Food availability differentially influences young males' and females' cognitive processes in accordance with sexual selection theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sexual selection theory predicts that additional resources will have a greater impact on males' compared with females' reproductive success. Consequently, we expected that strong cues signalling increased resource availability should augment cognitive functioning associated with long-term maximization of reproductive outcomes (inhibition, working memory) in human males. In human females, who can rely on assistance in resource-rich environments, we expected the opposite effect. We tested this prediction in lower socio-economic status children, since their poverty increased the relative salience of the cues available in a limited experimental situation. We show that cues indicative of food availability increased impoverished young males' inhibitory and working memory capacities compared with males who viewed photographs of food. By contrast, cues indicating food availability exerted the opposite effect on females. These results indicate that cues related to resource availability have differential effects on basic cognitive functions associated with strategic behaviour in males and females. The findings also demonstrate remarkable plasticity in fundamental cognitive processes in young children, even those from impoverished backgrounds.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".