@inproceedings {2021,
	title = {Adaptation-By-Proxy: Contagion Effect of Social Buffering in an Artificial Society},
	booktitle = {ALIFE 2021: The 2021 Conference on Artificial Life},
	year = {2021},
	note = {<a href="https://direct.mit.edu/isal/proceedings/isal/90/102917">Download</a> (Open Access)
},
	month = {07/2021},
	publisher = {The MIT Press},
	organization = {The MIT Press},
	abstract = {The {\textquotedblleft}social buffering{\textquotedblright} phenomenon proposes that social support facilitates wellbeing by reducing stress in a number of different ways. While this phenomenon may benefit agents with social support from others, its potential effects on the wider social group are less clear. Using a biologically-inspired artificial life model, we have investigated how some of the hypothesised hormonal mechanisms that underpin the {\textquotedblleft}social buffering{\textquotedblright} phenomenon affect the wellbeing and interactions of agents without social support across numerous social and physical contexts. We tested these effects in a small, rank-based society, with half of the agents endowed with numerous hormonal mechanisms associated with {\textquotedblleft}social buffering{\textquotedblright}, and half without. Surprisingly, our results found that these {\textquotedblleft}social buffering{\textquotedblright} mechanisms provided survival-related advantages to agents without social support across numerous conditions. We found that agents with socially-adaptive mechanisms themselves become a proxy for adaptation, and suggest that, in some (artificial) societies, {\textquotedblleft}social buffering{\textquotedblright} may be a contagious phenomenon.},
	doi = {10.1162/isal_a_00424},
	url = {https://direct.mit.edu/isal/proceedings/isal/90/102917},
	author = {Imran Khan and Lola Ca{\~n}amero}
}
@inproceedings {9998,
	title = {Adaptation and the Social Salience Hypothesis of Oxytocin: Early Experiments in a Simulated Agent Environment},
	booktitle = {Proc. 2nd Symposium on Social Interactions in Complex Intelligent Systems (SICIS)},
	series = {Proc. 2018 Convention of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB 2018)},
	year = {2018},
	note = {<a href="http://aisb2018.csc.liv.ac.uk/PROCEEDINGS\%20AISB2018/Social\%20Interactions\%20in\%20Complex\%20Intelligent\%20Systems\%20(SICIS)\%20-\%20AISB2018.pdf">Download full proceedings</a> (PDF)},
	month = {04/2018},
	pages = {2{\textendash}9},
	address = {Liverpool, UK},
	abstract = {Allostasis is a mechanism that permits adaptation of an organism as a response to changing (physical or social) environmental conditions. Allostasis is driven by a number of factors, including regulation through hormonal mechanisms. Oxytocin (OT) is a hormone that has been found to play a role in regulating social behaviours and adaptation. However, the concrete effects that OT promotes remain unclear and controversial. One of these effects is on the attention paid to social cues (social salience). Two opposing hypotheses have been proposed. One hypothesis is that adaptation is achieved by increasing attention to social cues (increasing social salience), the other that adaptation is achieved by decreasing attention to social cues (decreasing social salience). In this paper, we present agent simulation experiments that test these two contrasting hypotheses under different environmental conditions related to food availability: a comfortable environment, a challenging environment, and a very challenging environment. Our results show that, for the particular conditions modelled, increased social salience through the release of simulated oxytocin presents significant advantages in the challenging conditions.},
	url = {http://aisb2018.csc.liv.ac.uk/PROCEEDINGS\%20AISB2018/Social\%20Interactions\%20in\%20Complex\%20Intelligent\%20Systems\%20(SICIS)\%20-\%20AISB2018.pdf},
	author = {Imran Khan and Lewis, Matthew and Lola Ca{\~n}amero}
}
