We explore how adults learn counterintuitive causal relationships, and whether they discover hypotheses by revising their beliefs incrementally. We examined how adults learned a novel and unusual causal rule when presented with data that initially appeared to conform to a simpler, more salient rule. Adults watched a video of several blocks placed sequentially on a blicket detector, and were the...

The distribution of bifurcation angles found in ant foraging networks has been shown to give polarity to the networks so that nestbound ants reaching a bifurcation can choose the appropriate direction. In this paper, we use an individual-based model to test the hypothesis that this distribution is an emergent property of a population of foraging ants optimising the trade-off between exploitatio...

Previous research has shown that households are sensitive to commuting distance. In particular, households beyond a threshold distance move closer to the job when they change residence. The questions which motivate this paper are-how does race affect the probability of moving closer to the job when households change residence, and is there a trade off between commuting distance and neighborhood...

In the current functional MRI study, we investigated interactions between reward and threat processing. Visual cues at the start of each trial informed participants about the chance of winning monetary reward and/or receiving a mild aversive shock. We tested two competing hypothesis: according to the 'salience hypothesis', in the condition involving both reward and threat, enhanced activation w...

This paper tries to test the relationship between trade openness and economic growth in Former Soviet Union countries after their independence in 1991. It has become an article of faith in most economic and political circles that opening up the economy to international trade will produce substantial benefits in terms of greater consumer choice and higher living standards. Higher productivity is...

We report results of a new test of the financing of large and indivisible projects – arguably the focus of most capital structure theory. We develop a filter that identifies investment spikes in a large population of firms. Consistent with the pecking-order theory we find that projects are predominantly financed with debt, particularly in large and profitable firms. However, we reject the hypot...

This paper makes two contributions to the literature. First, by employing a macrolevel institutional dataset on benefit levels for social assistance (SA) and minimum income protection (MIP) in 22 European countries in the period 1990–2013, I show that the adequacy of income support for low-income inactive individuals in European welfare states has been steadily decreasing since 1994. Second, th...

The physiology and behaviour of ectotherms are strongly influenced by environmental temperature. A general hypothesis is that for performance traits, such as those related to growth, metabolism or locomotion, species face a trade-off between being a thermal specialist or a thermal generalist, implying a negative correlation between peak performance and performance breadth across a range of temp...

We study the financing patterns of large and indivisible projects – arguably the main focus of capital structure theory – by developing a filter that identifies investment spikes in a large population of firms. Consistent with the pecking-order theory we find that projects are predominantly financed with debt, particularly in large and profitable firms. However, we reject the hypothesis that in...

Given finite resources, intense investment in one life history trait is expected to reduce investment in others. Although telomere length appears to be strongly tied to age in many taxa, telomere maintenance requires energy. We therefore hypothesize that telomere maintenance may trade off against other life history characters. We used natural variation in laboratory populations of Atlantic silv...