceive extension requests as being more harmful (study 2a). In particular, women were more worried about burdening other people, such as their team members and managers (study 2d). It was the concern about burdening others—and not the concern about burdening themselves, the concern about appearing competent to their managers or themselves, or lower feelings of entitlement—that most strongly predicted women’s discomfort with asking for more time on adjustable deadlines at work. These findings build on recent research showing that women feel more uncomfortable with making time-saving purchases because they worry about burdening the service provider with disliked tasks (29).

While prior research suggests that some gender differences, such as the willingness to negotiate, reverts when women are in high-status positions (28), our data suggest that women are more likely to avoid asking for more time than men regardless of their workplace status or their manager’s gender (study 2b and 2c). The negotiations literature consistently shows that women are more reluctant to ask for more money than men because they are concerned about backlash effects for acting in gender atypical ways (46) and because they feel more energized to negotiate for the needs of others rather than for themselves (30). In an additional study (n = 906) (SI Appendix, Supplemental Study B), we found evidence for a psychological mechanism that distinguishes the current work from the salary negotiations literature. While women were more hesitant than men to ask for both time and money, women were especially concerned with impression management (i.e., appearing incompetent) when asking for more time, which explained their greater discomfort with making an extension request.

In a follow-up study (n = 799) (SI Appendix, Supplemental Study C), we replicated and extended these findings by showing that women experienced greater discomfort with asking for more time than with asking for more advice, help, or information because they were again concerned with appearing incompetent. Consistent with the results of study 2d, these beliefs were driven by negative self-conscious emotions and the fear of burdening others.

By pointing to the psychological mechanisms that underpin women’s hesitation to ask for more time, these studies offer preliminary insight into specific psychological interventions that may uniquely help women overcome their hesitation with asking for more time: helping women overcome their concerns over appearing incompetent and their concerns with burdening others. Future research should further replicate and extend these results.

One question that requires further investigation is whether women are accurate in their beliefs. If women experience greater backlash for extension requests on adjustable deadlines, as they do when being assertive in other domains (27), women’s avoidance of extension requests may be a necessary precaution. As indicated in study 3 and SI Appendix, Supplemental Study A, our data suggest that supervisors do not evaluate women more harshly, despite women predicting harsher judgement, nor are they more likely to attribute women’s requests to family or personal responsibilities. As this evidence is based on laboratory studies, future work would benefit from further examining the predicted and actual interpersonal outcomes of requesting deadline extensions in workplace settings.

We deliberately conducted our studies in contexts where the deadlines were explicitly adjustable, where there was little or no interdependence between the work of the manager and employee, and where there were no obvious negative repercussions associated with the extension request. This methodological decision provided a conservative test of our research question—if women were less likely than men to ask for more time in situations that incurred objectively fewer costs—it is also unlikely that they would make costlier requests. Of course, managers can incur costs from granting deadline extensions, such as when the requests meaningfully alter their work schedule. Employees can also incur reputational costs for requesting deadline extensions, such as when an employee makes repeated extension requests and consequently is judged negatively by their manager.

Although managers did not perceive men and women differently in response to one-off, costless extension requests, it is unclear from our studies whether managers would perceive female employees more negatively in costlier contexts. To provide an initial test of this question, we conducted two additional studies. In one study of managers (n = 1,731) (SI Appendix, Supplemental Study D), participants imagined that one of their female or male employees requested an extension that either delayed their schedule (or did not) and was the first or third request from this employee in the last 6 mo. Unsurprisingly, managers judged employees most harshly when they asked for an extension on a task that would delay their own timelines, especially when this was the third vs. first extension request. Importantly, even when extension requests delayed timelines or were the third request, managers did not judge females (vs. males) more harshly. We also replicated these findings in a consequential behavioral study where participants supervised either a female or male employee who made repeated, financially costly deadline extension requests (n = 849) (SI Appendix, Supplemental Study E). Although women worry more about seeming incompetent when asking for more time than men, our data suggest that these fears are unfounded, even in costlier contexts. More research should replicate and extend these results by varying the length and frequency of extension requests.

In study 1, we observed no moderating role of personal characteristics on the link between comfort with asking for more time, time stress, and burnout. Research would also benefit from further examining the links between demographic, job characteristics, comfort with asking for more time at work, and subjective well-being in diverse organizational settings.

Scholars have identified how women end up with more tasks at work, which contributes to their experience of greater time pressure. Women receive more requests to complete tasks outside of their formal responsibilities (14) and have a harder time delegating tasks to others at work (16). Our findings shed light on a previously unexplored contributor to women’s experience of time pressure: their reluctance to ask for more time. Compared to men, women feel less comfortable asking for more time, as they believe it will be more interpersonally costly. Therefore, women could end up with less time, affecting their performance and wellbeing.

Many things we find easy (like perception) are extremely hard to implement in machines, whereas many things we find hard (like complex math) are relatively easy; seems we have complex evolved brain specializations for the former but not the latter

Why AI is Harder Than We Think. Melanie Mitchell. Santa Fe Institute, Dec 2021. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2104.12871.pdf

Abstract: Since its beginning in the 1950s, the field of artificial intelligence has cycled several times between periods of optimistic predictions and massive investment (“AI spring”) and periods of disappointment, loss of confidence, and reduced funding (“AI winter”). Even with today’s seemingly fast pace of AI breakthroughs, the development of long-promised technologies such as self-driving cars, housekeeping robots, and conversational companions has turned out to be much harder than many people expected. One reason for these repeating cycles is our limited understanding of the nature and complexity of intelligence itself. In this paper I describe four fallacies in common assumptions made by AI researchers, which can lead to overconfident predictions about the field. I conclude by discussing the open questions spurred by these fallacies, including the age-old challenge of imbuing machines with humanlike common sense.

Men held less negative attitudes than women toward former romantic partners in samples of heterosexual respondents

Grüning, David J., Anna-Lena Loose, and Joachim I. Krueger. 2021. “Hard Feelings: Predicting Attitudes Toward Former Romantic Partners.” PsyArXiv. December 29. doi:10.31234/osf.io/t73a8

Abstract: Most research on relationship quality addresses ongoing involvements. Research on past relationships is rare. As a first step, Athenstaedt and colleagues (2020) explored attitudes toward former romantic partners in an Austrian sample of heterosexual respondents. They found that men held less negative attitudes than women. In two studies conducted in Germany and the USA, we replicate this gender difference and explore the role of three psychological predictors. Like Athenstaedt et al., we find that the degree of perceived social support before the breakup and continued friendly relations after the breakup have a positive association with ex-partner attitude. Critically, we introduce and corroborate the hypothesis that regret over having started the relationship has a negative association. However, regret also fails to mediate the association between gender and ex-partner attitude. We discuss the practical implications of these findings and note directions for future research.

The Political Impact of Immigration: An increase in high-skilled immigrants decreases the share of Republican votes, while an inflow of low-skilled immigrants increases it

Mayda, Anna Maria, Giovanni Peri, and Walter Steingress. 2022. "The Political Impact of Immigration: Evidence from the United States." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 14 (1): 358-89. DOI: 10.1257/app.20190081

Abstract: This paper studies the impact of immigration to the United States on the vote share for the Republican Party using county-level data from 1990 to 2016. Our main contribution is to show that an increase in high-skilled immigrants decreases the share of Republican votes, while an inflow of low-skilled immigrants increases it. These effects are mainly due to the indirect impact on existing citizens' votes, and this is independent of the origin country and race of immigrants. We find that the political effect of immigration is heterogeneous across counties and depends on their skill level, public spending, and noneconomic characteristics.

Teaching children that the world is a bad place predicts less success, less job and life satisfaction, worse health, dramatically less flourishing, more negative emotion, more depression, and increased suicide attempts

Parents think—incorrectly—that teaching their children that the world is a bad place is likely best for them. Jeremy D. W. Clifton & Peter Meindl. The Journal of Positive Psychology, Dec 27 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2021.2016907

Abstract: Primal world beliefs (‘primals’) are beliefs about the world’s basic character, such as the world is dangerous. This article investigates probabilistic assumptions about the value of negative primals (e.g., seeing the world as dangerous keeps me safe). We first show such assumptions are common. For example, among 185 parents, 53% preferred dangerous world beliefs for their children. We then searched for evidence consistent with these intuitions in 3 national samples and 3 local samples of undergraduates, immigrants (African and Korean), and professionals (car salespeople, lawyers, and cops;), examining correlations between primals and eight life outcomes within 48 occupations (total N=4,535) . As predicted, regardless of occupation, more negative primals were almost never associated with better outcomes. Instead, they predicted less success, less job and life satisfaction, worse health, dramatically less flourishing, more negative emotion, more depression, and increased suicide attempts. We discuss why assumptions about the value of negative primals are nevertheless widespread and implications for future research.

Keywords: Primal world beliefssuccessjob satisfactionhealthnegative emotionsdepressionsuicidelife satisfactionwellbeing

We feel that we perceive events in the environment as they unfold in real-time, but this mode of perception is impossible to implement due to biological constraints such as neural transmission delays; predictive mechanisms compensate these constraints

Perception in real-time: predicting the present, reconstructing the past. Hinze Hogendoorn. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, December 29 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2021.11.003

Highlights

*  We feel that we perceive our environment in real-time, despite the constraints imposed by neural transmission delays.

*  Due to these constraints, the intuitive view of perception in real-time is impossible to implement.

*  I propose a new way of thinking about real-time perception, in which perceptual mechanisms represent a timeline, rather than a single timepoint.

*  In this proposal, predictive mechanisms predict ahead to compensate for neural delays, and work in tandem with postdictive mechanisms that revise the timeline as additional sensory information becomes available.

*  Building on recent theoretical, computational, psychophysical, and functional neuroimaging evidence, this conceptualisation of real-time perception for the first time provides an integrated explanation for how we can experience the present.

Abstract: We feel that we perceive events in the environment as they unfold in real-time. However, this intuitive view of perception is impossible to implement in the nervous system due to biological constraints such as neural transmission delays. I propose a new way of thinking about real-time perception: at any given moment, instead of representing a single timepoint, perceptual mechanisms represent an entire timeline. On this timeline, predictive mechanisms predict ahead to compensate for delays in incoming sensory input, and reconstruction mechanisms retroactively revise perception when those predictions do not come true. This proposal integrates and extends previous work to address a crucial gap in our understanding of a fundamental aspect of our everyday life: the experience of perceiving the present.

Keywords: perceptiontimepredictionreal-timeneural delays

Individuals who are more receptive to opposing views do not change their minds more frequently than those who wear blinkers

Receptiveness to Opposing Views: Conceptualization and Integrative Review. Julia A. Minson, Frances S. Chen. Personality and Social Psychology Review, December 29, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1177/10888683211061037

Abstract: The present article reviews a growing body of research on receptiveness to opposing views—the willingness to access, consider, and evaluate contradictory opinions in a relatively impartial manner. First, we describe the construct of receptiveness and consider how it can be measured and studied at the individual level. Next, we extend our theorizing to the interpersonal level, arguing that receptiveness in the course of any given interaction is mutually constituted by the dispositional tendencies and observable behaviors of the parties involved. We advance the argument that receptiveness should be conceptualized and studied as an interpersonal construct that emerges dynamically over the course of an interaction and is powerfully influenced by counterpart behavior. This interpersonal conceptualization of receptiveness has important implications for intervention design and raises a suite of novel research questions.

Keywords: conflict resolution, individual differences, interpersonal processes, social cognition

A version dated 2018: Minson, Julia and Chen, Frances and Tinsley, Catherine H., Why Won't You Listen to Me? Measuring Receptiveness to Opposing Views (July 24, 2018). HKS Working Paper No. RWP18-028, SSRN: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3219238

The nervous system is a product of evolution, that is, it was constructed through a long series of modifications, within the strong constraints of heredity, and continuously subjected to intense selection pressures

Neuroscience needs evolution. Paul Cisek and Benjamin Y. Hayden. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, December 27 2021. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0518

Abstract: The nervous system is a product of evolution. That is, it was constructed through a long series of modifications, within the strong constraints of heredity, and continuously subjected to intense selection pressures. As a result, the organization and functions of the brain are shaped by its history. We believe that this fact, underappreciated in contemporary systems neuroscience, offers an invaluable aid for helping us resolve the brain's mysteries. Indeed, we think that the consideration of evolutionary history ought to take its place alongside other intellectual tools used to understand the brain, such as behavioural experiments, studies of anatomical structure and functional characterization based on recordings of neural activity. In this introduction, we argue for the importance of evolution by highlighting specific examples of ways that evolutionary theory can enhance neuroscience. The rest of the theme issue elaborates this point, emphasizing the conservative nature of neural evolution, the important consequences of specific transitions that occurred in our history, and the ways in which considerations of evolution can shed light on issues ranging from specific mechanisms to fundamental principles of brain organization.

4. The importance of major transitions in our evolutionary past

Evolution may occur slowly, but it can have a great effect. Across generations, it can produce large alterations with corresponding adaptations. In addition to papers that emphasize the conservative nature of evolution, our issue includes work that describes several major transitions that took place along the human lineage and made us what we are today. One significant example is the transition from an aquatic to a terrestrial environment. Malcolm MacIver & Barbara Finlay [44] discuss what this meant for sensory systems, especially vision. Due to the properties of light diffraction in water versus air, upon getting out on land our ancestors encountered a visual world that expanded dramatically, by a factor of a million in terms of sensed volume [45]. This offered a vast expansion of opportunities for navigation, as well as decision-making and planning. But there were also new challenges, such as the need for multi-joint limbs and the circuitry to control their movement and posture. All of this produced a great deal of neural expansion and diversification, leading to specific innovations that we find in extant animals, including ourselves.

Other implications of the water to land transition are discussed by Lucia Jacobs, whose paper proposes how air-breathing set the stage for hippocampal evolution in terrestrial tetrapods [46]. Her olfactory navigation hypothesis [47] suggests that olfaction is not just about odour identification, but fundamentally about using odours for spatial navigation. When our ancestors emerged onto land, olfactory sampling became linked with respiration, and Jacobs proposes that this can explain hippocampal theta rhythms, how they could be used to keep track of distance and ultimately for scaffolding mammalian memory.

Another dramatic transition started with the mammalian retreat into nocturnal life and then, about 200 million years later, a return to diurnal life in some primate species. This is described in a paper by Jon Kaas, Hui-Xin Qi and Iwona Stepniewska, which focuses on the corresponding changes to the visual system [48]. In particular, unlike other mammals, primates evolved good vision even when still nocturnal. This was made possible by their large, frontally facing eyes, as well as by a shift in the balance of visual projections to the neocortex, reducing the pathway through the superior colliculus and expanding the more direct retino-geniculo-striate pathway. This was followed by an expansion of the dorsal stream of visual processing into a wide variety of action-specific domains in parietal and premotor regions.

The paper by Paul Cisek summarizes many of these transitions, following along our lineage from chordate filter feeders to mobile aquatic vertebrates, terrestrial tetrapods, nocturnal mammals and diurnal primates [49]. Instead of framing the associated neural innovations as the superposition of new circuits at increasing levels of a hierarchy, with primate cognition at the top, he describes them as the progressive elongation of a general feedback control circuit that gradually subdivided into finer and finer control systems. That is, the highest level of the control hierarchy is the most ancient ‘hypothalamic’ regulation of behavioural state, within which new subdivisions such as abstract planning appeared as adaptations that extended control further into the world and toward more abstract interactions. The resulting architecture, he suggests, retains an ancestral organization into parallel control systems dedicated to guiding particular species-typical actions. Selection between these systems is governed by the basal ganglia, while a selection of specific actions within the chosen system occurs through a competition within each specific cortical map.

Giovanni Pezzulo, Thomas Parr and Karl Friston echo some of these points, emphasizing feedback control as the fundamental organization of the nervous system, but extend it with predictive processing [50]. In particular, they emphasize that predictive processing is by no means a recent evolutionary innovation, but rather a basic principle of vertebrate neural organization that was elaborated from allostatic control to multiple sensorimotor loops that extend in terms of both spatial hierarchy and temporal scales. In this view, cognitive abilities are not added as a new system on top of an old sensorimotor controller, but rather emerge as an extension that specializes part of it toward increasingly abstract and long-term control.

A different but compatible perspective is offered by David Leopold and Bruno Averbeck, who discuss how the vertebrate brain trains itself, a process they refer to as ‘self-tuition’ [51]. They propose that hypothalamic systems modulate telencephalic systems to bias them toward learning the types of information needed for basic functions such as feeding, seeking mates and escaping from threats, as well as orienting and navigating around the world. The complexity of the primate brain, they propose, reflects the complexity of such interactions.

A still more general theoretical treatment of similar issues is offered by Stuart Wilson and Tony Prescott, who define a mathematical framework for how layered control architectures operating at different temporal scales can coordinate to produce complex behaviour [52]. Importantly, while it is widely acknowledged that slower processes can provide the constraints on faster ones, these authors show how the inverse can also be true. The result is a control architecture without a strict hierarchy, but where different levels mutually constrain each other.