Search

Recently, considerable attention has been paid to animal adaptations to anthropogenic environments, such as foraging in burned areas where plants are promoted to regenerate by anthropogenic burning. However, among primates, reports on the utilization of resources that are available immediately after burning have been limited to a few primate species. In this study, we investigated and compared the activity budgets and food categories of a group of patas monkeys (Erythrocebus patas) in freshly burned areas by comparing them with those in previously burned areas and unburned areas. We also assessed the proportion of time spent in the freshly burned area before and after the fire: GPS collars were fitted to five of the six adults in the group, and their patterns when they traveled toward freshly burned and unburned feeding areas were compared. Patas monkeys spent more time in freshly burned areas after the fire, and they visited such areas mostly for feeding, particularly on roasted seeds of Cissus populnea. Furthermore, patas monkeys traveled faster and in a more synchronized way toward freshly burned areas. This "apparent goal-directed" travel began at least 1 h before arriving. Results indicate that the group recognized freshly burned areas as valuable, and the monkeys were able to travel in a goal-directed manner to them despite their variable locations. We suggest that smoke from freshly burned areas provides a visual cue with which to orient to the burned areas. Our results also support the notion that some primates are flexible enough to adapt to and benefit from anthropogenic environmental changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated the contribution of multisensory predictions to body ownership, and beyond, to the integration of body-related signals. Contrary to the prevailing idea, according to which, to be integrated, cues necessarily have to be perceived simultaneously, we instead proposed the prediction-confirmation account. According to this account, a perceived cue can be integrated with a predicted cue as long as both signals are relatively simultaneous. To test this hypothesis, a standard rubber hand illusion (RHI) paradigm was used. In the first part of each trial, the illusion was induced while participants observed the rubber hand being touched with a paintbrush. In the subsequent part of the trial, (i) both rubber hand and the participant’s real hand were stroked as before (i.e., visible/synchronous condition), (ii) the rubber hand was not stroke anymore (i.e., visible/tactile-only condition), or (iii) both rubber hand and the participant’s real hand were synchronously stroked while the location where the rubber hand was touched was occulted (i.e., occulted/synchronous condition). However, in this latter condition, participants still perceived the approaching movement of the paintbrush. Thus, based on this visual cue, the participants can properly predict the timepoint at which the tactile cue should occur (i.e., visuotactile predictions). Our major finding was that compared with the visible/tactile-only condition, the occulted/synchronous condition did not exhibit a decrease of the RHI as in the visible/synchronous condition. This finding supports the prediction-confirmation account and suggests that this mechanism operates even in the standard version of the RHI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research undertaken in Mediterranean pine forests suggests that the establishment of Pinus pinea L. and Pinus pinaster Ait. natural regeneration is determined by different spatial and temporal factors. In this context, we analyzed the establishment and success of natural regeneration in these two species and we examined the hypothesis that the spatial pattern of natural regeneration depends on adult tree presence, density or stand composition, while temporal patterns are typically driven by climatic conditions. For the purposes of the experiment we used 1936 plots of 0.02 ha established in mixed and pure forests of P. pinea and P. pinaster in the Northern Plateau of Spain. Plots were installed following regeneration fellings, and regeneration was monitored annually between 2001 and 2015. We used contingency tables and principal component analysis (PCA) to evaluate the main factors affecting the spatial distribution of the regeneration. PCA was also used to assess the temporal variation as a function of climatic variables. Finally, we checked for the existence of interspecific and intraspecific synchrony through Tau-Kendall synchrony analysis. We found that natural regeneration of P. pinea was more successful than that of P. pinaster over the whole of the studied period. Contingency tables showed that P. pinaster regeneration was associated with conspecific adult trees, while the relationship between P. pinea regeneration and adult trees varied depending on the regeneration development stage, i.e., seedling or saplings. Furthermore, we found that natural regeneration in both species could be enhanced through the presence of mixtures of adult trees. The spatial variability, analyzed through PCA, showed similar responses in both species, although temporal variability associated with climate variables differed between P. pinea and P. pinaster. Finally, we found different synchrony patterns affecting natural regeneration, depending on the species and the regeneration stages. In this context, temporal patterns seem to be species specific during the sapling stage of regeneration. These findings allow the observed regeneration patterns in Mediterranean pinewoods to be generalized at forest management scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To see whether there is a difference in temporal resolution of synchrony perception between audio–visual (AV), visuo–tactile (VT), and audio–tactile (AT) combinations, we compared synchrony–asynchrony discrimination thresholds of human participants. Visual and auditory stimuli were, respectively, a luminance-modulated Gaussian blob and an amplitude-modulated white noise. Tactile stimuli were mechanical vibrations presented to the index finger. All the stimuli were temporally modulated by either single pulses or repetitive-pulse trains. The results show that the temporal resolution of synchrony perception was similar for AV and VT (e.g., ~4 Hz for repetitive-pulse stimuli), but significantly higher for AT (~10 Hz). Apart from having a higher temporal resolution, however, AT synchrony perception was similar to AV synchrony perception in that participants could select matching features through attention, and a change in the matching-feature attribute had little effect on temporal resolution. The AT superiority in temporal resolution was indicated not only by synchrony–asynchrony discrimination but also by simultaneity judgments. Temporal order judgments were less affected by modality combination than the other two tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are capable of drawing a variety of inferences effortlessly, spontaneously, and with remarkable efficiency—as though these inferences are a reflex response of our cognitive apparatus. This remarkable human ability poses a challenge for cognitive science and computational neuroscience: How can a network of slow neuron-like elements represent a large body of systematic knowledge and perform a wide range of inferences with such speed? The connectionist model SHRUTI attempts to address this challenge by demonstrating how a neurally plausible network can encode a large body of semantic and episodic facts, systematic rules, and knowledge about entities and types, and yet perform a wide range of explanatory and predictive inferences within a few hundred milliseconds. Relational structures (frames, schemas) are represented in SHRUTI by clusters of cells, and inference in SHRUTI corresponds to a transient propagation of rhythmic activity over such cell-clusters wherein dynamic bindings are represented by the synchronous firing of appropriate cells. SHRUTI encodes mappings across relational structures using high-efficacy links that enable the propagation of rhythmic activity, and it encodes items in long-term memory as coincidence and coincidence-error detector circuits that become active in response to the occurrence (or non-occurrence) of appropriate coincidences in the on going flux of rhythmic activity. Finally, “understanding” in SHRUTI corresponds to reverberant and coherent activity along closed loops of neural circuitry. Over the past several years, SHRUTI has undergone several enhancements that have augmented its expressiveness and inferential power. This paper describes some of these extensions that enable SHRUTI to (i) deal with negation and inconsistent beliefs, (ii) encode evidential rules and facts, (iii) perform inferences requiring the dynamic instantiation of entities, and (iv) seek coherent explanations of observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]