Oxytocin has gained a reputation in popular culture as a simple "love drug" or "cuddle hormone", yet emerging biological evidence indicates that the effects of oxytocin are complex, mediating a suite of behavioral traits that range from ultrasocial to antisocial. Here we provide a comprehensive review to assess the salience of oxytocin in the lives of free-living social mammals. We reviewed the literature to understand the potential effects of oxytocin in promoting prosocial and antisocial behaviors in non-human mammals. Our review highlights a strong bias for studies of model organisms in highly-controlled settings, and emerging evidence for oxytocin's antisocial, context-specific and sex-specific effects. We discuss the results of the review in the context of insights gained from a pilot study aimed to investigate the potential for oxytocin to promote social cohesion in free-living yellow-bellied marmots (Marmota flaviventer). Our field experiment offers an example of the diverse issues that arise when conducting oxytocin manipulations in ecologically relevant contexts. Our synthesis highlights the challenges associated with acquiring adequate sample sizes for field-based, manipulative studies that require standardized measures of social behavior. Taken together, our findings lead us to join others in calling for revision of a simplistic view of oxytocin's role in regulating patterns of behavior. We draw from classical approaches used to study the mechanistic basis of behavior and offer a useful guide for disentangling these effects while appreciating the complex actions of oxytocin in shaping mammalian social behavior.
Conservation agriculture (CA) is based on 3 principles, namely reduced soil disturbance, permanent soil cover, and more complex and legume-rich rotations; and multiple studies have shown its positive impacts. Because CA relies on a variety of ecological processes, it is more deeply rooted in a specific ecological context than conventional agriculture. The complexity of these processes makes it difficult to elaborate general recipes to be applied by farmers, who therefore need to learn to make their own choices adapted to their own agroecosystem. Consequently, helping farmers to move toward CA requires supporting them in learning to develop their own practices. Farmers' learning remains poorly investigated at the individual level, with in particular very little work focusing on learning in CA. We hypothesize that the processes involved in learning to practice CA may differ from those involved in conventional agriculture: for instance, the current lack of detailed reference documents may induce farmers to experiment more. Against this background, we here aimed at describing how farmers experienced in CA learn, by qualifying their learning mechanisms and processes. To do so, we conducted five comprehensive interviews with farmers experienced in CA, and then inductively analyzed the data to explore the diversity of learning mechanisms involved, i.e. the elementary actions or cognitive activities which, organized together, constitute a learning process. We, thus, propose a descriptive framework of non-ordered and non-obligatory learning mechanisms that appear to be mobilized by farmers experienced in conservation agriculture, as a first step toward a deeper analysis of their learning processes. We further emphasize the often unintentional aspect of learning, as well as the importance, for farmers who wish to implement CA practices, of developing new standards of comparison. A better understanding of these learning processes would help improving extension services and training for farmers.
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