While there is good evidence for an influence of ontogenetic social experience on social behaviour later in life, the mechanisms underlying these effects are little understood.
Conversely, young of slowly maturing species (e.g., Bonnet macaque (Macaca radiata), Vervet monkey (Cercopithecus aethiops) may develop behavior during their extended ontogenetic period, or, they may experience different age-specific selection pressures resulting in dissimilar age-specific strategies.
The failure of our study to find robust differences in other regions than the planum temporale may also relate to the possibility that some structural asymmetries may parallel the ontogenetic development of functional asymmetries (experience-dependent plasticity; Josse et al., 2009), and hence might be more difficult to detect in childhood than adulthood.
It is intriguing as to why this overcompensation is expressed at the final stage of the ontogeny in contrast to the homeostatic effect observed in early stages of the ontogenetic trajectory, in which at least one growth component experiences a large trade-off to maintain the RGR.
Considerations of phylogenetic and ontogenetic continuities in nature suggest that animals and infants can have experiences very similar to our own.
The ontogenetic change in male mate preferences occurs most likely because of learned mate recognition after experience with females, which in this case does not result in a preference for one of the morphs, but rather in the loss of an innate preference for androchrome females.
This mechanism supports the recognition of individuals by encoding their peculiar features (in chicks CONLERN is responsible for the recognition of the imprinting object with respect to other conspecifics) (see also [7] for evidence of experience-driven species selectivity in monkeys; similar findings in humans concern the ontogenetic development of the other species effect, [18], [19]).
Previous experience with predator encounters (acoustic, visual or physical) was estimated by evaluating the subject's ontogenetic history.
Ontogenetic transition processes are of a type where an individual ages, and at some point in time experiences an event that can only occur once for each individual.
