Learning to act in the face of uncertainty

Our brain learns and remembers actions differently based on the level of decision uncertainty

NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY (NICT)

 

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SETUP OF THE EXPERIMENT

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CREDIT: NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY

[Abstract]

A study published online in the journal Nature Human Behaviour challenges the belief that identical physical actions are governed by the same motor memory, regardless of the decision-making process involved. Researchers from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT, President: TOKUDA Hideyuki, Ph.D.) and HONDA R&D Co., Ltd. have discovered that the brain differentiates and stores motor memories based on the level of uncertainty experienced during decision-making.

In a football (soccer) penalty shootout, a player may decide to confidently kick the ball to the right corner upon observing the goalkeeper moving in the opposite direction. Alternatively, the player might make the same kick while being unsure about the goalkeeper’s movement. Although the physical action—kicking the ball to the right—is identical in both scenarios, this new study reveals that the brain tags these actions differently based on the decision uncertainty involved. This discovery suggests that motor memories are not simply repetitions of the same action but are influenced by the cognitive processes leading up to them.

“This was a very surprising finding. This tells us that we cannot treat actions as something totally independent from the cognitive process. Both are combined to make the representation of action,” says HAGURA Nobuhiro, a senior author of the paper.

This research opens up new avenues for developing novel training methods in sports. By associating skill training with various decision-making situations, athletes can enhance their performance by refining their motor memories in context-specific scenarios.

For more information about this study, please visit the Nature Human Behaviour website (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-01911-x).

[Achievements]

In the study, human volunteers decided whether a cloud of dots presented on a screen was moving to the left or to the right. They held a robotic handle in their right hand and moved the handle towards the target in the direction of their decision (see Figure 1, Figure 2A). The uncertainty of the decision was modulated by changing the coherence level of the dots' motion. When all the dots were moving to the left or to the right (100% coherent motion), the certainty of the decision was high. When only a small proportion of the dots were coherently moving and the other dots were moving in random directions, the situation was uncertain. Participants' hand movement to express the decision was pushed by the robotic handle to deviate from the straight path (see Figure 2B), and under this perturbation, participants were instructed to make a straight movement by resisting the force.

In one of the experiments, participants were divided into two groups: the Certain Decision group and the Uncertain Decision group. The Certain Decision group learned to make a straight movement only after deciding on a high dot coherence level motion (100%). The Uncertain Decision group learned the same action, but only after deciding on a low coherence level motion (3%). Although both groups of participants successfully learned to make a straight movement in their respective decision contexts (certain or uncertain) (see Figure 3A), their performance level dropped when they were asked to perform the same movement after decisions with different uncertainty levels (different motion coherence levels) (see Figure 3B). Participants in the Certain group could resist perturbation at the same level as during their practice after a certain decision, but not after an uncertain decision (see Figure 3B; red line). Similarly, participants in the Uncertain group could perform well after an uncertain decision, but not after a certain decision (see Figure 3B; blue line). This indicates that decision and action are not independent; action is learned in association with the decision that led to the action.

In the other experiment, different types of perturbation (clockwise (CW) direction and counterclockwise (CCW) direction) were each associated with a different decision uncertainty level (see Figure 4B). If the decision uncertainty level does not differentiate the actions that follow the decision, participants should not be able to learn the two perturbations at the same time, since they would interfere with each other. However, if the decision uncertainty level 'tags' the action, participants should be able to learn the two perturbations simultaneously. Participants were indeed able to learn the two perturbations at the same time (see Figure 4A), demonstrating that the actions following certain and uncertain decisions are treated as different things in the brain.

[Future prospects]

The researchers believe that this finding may open up new avenues for developing novel training methods in sports. By associating skill training with various decision-making situations, athletes can enhance their performance by refining their motor memories in context-specific scenarios.

Figure 2 A: Screen of the experiment, B: perturbation pattern

Figure 3 A: The amount of force produced to resist the perturbation for both Certain and Uncertain conditions
             B: The amount of force produced for different uncertainty levels in both Certain and Uncertain conditions

Figure 4 A: The amount of force produced to resist the perturbation from the opposite direction, each associated with either Certain or Uncertain condition.
            B: The pattern of perturbation for each Certain and Uncertain condition.

CREDIT

National Institute of Information and Communications Technology

JOURNAL

Nature Human Behaviour

DOI

10.1038/s41562-024-01911-x 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Decision uncertainty as a context for motor memory

 

Bath student wins national award for computer game that explores mental health

UNIVERSITY OF BATH

 

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'GUILT FOR DREAMING' WAS CREATED IN JUST EIGHT WEEKS BY FINAL YEAR UNIVERSITY OF BATH COMPUTER SCIENCE STUDENT, SALMAAN ZHANG.

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CREDIT: SALMAAN ZHANG

A final year computer science undergraduate from the University of Bath has been named amongst the UK’s best student game developers, having won an award in the “Games with purpose” category at the Games Innovation Challenge 2024.

Salmaan Zhang competed against university and college students from across the country to win one of seven categories in the competition, which is sponsored by UNiDAYS and delivered by NSE (National Student Esports).

The challenge asked students in the UK to create the most innovative game in just eight weeks. Submitted entries were shortlisted and then judged by industry experts in several categories and against a number of criteria, including technical quality, look and feel, entertainment, innovation, social impact and marketability.

NSE invited a collection of leading esports and gaming professionals to judge the games in person at NSE’s office. The winners are awarded a prize of £500.

Salmaan won the ‘Games With Purpose’ category with his game, Guilt For Dreaming.

The game is an abstract adventure that delves into the dreams and nightmares of the protagonist's mind as they meet faces from their past and rekindle lost passions they once had.

The gameplay varies between different types as the protagonist reconnects with hobbies such as music, drawing and photography.

The game stood out to the judges as it allowed players to embark on an inner journey through the dreams and nightmares of the past, reclaiming lost passions and saving themselves from a bleak future.

Salmaan, who has just completed his final year studying a BSc in Computer Science, said: “Guilt for Dreaming is a mostly nonviolent video game that explores themes of mental health, friendship and identity.

“I wanted to make a game that explored mental health in a more PG-friendly way as most games often approach it as a fairly heavy and dark subject matter.

“Balancing my time between studying, working on my dissertation and making the game was tricky, but it was great being able to use my programming skills to do something I really enjoy.”

Alex Coulson, Managing Director at NSE said: “It was incredible seeing the quality of games submitted to the Games Innovation Challenge and it wouldn’t have been possible without the crucial support from UNiDAYS.

“This is just the start of helping UNiDAYS form deeper relationships with the NSE community through bringing value to their time at university.”

William Avery, Account Manager, Gaming, Tech & Entertainment at UNiDAYS said: “I had a great time playing the games the students made during the judging session and seeing first-hand some of the immense talent the NSE community has to offer, especially within the game development space.

“We are thoroughly excited to see what the partnership holds for the future and how we can enrich students’ day-to-day lives.”

Salmaan is now planning to begin another much larger game project and hopes to turn his skill for game development into a career.

He said: “Game design is one of my lifelong passions and was one of the reasons I chose to study computer science. This prize has spurred me on to make my dream of becoming a professional games developer a reality.”

 

New study adds to mystery of Cahokia exodus

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS

 

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THE REMAINS OF THE MOST SOPHISTICATED PREHISTORIC NATIVE CIVILIZATION NORTH OF MEXICO ARE PRESERVED AT CAHOKIA MOUNDS STATE HISTORIC SITE IN ILLINOIS. ARCHAEOLOGIST NATALIE MUELLER'S NEW STUDY CASTS DOUBT ON A POPULAR THEORY ABOUT WHY THE ANCIENT CITY WAS ABANDONED.

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CREDIT: PHOTO: JOE ANGELES / WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

Nine hundred years ago, the Cahokia Mounds settlement just across the Mississippi River from present-day St. Louis bustled with roughly 50,000 people in the metropolitan area, making it one of the largest communities in the world. By 1400, however, the once-popular site was practically deserted, a mass departure that remains shrouded in mystery.

One popular theory is that the Cahokia residents abandoned the settlement after a massive crop failure brought on by a prolonged drought. But a new study in the journal The Holocene by Natalie Mueller, assistant professor of archaeology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, and Caitlin Rankin, PhD ’20, suggests the Cahokians likely had other reasons to leave town.

Rankin dug deep into the soil at the historic Cahokia site to collect isotopes of carbon, atoms left behind by the plants growing when the human population collapsed and drought was common across the Midwest.

All plants use one of two types of carbon, Carbon 12 and Carbon 13, for photosynthesis, but not all plants do photosynthesis the same way. Plants adapted to dry climates — including prairie grasses and maize, an important new crop during the Cahokia period — incorporate carbon into their bodies at rates that leave behind a tell-tale signature when the plants die and decay.

Most of the other plants that the Cahokians would have harvested for food — including squash, goosefoot and sumpweed — will leave a different signature, one they share with plants from wetlands and native forests.

Rankin’s samples showed that ratios of Carbon 12 and Carbon 13 stayed relatively consistent during that crucial period — a sign there was no radical shift in the types of plants growing in the area. “We saw no evidence that prairie grasses were taking over, which we would expect in a scenario where widespread crop failure was occurring,” Mueller said.

The Cahokians are known for their ingenuity, and Rankin said they may have had the engineering and irrigation skills to keep crops flourishing under difficult conditions. “It’s possible that they weren’t really feeling the impacts of the drought,” said Rankin, now an archaeologist with the Bureau of Land Management in Nevada.

Mueller added that the sophisticated society that blossomed at Cahokia almost certainly included a storage system for grains and other foods. Residents also enjoyed a varied and diverse diet — including fish, birds, deer, bear and forest fruits and nuts — that would have kept them nourished even if a few food sources disappeared.

To get a better grasp of the diets and agricultural practices of Indigenous people of the Midwest, Mueller hopes to build a database that collects paleo-botanical evidence from across the region. “Gathering that information would help us see if people switched to different crops in response to climate change,” she said. She’s also planning to grow certain food crops in controlled conditions on campus to understand how they might have responded to ancient droughts and other challenges.

So, why did the Cahokians leave their land of plenty? Mueller suspects it was a gradual process. “I don’t envision a scene where thousands of people were suddenly streaming out of town,” she said. “People probably just spread out to be near kin or to find different opportunities.”

“They put a lot of effort into building these mounds, but there were probably external pressures that caused them to leave,” Rankin said. “The picture is likely complicated.”

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This story was originally published on the Ampersand website.

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JOURNAL

The Holocene

DOI

10.1177/09596836241254488 

ARTICLE TITLE

Correlating Late-Holocene climate change and population dynamics at Cahokia Mounds (American Bottom, USA)

 

Designing our meals with 3D printing

SINGAPORE UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY AND DESIGN

 

IMAGE: OVERVIEW OF MULTI-MATERIAL DIW 3D FOOD PRINTING. A) THE PRINTED LINE WITH TWO NOZZLES REQUIRED SWITCHING OF THE NOZZLE POSITIONS, AND THE PRINTED LINE WAS NOT COLLINEAR DUE TO MISALIGNMENT. THIS SPECIALLY DESIGNED NOZZLE PRODUCED PRINTS WITH NO BROKEN LINES. B) IMAGE OF THE FABRICATED Y-SHAPED NOZZLE. C) 3D PRINTED EDIBLE QR CODE PRINTED USING THE Y-SHAPED NOZZLE. view more 

CREDIT: SUTD

It’s raining meatballs from the sky!

Like a scene from the movies, a team of researchers from Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) has developed new ways to freely produce and customise the food that we eat.

Their findings have been published in the journal Future Foods as “Multi-material direct ink writing 3D food printing using multi-channel nozzle”.

Three-dimensional (3D) printing using food ingredients is currently the favoured approach to shaping foods with unique structures, textures, and nutritional compositions.

“Printing food in 3D enables the customisation of nutrients, the creation of aesthetically pleasing meals, and the modification of food texture to suit individual dietary needs,” explains principal investigator Michinao Hashimoto, an associate professor at SUTD looking into combining the use of design and technology in research.

Some repurposed food sources, such as okara (soybean dregs), orange peels, and insect protein, tend to ward off appetites by their appearances and origins. By adjusting the printing parameters, researchers can incorporate edible and nutrient-rich ingredients from these unusual sources, and construct an aesthetically pleasing meal. For the everyday person, this brings to the table a personalised and sustainable means to get the daily grub. At the same time, individuals with eating disorders or who have difficulty swallowing (dysphagic) can customise their mealtime experience and improve their eating habits.

Researchers have successfully printed foods using chocolate, milk, gelatin, and vegetable inks, but these constructs are largely confined to single ingredients. Existing methods struggle with seamless transitions between materials, leading to fragmented prints and increased complexity in the machine printing process, according to Dr Lee Cheng Pau, the lead researcher of the current study.  

One common approach uses multiple nozzles to hold and eject different food constituents, like having a box of colour pencils to work with. Requiring careful machine design and nozzle alignment when printing, this approach has discontinuous interfaces, where different materials overlap, and long printing times. Associate Prof Hashimoto and the team favour a different approach, taking inspiration from microfluidics. With dual inlets and a single outlet, this approach mitigates the intricacies of switching between multiple nozzles by combining the food pipelines before the printing stage.

Combining different food inks by intersecting junctions is not trivial, however. Backflows into the ingredient inlets tend to happen with fluids of different rheological properties—such as flow and viscosity. For example, squeezing out a dab of toothpaste requires more strength than pouring out water. If the two were to feed into a single outlet, pushing out toothpaste would likely send some paste up into the water inlet.

To overcome this challenge, the researchers had to carefully engineer the design of the food printer. The first step was to widen the exit outlet of the Y-junction in the printer to accommodate food ingredient inks that are high-yield-stress, which require more force to extrude. This change offers a lower resistance for the flow, preventing the ink from going up the wrong channel in the printer. In addition, it is necessary to account for the delay in the food ink transition. As the location for the switching between inks no longer happens at the printing nozzle, the researchers implemented an offset for the printing algorithm.

With their clever design, the team was able to demonstrate seamless and continuous printing between inks with vastly different rheological properties, with minimal backflow. To demonstrate the prowess of their system, they printed the SUTD institutional logo and a fully functional QR code using different milk inks.

Following up on their innovation, the team hopes to optimise the design and technology further to accommodate more inlets and progress toward commercial scalability.

“Our technology can be used to 3D-print foods consisting of multiple materials without compromising the printed structures and appearance,” said Dr Lee Cheng Pau. “It can be applied in creating meals tailored to individual dietary needs, aesthetically pleasing dishes, and interactive food experiences such as edible QR codes.”

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JOURNAL

Future Foods

DOI

10.1016/j.fufo.2024.100376 

ARTICLE TITLE

Multi-material direct ink writing 3D food printing using multi-channel nozzle

 

Retreating glaciers: fungi enhance carbon storage in young Arctic soils

LUDWIG-MAXIMILIANS-UNIVERSITÄT MÜNCHEN

Melting Arctic glaciers are in rapid recession, and microscopic pioneers colonize the new exposed landscapes. LMU researchers have revealed that yeasts play an important role in soil formation in the Arctic.

Roughly a tenth of the land surface of the Earth is covered by glacial ice. However, glaciers are retreating ever further and ever faster as a consequence of global warming. As they do so, they expose new landscapes which for millennia have been covered in ice, with extremely limited contact with air, light, and nutrients: conditions that are very challenging for life to survive. After glacial ice melts and retreats, various microbial lifeforms colonize the now accessible bedrock, accumulating nutrients and forming new soils and ecosystems. As soil can be a significant carbon store under the right circumstances, how exactly new soils form after the melting of glaciers is a question of great scientific and societal relevance.

The very first pioneers of the inhospitable terrain are microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi. “Microbes determine how much carbon and nitrogen can be stored in the young soils,” explains Professor William Orsi from the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at LMU. “But little is known about the exact processes behind this nutrient stabilization through microbial activity.” To better understand them, Orsi and his team studied soils in the Arctic that have recently been exposed. Their investigations were part of the dissertation of Orsi’s doctoral student Juan Carlos Trejos-Espeleta and were carried out in close cooperation with Arctic biogeochemist and CNRS researcher Dr. James Bradley from the Mediterranean Institute of Oceanography in France. The study was funded by the German National Science Foundation (DFG) the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The results of the study, in which other researchers from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland were involved, have now been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Timeline of colonization

The object of their analyses was the glacier foreland of Midtre Lovénbreen, a retreating valley glacier in the northwest of Spitsbergen. “In the high Arctic, the melting of glaciers is particularly dramatic,” says Orsi. “Ice-free terrestrial environments are expanding there at an extraordinarily fast rate.” James Bradley, who first worked at the site in 2013, said: “A decade ago I was drilling ice cores into the glacier. When we returned in 2021, the glacier had shrunk and instead of ice there were barren, seemingly lifeless soils”. But upon laboratory-based analyses of these soils, the researchers found that they contain incredibly diverse communities of microbes.

The newly exposed areas are ideal for researching incremental changes in the soil. The closer soil is to the glacier margin, the younger it is; whereas the further away soil is, the more time life has had to colonize the terrain. Immediately beyond the ice, there is a zone of glacial rocky debris where no visible plant life exists, followed by moraines with isolated mosses and lichens, and after this only then do flowering plants and soil begin to form in an advanced stage of development. As such, receding glacier edges are ideal natural laboratories for observing the various stages of soil development. The ecosystems are some of the most pristine, delicate, and vulnerable habitats on the planet, and they are rapidly colonised by specialised microbes, even though they are subject to extremes in temperature, light, water and nutrient availability.

Orsi’s team investigated the microbial composition of the various areas by means of DNA analysis while also measuring the cycling and flow of carbon and nitrogen. Through experiments involving isotope labeled amino acids, they were able to precisely follow the microbial assimilation and metabolism of organic carbon. “We were especially interested in what proportion of carbon microorganisms lock in the soil as biomass and how much they release back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide,” says Juan Carlos Trejos-Espeleta.

Pioneer fungi sequester carbon in the soil

Their main focus was on fungi – a class of organism that is much better than bacteria at storing a lot of carbon in the soil and keeping it there. The ratio of fungi to bacteria is an important indicator of carbon storage: More fungi mean more carbon in the soil, while more bacteria generally lead to the soil emitting more CO2. “In high Arctic ecosystems, the variety of fungi is particularly high compared to that of plants, which increases the likelihood that fungal communities could play a key role there as ecosystem engineers,” reckons Orsi. Discovering more about the carbon assimilation processes of fungal and bacterial populations and carbon flow processes in the ecosystem is crucial for making accurate predictions about how terrestrial ecosystems in the Arctic will respond to future warming.

And indeed, the researchers were able to show that fungi – or more precisely, specific basidiomycete yeasts – play a decisive role in the early stabilization of the assimilated carbon. According to the study, they are the fungal pioneers in the young postglacial soils and make a decisive contribution to the enrichment of organic carbon. The research team found that these specialized fungi are not only able to colonise the harsh Arctic landscapes before any other more complex life, but that they also provide a foothold for soil to develop by building up a base of organic carbon which other life can use. In soils in medium and late stages, bacteria increasingly dominate amino acid assimilation, leading to a significant reduction in the formation of biomass and an increase in CO2 from respiration. “Our results demonstrate that fungi will play a critical role in future carbon storage in Arctic soils as glaciers shrink further and more of Earth’s surface area is covered by soil” summarizes Orsi.

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2402689121 

ARTICLE TITLE

Principal role of fungi in soil carbon stabilization during early pedogenesis in the high Arctic

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

2-Jul-2024

XAOS

From stars to oceans: the impact of penetrative turbulence on climate science

Understanding the role of penetrative turbulence in climate and weather prediction

INSTITUTE OF ATMOSPHERIC PHYSICS, CHINESE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES

 

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“SCALING LAWS BEHIND PENETRATIVE TURBULENCE: HISTORY AND PERSPECTIVES” BY PROFESSOR ZIJING DING AND COLLEAGUES IS FEATURED ON THE COVER OF ADVANCES IN ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES, VOLUME 41 (2024), ISSUE 10. THE MORPHOLOGY OF CLOUDS CAN BE SEEN AS A MANIFESTATION OF TURBULENCE (COVER PHOTO BY YUANFEI ZHANG). THE GROUND IS COVERED WITH PENETRATIVE FLOW SIMULATIONS FROM PROFESSOR ZIJING DING'S RESEARCH GROUP, RESEMBLING A REFLECTION OF THE SKY ON THE EARTH.

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CREDIT: ADVANCES IN ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCES

Turbulence is an area of fluid dynamics that has been known about and researched for over a century. Most of us are broadly aware of it as a concept from our travels in the air, wherein it can at best be an inconvenience but at worst a frightening and dangerous experience. Indeed, this was starkly demonstrated recently when, in May 2024, a Singapore Airlines flight from London to Singapore encountered severe turbulence that was fatal for one passenger and left many others injured.

Perhaps less familiar to people is the specific phenomenon of penetrative turbulence, or penetrative convection, which is the subject of a recent review article written by Professor Zijing Ding and his team from the School of Energy Science and Engineering at the Harbin Institute of Technology in China, published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.

Penetrative turbulence occurs when a fluid that has been heated in an unstable manner penetrates another layer of fluid that has been stratified stably. It is a phenomenon often observed in large-scale natural and engineering environments, and is especially important in the earth and planetary sciences, as highlighted.

For example, penetrative turbulence is thought to play an important role in the mass–momentum transport in the tachocline (the transition region of stars between the radiative interior and the differentially rotating outer convective zone); and, here on Earth, it is also important for underwater oceanic life in winter. It influences the distribution of phytoplankton and other marine organisms, and can thus serve as an indicator of ecosystem health and contribute to the carbon cycle within these water bodies.

In our atmosphere, penetrative turbulence is central to the motions of key circulation systems, and thus its successful incorporation into prediction models ultimately impinges on our ability to forecast the weather. Of course, this takes on added importance in the current context of climate change and the effects it is having in the form of extreme weather events, such as droughts and floods.

“Our paper examines past theoretical, numerical, and experimental studies on penetrative turbulence, along with field studies that have provided insights into turbulence modeling”, explains Professor Ding.

“We look at the physical factors that initiate penetrative convection, state-of-the-art methods being applied to better understand its transport mechanisms and statistical properties, and discuss some perspectives emerging from the knowledge we have gained in terms of implications and practical applications in various scientific fields”.

A central theme of the review is the derivation of scaling laws embedded within large-scale penetrative turbulence. The ability to do so has, for example, enhanced our comprehension of heat distribution dynamics in the oceans, which, when integrated with other dynamic oceanographic factors such as wind-driven currents and thermohaline circulation, can help elucidate the influences of oceanic processes and glacial melt on Earth's climate.

In addition, the exploration of penetrative convection extends beyond natural systems to technical applications in engineering, such as the design of heat exchangers and the optimization of geothermal energy systems.

“However, practical applications often expose the limitations of our theoretical models”, adds Professor Ding, “and this is perhaps most notably the case in the atmospheric sciences”.

The frequency of extreme weather events is on the rise due to global warming, and scientists have been aware of penetrative convection as a contributing factor to this trend. By integrating more precise representations of penetrative convection into climate models, it should become possible to generate more reliable predictions of long-term climate patterns.

“Ultimately, in the atmospheric sciences, our goal is clear”, concludes Professor Ding. “We need a more realistic model of atmospheric convection to facilitate better predictions of both weather and climate. This requires us to successfully incorporate such influences as boundary conditions, Earth's rotation, and solar radiation, to name but a few”.

Advancements in our understanding of penetrative turbulence are central to these aims, and this timely review by Professor Ding and his colleagues provides a valuable point of reference for scientists to continue their studies in this important field.

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JOURNAL

Advances in Atmospheric Sciences

DOI

10.1007/s00376-024-4014-0 

ARTICLE TITLE

Scaling Laws Behind Penetrative Turbulence: History and Perspectives

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

2-Jul-2024

 

Human crying stresses out dogs more than pigs

Researchers at ELTE Department of Ethology in Budapest compared how companion dogs and companion miniature pigs from all over the world reacted to human emotional vocalizations

EÖTVÖS LORÁND UNIVERSITY

 

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RESEARCHERS AT ELTE DEPARTMENT OF ETHOLOGY IN BUDAPEST COMPARED HOW COMPANION DOGS AND COMPANION MINIATURE PIGS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD REACTED TO HUMAN EMOTIONAL VOCALIZATIONS. 

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CREDIT: PHOTO: OSZKÁR DÁNIEL GÁTI

Researchers at ELTE Department of Ethology in Budapest compared how companion dogs and companion miniature pigs from all over the world reacted to human emotional vocalizations. They found that both dogs and pigs differentiated between human crying (a negative but very usual vocalization) and human humming (not negative but unusual vocalization), but their reactions to the sounds differed.

Dogs' responses indicated that they matched their emotional state with the emotional content of the vocalizations they heard, supporting the concept of emotional contagion. In contrast, pigs exhibited more stress behaviours when exposed to the more neutral but unusual humming. These findings suggest that the special selection of dogs for dependency on humans during domestication may play a crucial role in facilitating emotional contagion induced by human sounds.

Animals, including humans, express their emotions through different channels, like vocalizations. These emotional vocalizations, especially those of negative valence, are suggested to possess a well-conserved acoustic structure through evolution, meaning that how they code information about an individual’s emotional state is very similar across species. This implies that not only conspecifics (members of the same species) but

also heterospecific (members of different species) individuals can process these vocalizations similarly.

Furthermore, hearing emotional vocalizations can lead to a process called emotional contagion, wherein there is an automatic emotional state matching between the caller and the receiver. Cross-species emotional contagion has been observed in family dogs after hearing human distress vocalizations. “We were curious whether the emotional contagion observed between dogs and humans was related to the well-conserved acoustic structure of some emotional vocalizations across species – explains Fanni Lehoczki from the Neuroethology of Communication Lab at ELTE Department of Ethology, first author of the study – or if it was promoted by the dogs' specific selection for cooperation and dependency on humans.”

VIDEOABSTRACT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zWW48mK_p9E 

To address this question, the

researchers compared the reactions of similarly raised family dogs and family minipigs to human sound playbacks.

Miniature pigs are also domestic animals and popular companions, but their common past with humans lacks selection for cooperation. The animals were exposed to a high-intensity, negative sound with a well-conserved acoustic structure: crying, and to a low-intensity, slightly positive and also unusual human sound: humming.

“For collecting this data we used a so-called ‘citizen science approach’- explains co-first author Paula Pérez Fraga, also from the Neuroethology of Communication Lab at ELTE Department of Ethology. The animals were tested remotely at their homes by their owners, facilitating the inclusion of more subjects in the study from various locations worldwide.”

Researchers found a very interesting result: dogs matched their emotional state with that of the human vocalization they heard, meaning that they displayed more behaviours indicative of high-arousal and negative emotional state, and vocalized more to the crying than to the humming. However, family pigs seemed to be highly aroused and in a more negative emotional state after hearing the more neutral humming.

“Our findings suggest that decoding the emotional content of certain human vocalizations, particularly those lacking a conservative acoustic structure and possibly perceived as less relevant for animals, such as humming, might be challenging for some domestic species.- says Pérez Fraga - While we cannot exclude that pigs also experienced emotional contagion when listening to human crying, one explanation for their reaction might be that humming is highly unusual, and surprising sounds stresses out pigs more than human sadness. On the other hand, one thing is clear, dogs seem to be specially keen on catching the emotional content of differently valenced human vocalizations, even of the more unusual ones. Therefore, selection for cooperation with humans might be key in promoting human-sound induced emotional contagion in domestic animals. However, to confirm this suggestion further research is needed involving physiological measurements.” 

 

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This study was published on 2nd of July 2024 in Animal Behaviour titled “Family pigs’ and dogs’ reactions to human emotional vocalizations - A citizen science study”, written by Fanni Lehoczki, Paula Pérez Fraga, and Attila Andics. This project was funded by the National Research, Development and Innovation Office, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Lendület Program), the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, and by Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE). 

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JOURNAL

Animal Behaviour

DOI

10.1016/j.anbehav.2024.05.011 

ARTICLE TITLE

Family pigs’ and dogs’ reactions to human emotional vocalizations:a citizen science study

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

2-Jul-2024

 

Sometimes friend, sometimes foe

How different species interact with each other, for example as predator and prey, is by no means fixed and can depend on the prevailing environmental conditions

UNIVERSITY OF KONSTANZ

To what extent is the relationship between different species fixed? Does a predator, for example, always act as a predator towards its prey? And will species that compete for the same nutrients always be competitors? For a long time, ecologist and evolutionary biologists assumed that such relationships between different species never change. But we now know that they can change – depending on the environmental conditions.

One of the central questions that the new research unit "Density dependent symbiosis in planktonic systems", or "DynaSym" for short, will investigate, is the role played by the population densities of the interacting species. The German Research Foundation (DFG) announced today (2. July 2024) that they will initially fund the research unit for four years (starting in October 2024). Spokesperson for DynaSym is the ecologist and evolutionary biologist Lutz Becks from the Department of Biology at the University of Konstanz.

Combining theoretical and experimental approaches
"Using microorganisms as model organisms, we want to find out how density changes the type of interaction between species and how this affects the dynamics of populations and communities," explains Becks. For example, under what conditions does a competitive relationship change into a mutualistic relationship that is beneficial to both species? And do such changes have subsequent effects on population densities – in other words, are there feedback mechanisms?

The researchers work in eight sub-projects at a total of six German universities and research institutions, and are collaborating with partners from France, Israel and the USA. Through the combination of experimental and modelling approaches, the project aims to provide new general mechanistic insights into the dynamics of communities and thus a basis for revising and extending existing theories in ecology. "Thanks to our interdisciplinary approach, which brings together experts in experimental ecology and evolution with modellers, we are in an excellent position to comprehensively investigate the processes underlying the complex dynamics of biotic communities", says Becks.

About the DFG research units
A total of nine new research units and a new Centre for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences will be funded, as the German Research Foundation announced today (2. July 2024). The aim of DFG research units is to promote medium-term close collaboration of several outstanding researchers to work on a special research task with the aim of achieving results that clearly go beyond individual grants. The maximum funding duration of a research unit is two periods of four years each. In the first period, the new units will receive a total of around 41.3 million euros.

 

Key facts: The German Research Foundation funds nine new research units and a new Centre for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences The research unit "Density dependent symbiosis in planktonic systems" ("DynaSym") investigates the influence of population densities on the interaction between different species. Spokesperson for DynaSym is the ecologist and evolutionary biologist Lutz Becks from the Department of Biology at the University of Konstanz. Principal investigators and research institutions involved in DynaSym: Professor Lutz Becks (University of Konstanz) Professor Ursula Gaedke, Dr Toni Klauschies & Professor Guntram Weithoff (University of Potsdam) Dr Birte Matthiessen (GEOMAR Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research, Kiel) Dr Stefanie Moorthi (University of Oldenburg) Professor Herwig Stibor & Dr Maria Stockenreiter (Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich) Dr Hildegard Uecker (Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, Plön) International project partners: Professor Frida Ben-Ami (Tel-Aviv University; Israel) Professor Meghan Duffy (University of Michigan; USA) Professor Jelena Pantel (University of Franche-Comté; France)

 

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Caption: Professor Lutz Becks, spokesperson of the new DFG research unit "DynaSym"

Image: © University of Konstanz, Inka Reiter