How basic components of information-updating interact to encourage variation in the results of empirical studies of within and transgenerational plasticity

Abstract

Experiences of parents and/or offspring are often assumed to affect the development of trait values in offspring because they provide information about the external environment, but it is currently unclear how information from different sources and times might combine to affect the information-states that provide the foundation for the patterns observed in empirical studies of developmental plasticity in response to environmental cues. We analyze Bayesian models designed to mimic fully-factorial experimental studies of within and transgenerational plasticity (TWP), in which parents, offspring, neither or both are exposed to cues from predators, to determine how different durations of cue exposure for parents and offspring, the devaluation of information from parents or the degradation of information from parents would affect offspring estimates of environmental states related to risk of predation at the end of such experiments. We show that the effects of different cue durations, the devaluation of information from parents, and the degradation of information from parents on offspring estimates are all expected to vary as a function of interactions with two other key parameters of information-based models of TWP: parental priors and the relative cue reliability in the different treatments. Our results suggest empiricists should expect to observe considerable variation across experimental studies of TWP based on simple principles of information-updating, without needing to invoke additional assumptions about costs, tradeoffs, development constraints, the fitness consequences of different trait values, or other factors.