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1. Sexual selection and the ascent of women: Mate choice research since Darwin

   https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abi6308  

   Rosenthal, Gil G. ; Ryan, Michael J. ( January 2022 , Science)

   BACKGROUND Charles Darwin’s  Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex  tackled the two main controversies arising from the Origin of Species:  the evolution of humans from animal ancestors and the evolution of sexual ornaments. Most of the book focuses on the latter, Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. Research since supports his conjecture that songs, perfumes, and intricate dances evolve because they help secure mating partners. Evidence is overwhelming for a primary role of both male and female mate choice in sexual selection—not only through premating courtship but also through intimate interactions during and long after mating. But what makes one prospective mate more enticing than another? Darwin, shaped by misogyny and sexual prudery, invoked a “taste for the beautiful” without speculating on the origin of the “taste.” How to explain when the “final marriage ceremony” is between two rams? What of oral sex in bats, cloacal rubbing in bonobos, or the sexual spectrum in humans, all observable in Darwin’s time? By explaining desire through the lens of those male traits that caught his eyes and those of his gender and culture, Darwin elided these data in his theory of sexual evolution. Work since Darwin has focused on howmore »traits and preferences coevolve. Preferences can evolve even if attractive signals only predict offspring attractiveness, but most attention has gone to the intuitive but tenuous premise that mating with gorgeous partners yields vigorous offspring. By focusing on those aspects of mating preferences that coevolve with male traits, many of Darwin’s influential followers have followed the same narrow path. The sexual selection debate in the 1980s was framed as “good genes versus runaway”: Do preferences coevolve with traits because traits predict genetic benefits, or simply because they are beautiful? To the broader world this is still the conversation. ADVANCES Even as they evolve toward ever-more-beautiful signals and healthier offspring, mate-choice mechanisms and courter traits are locked in an arms race of coercion and resistance, persuasion and skepticism. Traits favored by sexual selection often do so at the expense of chooser fitness, creating sexual conflict. Choosers then evolve preferences in response to the costs imposed by courters. Often, though, the current traits of courters tell us little about how preferences arise. Sensory systems are often tuned to nonsexual cues like food, favoring mating signals resembling those cues. And preferences can emerge simply from selection on choosing conspecifics. Sexual selection can therefore arise from chooser biases that have nothing to do with ornaments. Choice may occur before mating, as Darwin emphasized, but individuals mate multiple times and bias fertilization and offspring care toward favored partners. Mate choice can thus occur in myriad ways after mating, through behavioral, morphological, and physiological mechanisms. Like other biological traits, mating preferences vary among individuals and species along multiple dimensions. Some of this is likely adaptive, as different individuals will have different optimal mates. Indeed, mate choice may be more about choosing compatible partners than picking the “best” mate in the absolute sense. Compatibility-based choice can drive or reinforce genetic divergence and lead to speciation. The mechanisms underlying the “taste for the beautiful” determine whether mate choice accelerates or inhibits reproductive isolation. If preferences are learned from parents, or covary with ecological differences like the sensory environment, then choice can promote genetic divergence. If everyone shares preferences for attractive ornaments, then choice promotes gene flow between lineages. OUTLOOK Two major trends continue to shift the emphasis away from male “beauty” and toward how and why individuals make sexual choices. The first integrates neuroscience, genomics, and physiology. We need not limit ourselves to the feathers and dances that dazzled Darwin, which gives us a vastly richer picture of mate choice. The second is that despite persistent structural inequities in academia, a broader range of people study a broader range of questions. This new focus confirms Darwin’s insight that mate choice makes a primary contribution to sexual selection, but suggests that sexual selection is often tangential to mate choice. This conclusion challenges a persistent belief with sinister roots, whereby mate choice is all about male ornaments. Under this view, females evolve to prefer handsome males who provide healthy offspring, or alternatively, to express flighty whims for arbitrary traits. But mate-choice mechanisms also evolve for a host of other reasons Understanding mate choice mechanisms is key to understanding how sexual decisions underlie speciation and adaptation to environmental change. New theory and technology allow us to explicitly connect decision-making mechanisms with their evolutionary consequences. A century and a half after Darwin, we can shift our focus to females and males as choosers, rather than the gaudy by-products of mate choice. Mate choice mechanisms across domains of life. Sensory periphery for stimulus detection (yellow), brain for perceptual integration and evaluation (orange), and reproductive structures for postmating choice among pollen or sperm (teal). ILLUSTRATION: KELLIE HOLOSKI/ SCIENCE« less
2. How can geologic decision-making under uncertainty be improved?

   https://doi.org/10.5194/se-10-1469-2019  

   Wilson, Cristina G. ; Bond, Clare E. ; Shipley, Thomas F. ( January 2019 , Solid Earth)

   Abstract. In the geosciences, recent attention has been paid to the influence of uncertainty on expert decision-making. When making decisions under conditions of uncertainty, people tend to employ heuristics (rules of thumb) based on experience, relying on their prior knowledge and beliefs to intuitively guide choice. Over 50 years of decision-making research in cognitive psychology demonstrates that heuristics can lead to less-than-optimal decisions, collectively referred to as biases. For example, the availability bias occurs when people make judgments based on what is most dominant or accessible in memory; geoscientists who have spent the past several months studying strike-slip faults will have this terrain most readily available in their mind when interpreting new seismic data. Given the important social and commercial implications of many geoscience decisions, there is a need to develop effective interventions for removing or mitigating decision bias. In this paper, we outline the key insights from decision-making research about how to reduce bias and review the literature on debiasing strategies. First, we define an optimal decision, since improving decision-making requires having a standard to work towards. Next, we discuss the cognitive mechanisms underlying decision biases and describe three biases that have been shown to influence geoscientists' decision-making (availability bias,more »framing bias, anchoring bias). Finally, we review existing debiasing strategies that have applicability in the geosciences, with special attention given to strategies that make use of information technology and artificial intelligence (AI). We present two case studies illustrating different applications of intelligent systems for the debiasing of geoscientific decision-making, wherein debiased decision-making is an emergent property of the coordinated and integrated processing of human–AI collaborative teams.« less
3. A Case for Cognitive Models in Visualization Research

   Padilla, Lace ( October 2018 , Seventh Workshop on Beyond Time and Errors on Novel Evaluation Methods for Visualization)

   The visualization community has seen a rise in the adoption of user studies. Empirical user studies systematically test the assumptions that we make about how visualizations can help or hinder viewers’ performance of tasks. Although the increase in user studies is encouraging, it is vital that research on human reasoning with visualizations be grounded in an understanding of how the mind functions. Previously, there were no sufficient models that illustrate the process of decision-making with visualizations. However, Padilla et al. [41] recently proposed an integrative model for decision-making with visualizations, which expands on modern theories of visualization cognition and decision-making. In this paper, we provide insights into how cognitive models can accelerate innovation, improve validity, and facilitate replication efforts, which have yet to be thoroughly discussed in the visualization community. To do this, we offer a compact overview of the cognitive science of decision-making with visualizations for the visualization community, using the Padilla et al. [41] cognitive model as a guiding framework. By detailing examples of visualization research that illustrate each component of the model, this paper offers novel insights into how visualization researchers can utilize a cognitive framework to guide their user studies. We provide practical examples of eachmore »component of the model from empirical studies of visualizations, along with visualization implications of each cognitive process, which have not been directly addressed in prior work. Finally, this work offers a case study in utilizing an understanding of human cognition to generate a novel solution to a visualization reasoning bias in the context of hurricane forecast track visualizations.« less
4. Current Best Practice for Presenting Probabilities in Patient Decision Aids: Fundamental Principles

   https://doi.org/10.1177/0272989X21996328  

   Bonner, Carissa ; Trevena, Lyndal J. ; Gaissmaier, Wolfgang ; Han, Paul K. ; Okan, Yasmina ; Ozanne, Elissa ; Peters, Ellen ; Timmermans, Daniëlle ; Zikmund-Fisher, Brian J. ( October 2021 , Medical Decision Making)

   Background Shared decision making requires evidence to be conveyed to the patient in a way they can easily understand and compare. Patient decision aids facilitate this process. This article reviews the current evidence for how to present numerical probabilities within patient decision aids. Methods Following the 2013 review method, we assembled a group of 9 international experts on risk communication across Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. We expanded the topics covered in the first review to reflect emerging areas of research. Groups of 2 to 3 authors reviewed the relevant literature based on their expertise and wrote each section before review by the full authorship team. Results Of 10 topics identified, we present 5 fundamental issues in this article. Although some topics resulted in clear guidance (presenting the chance an event will occur, addressing numerical skills), other topics (context/evaluative labels, conveying uncertainty, risk over time) continue to have evolving knowledge bases. We recommend presenting numbers over a set time period with a clear denominator, using consistent formats between outcomes and interventions to enable unbiased comparisons, and interpreting the numbers for the reader to meet the needs of varying numeracy. Discussion Understanding how different numericalmore »formats can bias risk perception will help decision aid developers communicate risks in a balanced, comprehensible manner and avoid accidental “nudging” toward a particular option. Decisions between probability formats need to consider the available evidence and user skills. The review may be useful for other areas of science communication in which unbiased presentation of probabilities is important.« less
5. Strategy-dependent effects of working-memory limitations on human perceptual decision-making

   https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.73610  

   Schapiro, Kyra ; Josić, Krešimir ; Kilpatrick, Zachary P ; Gold, Joshua I ( March 2022 , eLife)

   Working memory, the brain’s ability to temporarily store and recall information, is a critical part of decision making – but it has its limits. The brain can only store so much information, for so long. Since decisions are not often acted on immediately, information held in working memory ‘degrades’ over time. However, it is unknown whether or not this degradation of information over time affects the accuracy of later decisions. The tactics that people use, knowingly or otherwise, to store information in working memory also remain unclear. Do people store pieces of information such as numbers, objects and particular details? Or do they tend to compute that information, make some preliminary judgement and recall their verdict later? Does the strategy chosen impact people’s decision-making? To investigate, Schapiro et al. devised a series of experiments to test whether the limitations of working memory, and how people store information, affect the accuracy of decisions they make. First, participants were shown an array of colored discs on a screen. Then, either immediately after seeing the disks or a few seconds later, the participants were asked to recall the position of one of the disks they had seen, or the average position of allmore »the disks. This measured how much information degraded for a decision based on multiple items, and how much for a decision based on a single item. From this, the method of information storage used to make a decision could be inferred. Schapiro et al. found that the accuracy of people’s responses worsened over time, whether they remembered the position of each individual disk, or computed their average location before responding. The greater the delay between seeing the disks and reporting their location, the less accurate people’s responses tended to be. Similarly, the more disks a participant saw, the less accurate their response became. This suggests that however people store information, if working memory reaches capacity, decision-making suffers and that, over time, stored information decays. Schapiro et al. also noticed that participants remembered location information in different ways depending on the task and how many disks they were shown at once. This suggests people adopt different strategies to retain information momentarily. In summary, these findings help to explain how people process and store information to make decisions and how the limitations of working memory impact their decision-making ability. A better understanding of how people use working memory to make decisions may also shed light on situations or brain conditions where decision-making is impaired.« less