Biology subjects

Penke, L.

Publications and source records attributed to Penke, L..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2025

Continuous dynamics of cooperation and competition in social foraging

Real-life social interactions often unfold continuously and involve dynamic cooperation and competition, yet most studies rely on discrete games that do not capture the adaptive and graded nature of continuous sensorimotor decisions. To address this gap, we developed the Cooperation-Competition Foraging game -- an ecologically grounded paradigm in which pairs of participants (dyads) navigate a continuous shared space under face-to-face visibility, deciding in real-time to collect rewarded targets either individually or jointly. Dyads (n=58, 116 participants) spontaneously converged on distinct stable strategies along the cooperation-competition spectrum, forming three groups: cooperative, intermediate, and competitive. Despite the behavioral complexity, our computational model, which incorporated travel path minimization, sensorimotor communication, and recent choice history, predicted dyadic decisions with 87% accuracy, and linked prediction certainty with ensuing dynamics of spatiotemporal coordination. Further modeling revealed how sensorimotor factors, such as movement speed and skill, shape distinct strategies and payoffs. Crucially, we quantify the cost of cooperation, demonstrating that in many dyads prosocial tendencies outweigh the individual benefits of exploiting skill advantages. Our versatile framework provides a predictive, mechanistic account of how social and embodied drivers promote the emergence of dynamic cooperation and competition, and offers rigorous metrics for investigating the neural basis of naturalistic social interactions, and for linking personality traits to distinct strategies.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

Hormonal and modality specific effects on males’ emotion recognition ability

Successful emotion recognition is a key component of our socio-emotional communication skills. However, little is known about the factors impacting males accuracy in emotion recognition tasks. This pre-registered study examined potential candidates, focusing on the modality of stimulus presentation, emotion category, and individual hormone levels. We obtained accuracy and reaction time scores from 312 males who categorized voice, face and voice-face stimuli for nonverbal emotional content. Results showed that recognition accuracy was significantly higher in the audio-visual than in the auditory or visual modality. While no significant association was found for testosterone and cortisol alone, the effect of the interaction with recognition accuracy and reaction time was significant, but small. Our results establish that audio-visual congruent stimuli enhance recognition accuracy and provide novel empirical support by showing that the interaction of testosterone and cortisol modulate to some extent males accuracy and response times in emotion recognition tasks.

physiology↗

bioRxiv2019

Personality homophily affects male social bonding in wild Assamese macaques (Macaca assamensis)

Animal social bonds are defined as stable, equitable and strong affiliative and cooperative relationships similar to human friendships. Just as human friendships, social bonds are thought to function as alliances that generate adaptive benefits via support in critical situations. In humans, similarity in many sociodemographic, behavioural and intrapersonal characteristics leads to trust and is predictive of friendships. Specifically, personality homophily, that is the tendency of individuals to form social bonds with others who have a similar personality, may increase predictability and facilitate trust and reciprocity among partners with compatible behavioural tendencies. While evidence for social bonding in nonhumans is accumulating, far less is known about its predictors. Here, personality homophily effects on the formation and maintenance of social bonds are shown in twenty-four wild male Assamese macaques (Macaca assamensis), at Phu Khieo Wildlife Sanctuary, Thailand. Dyadic bond strength increased with increased similarity in the trait Connectedness (i.e. frequent and diverse neighbours in 5m proximity and pronounced social tolerance, as high rates of friendly approaches to and by others). To differentiate whether homophily indeed predicted bond formation or whether bonded males personalities became more similar over time, we tested the stability of the connectedness traits in a subset of immigrating males that had to form new bonds. Connectedness in these males remained stable suggesting that males do not adapt their personality to their partner. Our results support the idea of a shared evolutionary origin of homophily as a partner choice strategy in human and non-human animals. The main selective advantage of personality similarity in animal social bonds may result from a more reliable cooperation among individuals with similar cooperative behavioural tendencies.

animal behavior and cognition↗

bioRxiv2017

Genomic analysis of family data reveals additional genetic effects on intelligence and personality

Pedigree-based analyses of intelligence have reported that genetic differences account for 50-80% of the phenotypic variation. For personality traits these effects are smaller, with 34-48% of the variance being explained by genetic differences. However, molecular genetic studies using unrelated individuals typically report a heritability estimate of around 30% for intelligence and between 0% and 15% for personality variables. Pedigree-based estimates and molecular genetic estimates may differ because current genotyping platforms are poor at tagging causal variants, variants with low minor allele frequency, copy number variants, and structural variants. Using [~]20 000 individuals in the Generation Scotland family cohort genotyped for [~]700 000 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), we exploit the high levels of linkage disequilibrium (LD) found in members of the same family to quantify the total effect of genetic variants that are not tagged in GWASs of unrelated individuals. In our models, genetic variants in low LD with genotyped SNPs explain over half of the genetic variance in intelligence, education, and neuroticism. By capturing these additional genetic effects our models closely approximate the heritability estimates from twin studies for intelligence and education, but not for neuroticism and extraversion. We then replicated our finding using imputed molecular genetic data from unrelated individuals to show that [~]50% of differences in intelligence, and [~]40% of the differences in education, can be explained by genetic effects when a larger number of rare SNPs are included. From an evolutionary genetic perspective, a substantial contribution of rare genetic variants to individual differences in intelligence and education is consistent with mutation-selection balance.

genetics↗