[3] In a parallel literature, psychologists studying learning and cognition have spent years documenting the many ways that experiences in the past can affect the behavior an individual expresses at the current time.
[6][7] This form of plasticity highlights the concept that external stimuli in a given context activate neural and hormonal mechanisms or pathways which already exist inside the organism.
[6] A major difference between developmental and contextual plasticity is the inherent trade-off between the time of interpreting a stimulus and exhibiting a behavior.
In such cases, the same set of external or internal stimuli can lead to coordinated changes in suites of behavioral, morphological and physiological traits.
Contextual plasticity is typically studied by presenting the same individual with different external stimuli, and then recording their responses to each stimulus.
For instance, ants can rapidly alter their running speed in response to changes in the external temperature.
For instance, this experimental design was used to demonstrate that the density at which moth larvae were raised affected the courtship signals that they produced as adults.
Potential plasticity refers to the ability of a given phenotypic trait to vary in its response to variation in stimuli, experiences, or environmental conditions.
Realized plasticity, on the other hand, refers to the extent to which a given phenotype actually varies in response to changes in a specific stimulus, experience, or environmental condition.
Developmental plasticity is particularly important in terms of survival in novel environments, because trial-and-error processes such as learning (which encompass both phenotype sampling and environmental feedback) have the ability to immediately shift an entire population close to a new adaptive norm.
However, this would only be the case if the costs of maintaining the ability to change phenotype was lower than the benefit conferred to the individual.