Do Cockatiels Choose Their Favourite Tunes? Use of Touchscreen for Animal Welfare Enhancement and Insights into Musical Preferences.

Music may be one of the oldest forms of art, and its appreciation is thought to be universal among humans. Music could also represent a useful tool to improve captive animals' welfare, especially if individuals can choose the music they prefer. The ability to discriminate between different kinds of music or composers has been demonstrated in numerous non-human species.

Predictors of childhood trajectories of overt and indirect aggression: An interdisciplinary approach.

The aim of this study was to advance our understanding of the development of aggression in boys and girls by testing a model combining insights from both evolutionary theory and developmental psychology. A sample of 744 children (348 girls) between six and 13 years old was recruited in schools with high deprivation indices. Half of the sample (N = 372; 40.

Grandmothering and cognitive resources are required for the emergence of menopause and extensive post-reproductive lifespan.

Menopause, the permanent cessation of ovulation, occurs in humans well before the end of the expected lifespan, leading to an extensive post-reproductive period which remains a puzzle for evolutionary biologists. All human populations display this particularity; thus, it is difficult to empirically evaluate the conditions for its emergence. In this study, we used artificial neural networks to model the emergence and evolution of allocation decisions related to reproduction in simulated populations.

Different kinds of genetic markers permit inference of Paleolithic and Neolithic expansions in humans.

Recent population genetic studies have provided valuable insights on the demographic history of our species. However, some issues such as the dating of the first demographic expansions in human populations remain puzzling. Indeed, although a few genetic studies argued that the first human expansions were concomitant with the Neolithic transition, many others found signals of expansion events starting during the Palaeolithic.

Inference of sex-specific expansion patterns in human populations from Y-chromosome polymorphism.

Studying the current distribution of genetic diversity in humans has important implications for our understanding of the history of our species. We analyzed a set of linked STR and SNP loci from the paternally inherited Y chromosome to infer the past demography of 55 African and Eurasian populations, using both the parametric and nonparametric coalescent-based methods implemented in the BEAST application. We inferred expansion events in most sedentary farmer populations, while we found constant effective population sizes for both nomadic hunter-gatherers and seminomadic herders.

Adaptive value of phenological traits in stressful environments: predictions based on seed production and laboratory natural selection.

Phenological traits often show variation within and among natural populations of annual plants. Nevertheless, the adaptive value of post-anthesis traits is seldom tested. In this study, we estimated the adaptive values of pre- and post-anthesis traits in two stressful environments (water stress and interspecific competition), using the selfing annual species Arabidopsis thaliana.