Search results for "Sensory cue"
showing 10 items of 62 documents
Small but smart: the interaction between environmental cues and internal state modulates host-patch exploitation in a parasitic wasp
2007
International audience; The reproductive success of insect parasitoids depends on two activities, searching for hosts to obtain immediate fitness rewards (offspring) and searching for food to extend life span and enhance future reproductive opportunities. Models suggest that to deal with this trade-off and to cope with the variability of the resources they depend on, parasitoids should simultaneously integrate information originating from three distinct sources: host and food availabilities in the environment (environmental information) and the metabolic reserves of the parasitoid (internal information). We tested whether, in the parasitic wasp Venturia canescens, these three types of infor…
Sex-specific variation in the onset of reproduction and reproductive trade-offs in a boreal small mammal
2014
In seasonal environments, the optimal onset of reproduction plays a major role in defining the reproductive success of an individual. Environmental cues, like day length, weather conditions, and food, regulate the initiation and termination of the breeding season. Besides the interspecific variation in response to environmental cues, it has been suggested that due to different selection pressures, females and males can have different responses to environmental stimuli. However, this phenomenon has gained relatively little consideration, and the physiological mechanism behind these differences is not well known. Here, we report how two different environmental cues, variability of temperature…
Colour and luminance contrasts predict the human detection of natural stimuli in complex visual environments.
2017
Much of what we know about human colour perception has come from psychophysical studies conducted in tightly-controlled laboratory settings. An enduring challenge, however, lies in extrapolating this knowledge to the noisy conditions that characterize our actual visual experience. Here we combine statistical models of visual perception with empirical data to explore how chromatic (hue/saturation) and achromatic (luminant) information underpins the detection and classification of stimuli in a complex forest environment. The data best support a simple linear model of stimulus detection as an additive function of both luminance and saturation contrast. The strength of each predictor is modest …
Adolescents’ food packaging perceptions. Does gender matter when weight control and health motivations are considered?
2016
Abstract This paper investigates, first, to what extent adolescents highly involved in food are more worried about weight control and health than less involved adolescents. Second, it studies the impact of both food choice motivations on food packaging relevance, considering both, visual and informative packaging cues. Finally, these relationships are re-tested in two different frameworks: men and to this end, 589 adolescent consumers between 14 and 17 years were questioned. The interviews were done personally by an external company at the door of 30 different schools. Our results have confirmed the relevance of packaging informative cues over visual cues for adolescents highly worried abou…
Unexpected diversity in socially synchronized rhythms of shorebirds.
2016
The behavioural rhythms of organisms are thought to be under strong selection, influenced by the rhythmicity of the environment1,2,3,4. Such behavioural rhythms are well studied in isolated individuals under laboratory conditions1,5, but free-living individuals have to temporally synchronize their activities with those of others, including potential mates, competitors, prey and predators6,7,8,9,10. Individuals can temporally segregate their daily activities (for example, prey avoiding predators, subordinates avoiding dominants) or synchronize their activities (for example, group foraging, communal defence, pairs reproducing or caring for offspring)6,7,8,9,11. The behavioural rhythms that em…
Neurons in the pigeon caudolateral nidopallium differentiate Pavlovian conditioned stimuli but not their associated reward value in a sign-tracking p…
2016
AbstractAnimals exploit visual information to identify objects, form stimulus-reward associations, and prepare appropriate behavioral responses. The nidopallium caudolaterale (NCL), an associative region of the avian endbrain, contains neurons exhibiting prominent response modulation during presentation of reward-predicting visual stimuli, but it is unclear whether neural activity represents valuation signals, stimulus properties, or sensorimotor contingencies. To test the hypothesis that NCL neurons represent stimulus value, we subjected pigeons to a Pavlovian sign-tracking paradigm in which visual cues predicted rewards differing in magnitude (large vs. small) and delay to presentation (s…
Drosophila Food-Associated Pheromones: Effect of Experience, Genotype and Antibiotics on Larval Behavior
2016
International audience; Animals ubiquitously use chemical signals to communicate many aspects of their social life. These chemical signals often consist of environmental cues mixed with species-specific signals-pheromones-emitted by conspecifics. During their life, insects can use pheromones to aggregate, disperse, choose a mate, or find the most suitable food source on which to lay eggs. Before pupariation, larvae of several Drosophila species migrate to food sources depending on their composition and the presence of pheromones. Some pheromones derive from microbiota gut activity and these food-associated cues can enhance larval attraction or repulsion. To explore the mechanisms underlying…
Flexible switching of feedback control mechanisms allows for learning of different task dynamics.
2013
To produce skilled movements, the brain flexibly adapts to different task requirements and movement contexts. Two core abilities underlie this flexibility. First, depending on the task, the motor system must rapidly switch the way it produces motor commands and how it corrects movements online, i.e. it switches between different (feedback) control policies. Second, it must also adapt to environmental changes for different tasks separately. Here we show these two abilities are related. In a bimanual movement task, we show that participants can switch on a movement-by-movement basis between two feedback control policies, depending only on a static visual cue. When this cue indicates that the …
Speed on the dance floor : auditory and visual cues for musical tempo
2016
Musical tempo is most strongly associated with the rate of the beat or “tactus,” which may be defined as the most prominent rhythmic periodicity present in the music, typically in a range of 1.67–2 Hz. However, other factors such as rhythmic density, mean rhythmic inter-onset interval, metrical (accentual) structure, and rhythmic complexity can affect perceived tempo (Drake et al., 1999 and London, 2011Drake, Gros, & Penel, 1999; London, 2011). Visual information can also give rise to a perceived beat/tempo (Iversen, et al., 2015), and auditory and visual temporal cues can interact and mutually influence each other (Soto-Faraco and Kingstone, 2004 and Spence, 2015). A five-part experiment w…
Object-Guided Spatial Selection in Touch Without Concurrent Changes in the Perceived Location of the Hands
2012
In an endogenous cueing paradigm with central visual cues, observers made speeded responses to tactile targets at the hands, which were either close together or far apart, and holding either two separate objects or one common object between them. When the hands were far apart, the response time costs associated with attending to the wrong hand were reduced when attention had to be shifted along one object jointly held by both hands compared to when it was shifted over the same distance but across separate objects. Similar reductions in attentional costs were observed when the hands were placed closer together, suggesting that processing at one hand is less prioritized over that at another …