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

Dear Dr. Qwerty, 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: calls(a)bbsonline.org The Calls are sent to 10,000 BBS Associates, so there is no expectation (indeed, it would be calamitous) that each recipient 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 Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is familiar with your work to nominate you. All past BBS authors, referees and commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates. An electronic list of current BBS Associates is available at this location to help you select a name: http://www.bbsonline.org/Instructions/assoclist.html If no current BBS Associate knows your work, please send us your Curriculum Vitae and BBS will circulate it to appropriate Associates to ask whether they would be prepared to nominate you. (In the meantime, your name, address and email address will be entered into our database as an unaffiliated investigator.) ======================================================================= COMMENTARY PROPOSAL INSTRUCTIONS ======================================================================= 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. ======================================================================= *** TARGET ARTICLE INFORMATION *** ======================================================================= 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 animal’s 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/ ======================================================================= SUPPLEMENTARY ANNOUNCEMENT ======================================================================= (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!). *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* Please note: Your email address has been added to our user database for Calls for Commentators, the reason you received this email. If you do not wish to receive further Calls, please feel free to change your mailshot status through your User Login link on the BBSPrints homepage, using your username and password. 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