Danielle Sulikowski

Charles Sturt University · School of Psychology

Mechanisms of animal learning and memory were traditionally studied without reference to niche-specific functional considerations. More recently, ecological demands have informed such investigations, most notably with respect to foraging in birds. In parallel, behavioural ecologists, primarily concerned with functional optimization, have begun to c...

Human faces show marked sexual shape dimorphism, and this affects their attractiveness. Humans also show marked height dimorphism, which means that men typically view women's faces from slightly above and women typically view men's faces from slightly below. We tested the idea that this perspective difference may be the evolutionary origin of the f...

Individuals select mates adaptively, adjusting their ideal partner preferences in accordance with their own mate value, and prevailing environmental conditions. They may then select a mate that falls short of these preferences if they are unable to locate or attract someone who meets their ideals. In the current study we investigated the extent to...

Make-up increases facial attractiveness. This may impress potential mates, but can also cause potential rivals to underestimate their own competitive potential. Such self-promotional behaviours may function even in the absence of potential mates, becoming signals of intrasexual competitive intent. Here we present data from two studies investigating...

Despite the impact of social media use on women’s self-perception, research has less frequently explored social media’s impact on behavioral intentions. Further, most of the research in this area has taken into account social comparison as a mediating variable, despite the extent of our social comparison being closely related to sexual competition,...

In this article we speak with leading women working in the field about how policy should be designed to deal with the rising scourge of femicide in Australian society. All have different views and some challenge the idea that all men are culpable. The idea that men need support is encapsulated in a call for a more empowered and compassionate Fifth...

The Australian Fabians Review focuses on progressive policy supported by empirical science. In this edition, multiple authors tackle issues of inequality with supporting research. Those authored by Paul Read cover Australian inequality metrics, domestic violence, technofeudalism and foreign policy.

Intrasexual competition between women is often covert, and targets rivals' appearance. Here we investigate appearance advice as a vector for female intrasexual competition. Across two studies (N = 192, N = 258) women indicated how much hair they would recommend hypothetical clients have cut off in their hypothetical salon. Clients varied in their f...

Recognising faces is widely believed to be achieved using “special” neural and cognitive mechanisms that depend on “holistic” processing, which are not used when recognising other kinds of objects. An important, but largely unaddressed, question is how much like a Human face a stimulus needs to be to engage this “special” mechanism(s). In the curre...

This report investigated the surveillance risks associated with so-called Family Plans (i.e., mobile phone/landline in multiple names) offered by most Australian Telecommunications companies (Telcos). Data share arrangements these Family Plans offer can be exploited to harm those involved in family and domestic violence. It is therefore important t...

Attentional biases for threatening stimuli of various kinds have been repeatedly demonstrated. More recently, sex differences in the strength of visual biases for weapons have been observed, with men exhibiting stronger biases than do women. In the current study we further explored this sex difference, by examining how immediate vicarious experienc...

Mate dollars (Li et al., 2002) are a hypothetical currency utilized in self-report experiments investigating human mate preferences. Participants are given a fixed number of mate dollars to spend across a finite number of traits to “purchase” their ideal partner – sometimes called a budget-allocation task. The more mate dollars a participant spends...

The integrative model of criminal choice proposes that cognitive and/or affective appraisals partially mediate the personality-crime relationship. The current study tests the integrated model of criminal choice across three different levels of subjective apprehension risk. Participants made hypothetical criminal choices in response to three vignett...

Threat superiority effects describe the reaction time advantage for locating threatening objects in a visual search paradigm, compared to locating visually similar non-threatening objects. They are widely reported for threats of both natural (snakes and spiders) and man-made (guns and knives) origins. Across two experiments, the current study contr...

Within-species comparisons refer to comparative analyses between (groups of) individuals from the same species. These may be naturally occurring groups within the same population such as males and females (Gur and Gur 2017), or juveniles and adults (Adjorlolo and Egbenya 2016; Lobue 2009), or groups comprised of individuals varying in other behavio...

Our perceptual sensitivity to cues of socially and sexually relevant physiological and psychological traits in others is remarkable. For such sensitivity to evolve, the directly perceptible qualities of others (which include intrinsic physical traits, such as height, weight, body odor, facial morphology, and body shape; as well as behaviorally modi...

Primates and corvids comprise some of the most enigmatic study species in the field of comparative cognition. These two groups have produced some of the strongest claims of advanced intelligence among non-human animals. Wolfgang Köhler’s The Mentality of Apes (1925) argued for a level of intelligence in apes that was primitive relative to that seen...

Objective: Mate choice involves trading-off several preferences. Research on this process tends to examine mate preference prioritization in homogenous samples using a small number of traits and thus provide little insight into whether prioritization patterns reflect a universal human nature. This study examined whether prioritization patterns, an...

In one of the founding texts of the field of ethology, On Aims and Methods of Ethology, Niko Tinbergen (1963) proposed that a complete understanding of any given behavior necessitates explanation at four different levels (the “four major problems of biology”): causal (or mechanistic), ontogenetic, phylogenetic, and functional. These levels of expla...

Modern attitudes to meat in both men and women reflect a strong meat-masculinity association. Sex differences in the relationship between meat and masculinity have not been previously explored. In the current study we used two IATs (implicit association tasks), a visual search task, and a questionnaire to measure implicit and explicit attitudes tow...

The ovulatory shift hypothesis proposes that women's preferences for masculine physical and behavioral traits are greater at the peri-ovulatory period than at other points of the menstrual cycle. However, many previous studies used self-reported menstrual cycle data to estimate fecundability rather than confirming the peri-ovulatory phase hormonall...

Foraging decisions reflect cost-benefit trade-offs. Costs arise from missed opportunities, ingestion (such as if prey are toxic), and acquisition (time and energy through exploration). Benefits arise from acquiring energy, nutrients and information. I present a collection of recent findings from vertebrates and invertebrates, demonstrating the brea...

We argue that the CLASH model makes a number of questionable assumptions about the harshness and unpredictability of low-latitude environments, calling into question the life history strategy approach used, and that it is inconsistent with more nuanced global patterns of violence. We suggest an alternative account for less violence at high latitude...

Burke and Sulikowski (2010) showed that faces depicted pitched backwards were perceived as more masculine and those pitched forwards were perceived as more feminine, which also affected the attractiveness of female faces. Face pitch also affects perceived dominance. Whether these effects are a consequence of the perspective-induced change in percei...

Sexual dimorphism in facial shape and beardedness are salient human secondary sexual traits that enhance perceptions of men’s social dominance. The majority of this evidence, however, comes from studies measuring explicit ratings. To our knowledge, few studies have tested whether facial masculinity and beardedness are implicitly associated with dom...

We adopt Tinbergen's (1963) “four questions” approach to strengthen the criticism by Maestripieri et al. of the non-evolutionary accounts of favouritism toward attractive individuals, by showing which levels of explanation are lacking in these accounts. We also use this approach to propose ways in which the evolutionary account may be extended and...

Conservatives differ from liberals in a variety of domains, including exhibiting greater fear and disgust sensitivity. Additionally, experimental procedures to reduce reasoning ability lead to stronger endorsement of conservative views. We propose that dual-process models of moral judgements can account for these findings, with conservatives relyin...

In this paper, I begin by presenting a detailed summary and discussion of work that has been conducted in my laboratory investigating how the cognitive mechanisms that underpin foraging may be adapted to maximally exploit resources of different distributions. My study species, the noisy miner (Aves: Meliphagidae, Manorina melanocephala) is a genera...

In many species, male secondary sexual traits have evolved via female choice as they confer indirect (i.e. genetic) benefits or direct benefits such as enhanced fertility or survival. In humans, the role of men's characteristically masculine androgen-dependent facial traits in determining men's attractiveness has presented an enduring paradox in st...

Female masculinity preference depends on a host of factors, such as judgement context, hormonal contraceptive use, relationship status, and life history. Other factors inherent to the face such as pupil dilation, which serves a number of social functions, also affect facial attractiveness. We sought to examine the interaction of a host of these fac...

Previous research has demonstrated that while women prefer to look at the face of men regardless of relationship context, men preferentially look at women’s bodies for short-term (over long-term) relationship judgments. The current study examined how self-rated mate value and ‘mating intelligence’ correlate with the subjective importance of informa...

Same-sex and opposite-sex judgements of attractiveness probably serve different adaptive functions. From a reproductive perspective, opposite sex judgements influence mate choice, while same-sex judgements assess the quality of potential rivals. In the current study we asked participants to make attractiveness judgements of potential mates and pote...

Research investigating human behaviour patterns leading to successful mate choice, sex differences in these patterns, and their physiological and hormonal correlates has been increasing in recent years. Here I will focus on female gonadal hormones and their impact on sexual signalling, considering the evolutionary functions of these behaviour patte...

Subjective attractiveness ratings of facial portraits of women taken at the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle are higher than those of portraits of the same women taken during non-fertile periods. As female faces tilted downward are rated as more attractive and female courtship behaviours change across the menstrual cycle, we investigated whethe...

Many studies have used visual search tasks to show that especially relevant stimuli (including threatening, but also positively valenced, stimuli) are given priority visual attention. In the current study we combined a visual search task with an IAT (implicit association test) and explicit self-reports to investigate how men and women respond to me...

A host of previous research has demonstrated changes in women’s preferences for masculine faces, behaviour, sexual attitudes, etc., as a function of proximity to ovulation. However, until now, evidence of a change in skin exposure across the menstrual cycle (as measured within subjects), has only been inferred through independent ratings of attract...

The ability to utilise informative signals of mate quality provides a reproductive advantage over conspecifics. The face and voice are two such signals of the genetic and behavioural quality of potential mates. The present study uses a visual search paradigm to explore the cross modal effects of voices on the covert attention and perception of face...

Previous research has demonstrated that men’s interest in and attention to female bodies (as opposed to faces) increases for short-term (ST) relationship judgments over long-term (LT), presumably as women’s bodies change more in response to pregnancy and cyclical fertility than women’s faces, thus being a good cue to ST reproductive potential. Addi...

Noisy miners, Manorina melanocephala (Australian honeyeaters, Meliphagidae) feed on both nectar and invertebrates. The spatiotemporal distributions of these two food resources differ: nectar is a static, visually signalled resource, and invertebrates are cryptic and mobile. In the present study, we investigated whether birds would forage more effic...

Burke and Sulikowski (2010) showed that the forward or backward head tilt angle (pitch) of a human face influenced both attractiveness and masculinity/femininity ratings. Face pitch has also been shown to impact dominance ratings, as has eye gaze direction. The current study was designed to investigate whether the effect of face pitch on attractive...

Noisy miners (Australian honeyeaters) feed on both nectar and invertebrates. The distributions of these two food resources differ: nectar is a static, visually cued resource that depletes and replenishes in a predictable way while invertebrates are cryptic and mobile. If the cognitive mechanisms that underpin foraging have been adapted to increase...

In visual displays, people locate potentially threatening stimuli, such as snakes, spiders, and weapons, more quickly than similar benign stimuli, such as beetles and gadgets. Such biases are likely adaptive, facilitating fast responses to potential threats. Currently, and historically, men have engaged in more weapons-related activities (fighting...

Subjective attractiveness ratings of facial portraits of women taken at the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle are higher than those of portraits of the same women taken during non-fertile periods. Since female faces tilted downward are rated as more attractive and female courtship behaviours change across the menstrual cycle, we investigated whe...

The hunter-gatherer hypothesis of SILVERMAN and EALS (1992) is the best-supported evolutionary explanation for sex differences in human spatial cognitive skills. It proposes that the sex differences in performance on a range of spatial task are a consequence of males (who hunted much more than did females) being better adapted to encode space alloc...

Noisy miners (an Australian honeyeater) feed on both nectar and invertebrates. The distributions of these two food resources differ: nectar is a static, visually cued resource that depletes and replenishes in a predictable way while invertebrates are cryptic and mobile. If the cognitive mechanisms that underpin foraging have been adapted to increas...

Human activity can dramatically affect biodiversity, often by introducing non-native species, or by increasing the abundance of a small number of native species. Management strategies aimed at conserving biodiversity need to be informed by the actual impacts of highly abundant species, whether native or introduced. In this study we examined charact...

Even in multicultural nations interracial relationships and marriages are quite rare, one reflection of assortative mating. A relatively unexplored factor that could explain part of this effect is that people may find members of their own racial group more attractive than members of other groups. We tested whether there is an own-race preference in...

People are highly sensitive to configural variation in faces. This sensitivity allows for discrimination between different identities and detection of facial expressions and is reduced when faces are inverted. The extent to which configural sensitivity facilitates judgements of facial attractiveness is not well understood, but is the focus of the c...

Several theories have been proposed to account for the evolution of homosexual behaviour in humans. These theories can be broadly divided into two groups: those that contend that the homosexual individual reproduces, attaining direct fitness benefits and those that explain the maintenance of homosexual individuals in the population via inclusive fi...

Stereoscopic information has been shown to improve our ability to recognise individuals across depth rotations, but do not affect our ability to match faces shown at different sizes (Burke et al, 2007). This is presumably because viewpoint generalisation (but not size generalisation) is facilitated by using whatever structural information can be de...

People are highly sensitive to configural variation in faces. This sensitivity allows for discrimination between different identities and detection of facial expressions and is reduced when faces are inverted. The extent to which configural sensitivity facilitates judgements of facial attractiveness is not well understood, but is the focus of the c...

In this paper we examine the holistic processing of faces from an evolutionary perspective, clarifying what such an approach entails, and evaluating the extent to which the evidence currently available permits any strong conclusions. While it seems clear that the holistic processing of faces depends on mechanisms evolved to perform that task, our r...

Previous reports of faster responses to threatening compared to benign stimuli in visual search tasks, have argued that threatening targets are faster to engage, and slower to disengage, attention than benign targets. This study re-interprets previous findings and resolves inconsistencies by replacing the theory of differential disengagement of att...

There is a great deal of evidence that faces are processed more holistically and/or configurally than are other categories of objects. This has frequently been interpreted as evidence that we have specialised neural mechanisms to process faces, which, if true, raises important questions about the evolutionary origin of the face-processing module, a...

Invasive species present economic and ecological challenges worldwide. In many cases we are not aware of the full effect they have on the environment, the extent of any damage, or the factors contributing to their success. In this study we examined the foraging aggression of wild Common Mynas (Sturnus tristis) as a potential explanation for their i...

Previous reports of faster responses to threatening compared to benign stimuli in visual search tasks, have argued that threatening targets are faster to engage, and slower to disengage, attention than benign targets. This study re-interprets previous findings and resolves inconsistencies by replacing the theory of differential disengagement of att...

Previous reports of faster responses to threatening compared to benign stimuli in visual search tasks have argued that threatening targets are faster to engage and slower to disengage attention than benign targets. This study reinterprets previous findings and resolves inconsistencies in the literature by replacing the theory of differential diseng...

A variety of nectarivorous species have demonstrated a bias to ‘win-shift’ (shift away from/avoid locations that have recently yielded food, as opposed to ‘win-stay’ behaviour where the animal returns to such locations). Since recently exploited !owers contain no nectar, the win-shift bias is a candidate for an adaptive specialization of cognition....

The tendency to win-shift (to better learn to avoid, rather than return to, recently rewarded locations) has been demonstrated in a variety of nectarivorous birds and in honeybees. It is hypothesized to be a cognitive adaptation to the depleting nature of nectar. In the present study we report the first attempt to test for a win-shift bias in a nec...

Holistic/configural processing has typically been found for faces, but not for other categories of objects. This raises important questions about the nature of the face processing mechanism, the kinds of stimuli that can activate it, and about the evolutionary origin of a face - processing module, if one exists. To begin to address these questions,...

Recent attempts to integrate function and mechanism have resulted in an appreciation of the relevance of forager psychology to understanding the functional aspects of foraging behaviour. Conversely, an acknowledgement of the functional diversity of learning mechanisms has led to greater understanding of the adaptive nature of cognition. In this pap...

An article recently published in the prestigious scientific journal, Biology Letters, claims to have been written by 25 8-10 year olds. The paper, Blackawton bees, co-authored by Beau Lotto from UCL (and the 25 8-10 year olds), reports the data collected from an experiment it claims was designed and conducted by the primary school children. The pap...

The adaptationist perspective investigates how an animal's cognition has been shaped by the informational properties of the environment. The information that is useful may vary from one context to another. In the current study we examine how manipulating the foraging context (the type of resource being foraged) could affect the way spatial informat...

Open-field mazes are routinely used to study the spatial cognitive abilities of birds and are often implicitly assumed to be suitable tests of generic spatial memory ability. In recent years there has been extensive research motivated by considerations of an animals' ecology, demonstrating potential examples of specialisations of spatial cognition,...

In a previous study we allowed noisy miner birds to forage for either nectar or invertebrates in an open-field analogue of the radial arm maze. Introducing a manipulation that disrupted the birds’ movement had a greater detrimental effect on performance when birds were foraging for invertebrates than when they were foraging for nectar. In the study...

Search is an important tool in an ant's navigational toolbox to relocate food sources and find the inconspicuous nest entrance. In habitats where landmark information is sparse, homing ants travel their entire home vector before searching systematically with ever increasing loops. Search strategies have not been previously investigated in ants that...

The tendency to avoid locations that have recently yielded food (to ‘win-shift’) has been identified in a variety of nectar-feeding species and has been interpreted as an adaptation to the spatio-temporal distribution of nectar. In the omnivorous Noisy Miner bird (Manorina melanocephala), this behaviour is sensitive to foraging context, manifesting...

To explore a radial arm maze efficiently animals may use a variety of strategies including spatial working memory and movement algorithms. In the study reported here noisy miner birds (Manorina melanocephala) were tested using an open-field analogue of the radial arm maze, and were rewarded with either nectar or mealworms. When foraging for nectar,...

A variety of social insects use visual cues for homing. In this study, we examine the possible factors affecting the learning and retention of nest-associated visual cues by the Australian desert ant Melophorus bagoti and the manner in which such cues are encoded by foraging ants. We placed four prominent cylindrical landmarks around a nest and tra...

Theories of neuroecology assume that cognitive abilities are subject to natural selection and, therefore, are adapted to solve the particular problems presented by an animal’s ecological niche. One hypothesised example of such an adaptive specialisation, is the tendency of various nectarivorous species to perform better on tasks requiring them to a...

The tendency of nectarivorous birds to perform better on tasks requiring them to avoid previously rewarding locations (to win-shift) than to return to them (win-stay) has been explained as an adaptation to the depleting nature of nectar. This interpretation relies on the previously untested assumption that the win-shift tendency is not associated w...

The tendency of nectar feeding birds to better learn to avoid previously rewarding locations (to win-shift) than to return to them (win-stay), has been interpreted as an adaptation to the spatio-temporal distribution of their main food source. The nectar in a flower typically depletes in a single feed, making that flower an unprofitable place to fo...