Social overshadowing: revisiting cue-competition in social interactions

Understanding how we use the information surrounding us to extract patterns and guide our behavior has been of major interest in psychological research, in both social and nonsocial contexts. On the one hand, associative learning psychology has largely documented how human and nonhuman animals learn through trials to respond to rewarding stimuli, and avoid those that are not. On the other hand, researchers in social psychology have extensively investigated how our perception of and interactions with others dynamically evolve as a result of acquiring information about them. The present research adopts a domain-general approach of learning and explores whether the principles underlying associative learning also govern learning in social contexts. In particular, we examined whether overshadowing, a well-established cue-competition phenomenon, impacts learning of the cooperative behaviors of unfamiliar interaction partners. Across three experiments using an adaptation of the iterated Trust Game, we consistently observed a ‘social overshadowing’ effect, that is, a better learning about the cooperative tendencies of partners presented alone compared to those presented in a pair. This robust effect was not modulated by gender stereotypes or beliefs about the internal communication dynamics within a pair of partners. The implications of these results for both associative learning and social psychology are discussed

Tallo database

The Tallo database (v1.0.0) is a collection of 498,838 georeferenced and taxonomically standardized records of individual trees for which stem diameter, height and/or crown radius have been measured. Data were compiled from 61,856 globally distributed sites and include measurements for 5,163 tree species. For a full description of the database, see: Jucker et al. (2022) Tallo – a global tree allometry and crown architecture database. Global Change Biology, https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16302. If using the Tallo database in your work please cite the original publication listed above, as well as this repository using the corresponding DOI (10.5281/zenodo.6637599)

Plant size, latitude, and phylogeny explain within-population variability in herbivory

Interactions between plants and herbivores are central in most ecosystems, but their strength is highly variable. The amount of variability within a system is thought to influence most aspects of plant-herbivore biology, from ecological stability to plant defense evolution. Our understanding of what influences variability, however, is limited by sparse data. We collected standardized surveys of herbivory for 503 plant species at 790 sites across 116° of latitude. With these data, we show that within-population variability in herbivory increases with latitude, decreases with plant size, and is phylogenetically structured. Differences in the magnitude of variability are thus central to how plant-herbivore biology varies across macroscale gradients. We argue that increased focus on interaction variability will advance understanding of patterns of life on Earth

La gran exposición anticomunista del Tercer Reich: Das Sowjetparadies (1942)

Despite its origin can be traced since ancient times, the Atrocity Propaganda became especially relevant as the pivotal theme of the discourses aimed to justify the extreme violence against the “other” during the major conflicts of the Twentieth Century. Few States were as skilled as the Nazi Regime to take advantage of the potential of Art to be the backbone of the process of violent socialization of its citizenship. The power of the image to show a degraded image of the enemy which, in turn, strengthened the validity of the addresser’s arguments is openly revealed at the exhibition Das Sowjetparadies held in Berlin in 1942. In this paper, we analyze the Exhibition contents and reflect on the importance of this type of actions to disseminate an anti-Communist and anti-Semitic discourse