Meeting Abstract

127.1  Tuesday, Jan. 7 13:30  Does the development of cerebral lateralization play a role in the evolution of personality? HURD, PL; University of Alberta phurd@ualberta.ca

Cerebral lateralization, the disproportionate partitioning of tasks to one cerebral hemisphere or the other, appears to be ubiquitous among vertebrate species. Empirical work on non-human animals demonstrates some selective advantages to such lateralization. There appears to be, however considerable variation within species in the degree to which different individuals are lateralized. The maintenance of such variation is curious. Within humans, lateralization has long been associated with behavioural variation in sexually dimorphic behaviours, and specifically with variation in the development of traits thought to be linked to pre-natal testosterone exposure. I will discuss recent work in my lab examining the links between cerebral lateralization, behavioural traits such as boldness and aggression, variation in neurological structures, and life-history variation in a cichlid fish.