Vallortigara & Rogers/Survival with an asymmetrical brain: BBS Call for Commentators

[Behavioral & Brain Sciences]

Below the proposal instructions please find the abstract, keywords, and a
link to the full text of the forthcoming BBS target article:

    Survival with an asymmetrical brain: Advantages and 
        disadvantages of cerebral lateralization
  
     Giorgio Vallortigara and Lesley J. Rogers

This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and
Brain Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal
providing Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current
research in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences.

Commentators must be BBS Associates or suggested by a BBS Associate.
To be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other
appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a
BBS Associate, please reply by EMAIL within three (3) weeks to:

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should comment on every occasion! Hence there is no need to reply
except if you wish to comment, or to suggest someone to comment.

If you are not a BBS Associate, please approach a current BBS
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http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html

If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your
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                   COMMENTARY PROPOSAL INSTRUCTIONS
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To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, it would be most
helpful if you would send us an indication of the relevant expertise you
would bring to bear on the paper, and what aspect of the paper you would
anticipate commenting upon.

Please DO NOT prepare a commentary until you receive a formal invitation,
indicating that it was possible to include your name on the final list,
which is constructed so as to balance areas of expertise and frequency of
prior commentaries in BBS.


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                    *** TARGET ARTICLE INFORMATION ***
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TITLE: Survival with an asymmetrical brain: Advantages and disadvantages of
cerebral lateralization

AUTHORS:  Giorgio Vallortigara and Lesley J. Rogers

ABSTRACT: Recent evidence in natural and semi-natural settings has revealed a
variety of left-right perceptual asymmetries among vertebrates. This includes
preferential use of the left or right visual hemifield during activities such
as searching for food, agonistic responses or escape from predators in
animals as different as fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals. There
are obvious disadvantages in showing such directional asymmetries because
relevant stimuli may happen to be located to the animals left or right at
random; there is no a priori association between the meaning of a stimulus
(e.g., its being a predator or a food item) and its being located to the
animal's left or right. Moreover, other organisms (e.g. predators) could
exploit the predictability of behavior that arises from population-level
lateral biases. It might be argued that lateralization of function can
enhance cognitive capacity and efficiency of the brain, thus counteracting
the ecological disadvantages of lateral biases in behavior. However, such an
increase in brain efficiency could be obtained by each individual being
lateralized without any need to align the direction of the asymmetry in the
majority of the individuals of the population. Here we argue that the
alignment of the direction of behavioral asymmetries at the population level
arises as an evolutionarily stable strategy under "social" pressures, i.e.
when individually asymmetrical organisms must coordinate their behavior with
the behavior of other asymmetrical organisms of the same or different
species.

KEYWORDS: Asymmetry, lateralization of behavior, brain evolution, brain
lateralization, evolution of lateralization, evolutionarily stable strategy,
hemispheric specialization, laterality, social behavior, development

FULL TEXT: http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Vallortigara-12152003/Referees/


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                      SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENT
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(1) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review

    In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) had only been able
    to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because of our
    limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota will make
    it possible for us to increase the number of books we treat per
    year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and
    biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you
    would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review.

    (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the
    basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you
    indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you
    nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of
    potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential
    impact!).



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Barbara Finlay - Editor
Paul Bloom - Editor

Behavioral and Brain Sciences
bbs at bbsonline.org
http://www.bbsonline.org
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