Some conceptual problems with the classical theory of behaviour

Behaviour is usually assumed to depend on the reach of a critical intensity--termed reactivity threshold--by its motivation. This view represents a simple, predictive theoretical framework in ethology and animal psychology. However, it is here argued that only the influence of an isolated motivation on behaviour can be explained that way; that such a view fails to account for behaviour when several motivations are jointly activated. Upon analysis, the classical theory of behaviour (CTB) proves to be under-specified and thus leads to three conceptual problems that make it logically inconsistent for the study of multiple motivations. A revision of the CTB, called anticipatory dynamics model (ADM), is then developed in order to bring a theoretical solution to these conceptual problems. The ADM hypothesizes that an organism's motivational interactions are due to the limitation of the organism's attentional resources.     

From Affective Experience to Motivated Action: Tracking Reward-Seeking and Punishment-Avoidant Behaviour in Real-Life

Many of the decisions and actions in everyday life result from implicit learning processes. Important to psychopathology are, for example, implicit reward-seeking and punishment-avoidant learning processes. It is known that when specific actions get associated with a rewarding experience, such as positive emotions, that this will increase the likelihood that an organism will engage in similar actions in the future. Similarly, when actions get associated with punishing experiences, such as negative emotions, this may reduce the likelihood that the organism will engage in similar actions in the future. This study examines whether we can observe these implicit processes prospectively in the flow of daily life. If such processes take place then we expect that current behaviour can be predicted by how similar behaviour was experienced (in terms of positive and negative affect) at previous measurement moments. This was examined in a sample of 621 female individuals that had participated in an Experience Sampling data collection. Measures of affect and behaviour were collected at 10 semi-random moments of the day for 5 consecutive days. It was examined whether affective experience that was paired with certain behaviours (physical activity and social context) at previous measurements modified the likelihood to show similar behaviours at next measurement moments. Analyses were performed both at the level of observations (a time scale with units of ± 90 min) and at day level (a time scale with units of 24 h). As expected, we found that affect indeed moderated the extent to which previous behaviour predicted similar behaviour later in time, at both beep- and day-level. This study showed that it is feasible to track reward-seeking and punishment-avoidant behaviour prospectively in humans in the flow of daily life. This opens up a new toolbox to examine processes determining goal-oriented behaviour in relation to psychopathology in humans.     

Modelling a wireless connected swarm of mobile robots

It is a characteristic of swarm robotics that modelling the overall swarm behaviour in terms of the low-level behaviours of individual robots is very difficult. Yet if swarm robotics is to make the transition from the laboratory to real-world engineering realisation such models would be critical for both overall validation of algorithm correctness and detailed parameter optimisation. We seek models with predictive power: models that allow us to determine the effect of modifying parameters in individual robots on the overall swarm behaviour. This paper presents results from a study to apply the probabilistic modelling approach to a class of wireless connected swarms operating in unbounded environments. The paper proposes a probabilistic finite state machine (PFSM) that describes the network connectivity and overall macroscopic behaviour of the swarm, then develops a novel robot-centric approach to the estimation of the state transition probabilities within the PFSM. Using measured data from simulation the paper then carefully validates the PFSM model step by step, allowing us to assess the accuracy and hence the utility of the model.     

A rule-based approach to the modelling of bacterial ecosystems

This paper presents an approach to ecological/evolutionary modelling that is inspired by natural bacterial ecosystems and bacterial evolution. An individual-based artificial ecosystem model is proposed, which is designed to explore the evolvability of adaptive behavioural strategies in artificial bacteria represented by rule-based learning classifier systems. The proposed ecosystem model consists of a n-dimensional environmental grid, which can contain different types of artificial resources in arbitrary arrangements. The resources provide the energy that is necessary for the organisms to sustain life, and can trigger different types of behaviour in the organisms, such as movement towards nutrients and away from toxic substances, growth, and the controlled release of signalling resources. The balance between energy and material is modelled carefully to ensure that the ecosystem is dissipative. Those organisms that are able to efficiently exploit the available resources gradually accumulate enough energy to reproduce (by binary fission) and generate copies of themselves in the environment. Organisms are also able to produce their own resources, which can potentially be used as markers to send signals to other organisms (a behaviour known as quorum sensing). The complex relationships between stimuli and actions in the organisms are stochastically altered by means of mutations, thus enabling the organisms to adapt to their environment and maximise their lifespan and reproductive success. In this paper, the proposed bacterial ecosystem model is defined formally and its structure is discussed in detail. This is followed by results from simulation experiments that illustrate the model's operation and how it can be used in evolutionary modelling/computing scenarios.     

Beyond learning fixed rules and social cues: abstraction in the social arena

Abstraction is a central idea in many areas of physical comparative cognition such as categorization, numerical competence or problem solving. This idea, however, has rarely been applied to comparative social cognition. In this paper, I propose that the notion of abstraction can be applied to the social arena and become an important tool to investigate the social cognition and behaviour processes in animals. To make this point, I present recent evidence showing that chimpanzees know about what others can see and about what others intend. These data do not fit either low-level mechanisms based on stimulus-response associations or high-level explanations based on metarepresentational mechanisms such as false belief attribution. Instead, I argue that social abstraction, in particular the development of concepts such as seeing in others, is key to explaining the behaviour of our closest relative in a variety of situations.     

Hormone multifunctionalities: a theory of endocrine signaling, command and control

A theory is presented outlining how organisms can function and benefit from multifunctionality of hormones in order to enhance greatly the information-carrying potential of endocrine signaling. Hormones are produced continuously as micropulses, and intermittently as larger pulses. It is generally believed that micropulses generate fluctuating basal hormone concentrations, which may consistently elicit particular responses among diverse variables. Evidence is discussed suggesting that in contrast to the hormone micropulses, the larger endogenous hormone pulses may elicit responses which may differ from one pulse to another and may therefore serve different physiological functions. In this paper we postulate that an endogenous hormone pulse is a specific form of a multisignal message that serves a certain physiological function. Different pulses of a hormone may be signals of diverse multisignal messages that serve different functions. A multisignal message may elicit congruous responses by selectively enhancing some actions and suppressing other actions of the component signals. Various roles of signals of multisignal messages are discussed, as well as processes that may be involved in the diversity and selectivity of actions of different pulses of a hormone. Hormones also are converted into other hormones; we analyze how precursor and derived hormones may function independently of each other, and how precursor hormones may give rise to permissive effects. Mechanisms involved in therapeutic and adverse effects of hormone administrations are analyzed, and a strategy is suggested for developing more selective hormonal therapies.     

On the implementation of a wrinkling,hyperelastic membrane model for skin and other materials

A number of researchers have studied the mechanical properties of skin and developed constitutive models to describe its behaviour. Typically, many of these studies have concentrated on the uniaxial tensile behaviour of the skin, on the grounds that it will wrinkle under in-plane compression and have minimal stiffness. However, although there is a substantial body of literature on wrinkling models, the practical implementation of such a model of skin in a finite element setting has not been widely addressed. This paper presents computational details of a wrinkling, hyperelastic membrane model and aspects of its implementation and areas requiring further research are discussed. The model is based on an Ogden constitutive model, which provides accurate results at moderate strains, but it would be straightforward to implement other constitutive models such as the Fung or Arruda–Boyce models using a similar approach. Example results are presented which demonstrate that the model can provide a good approximation to experimental data. The model has many other possible applications, both for biological materials and for other thin hyperelastic membranes.     

Multilevel structure in behaviour and in the brain: a model of Fuster's hierarchy

A basic question, intimately tied to the problem of action selection, is that of how actions are assembled into organized sequences. Theories of routine sequential behaviour have long acknowledged that it must rely not only on environmental cues but also on some internal representation of temporal or task context. It is assumed, in most theories, that such internal representations must be organized into a strict hierarchy, mirroring the hierarchical structure of naturalistic sequential behaviour. This article reviews an alternative computational account, which asserts that the representations underlying naturalistic sequential behaviour need not, and arguably cannot, assume a strictly hierarchical form. One apparent liability of this theory is that it seems to contradict neuroscientific evidence indicating that different levels of sequential structure in behaviour are represented at different levels in a hierarchy of cortical areas. New simulations, reported here, show not only that the original computational account can be reconciled with this alignment between behavioural and neural organization, but also that it gives rise to a novel explanation for how this alignment might develop through learning.     

Action anticipation in human infants reveals assumptions about anteroposterior body-structure and action

Animal actions are almost universally constrained by the bilateral body-plan. For example, the direction of travel tends to be constrained by the orientation of the animal''s anteroposterior axis. Hence, an animal''s behaviour can reliably guide the identification of its front and back, and its orientation can reliably guide action prediction. We examine the hypothesis that the evolutionarily ancient relation between anteroposterior body-structure and behaviour guides our cognitive processing of agents and their actions. In a series of studies, we demonstrate that, after limited exposure, human infants as young as six months of age spontaneously encode a novel agent as having a certain axial direction with respect to its actions and rely on it when anticipating the agent''s further behaviour. We found that such encoding is restricted to objects exhibiting cues of agency and does not depend on generalization from features of familiar animals. Our research offers a new tool for investigating the perception of animate agency and supports the proposal that the underlying cognitive mechanisms have been shaped by basic biological adaptations in humans.     

Testing,tracing and isolation in compartmental models

Existing compartmental mathematical modelling methods for epidemics, such as SEIR models, cannot accurately represent effects of contact tracing. This makes them inappropriate for evaluating testing and contact tracing strategies to contain an outbreak. An alternative used in practice is the application of agent- or individual-based models (ABM). However ABMs are complex, less well-understood and much more computationally expensive. This paper presents a new method for accurately including the effects of Testing, contact-Tracing and Isolation (TTI) strategies in standard compartmental models. We derive our method using a careful probabilistic argument to show how contact tracing at the individual level is reflected in aggregate on the population level. We show that the resultant SEIR-TTI model accurately approximates the behaviour of a mechanistic agent-based model at far less computational cost. The computational efficiency is such that it can be easily and cheaply used for exploratory modelling to quantify the required levels of testing and tracing, alone and with other interventions, to assist adaptive planning for managing disease outbreaks.     

Modelling and predicting the spatial distribution of tree root density in heterogeneous forest ecosystems

Background and Aims In mountain ecosystems, predicting root density in three dimensions (3-D) is highly challenging due to the spatial heterogeneity of forest communities. This study presents a simple and semi-mechanistic model, named ChaMRoots, that predicts root interception density (RID, number of roots m^–2). ChaMRoots hypothesizes that RID at a given point is affected by the presence of roots from surrounding trees forming a polygon shape.Methods The model comprises three sub-models for predicting: (1) the spatial heterogeneity – RID of the finest roots in the top soil layer as a function of tree basal area at breast height, and the distance between the tree and a given point; (2) the diameter spectrum – the distribution of RID as a function of root diameter up to 50 mm thick; and (3) the vertical profile – the distribution of RID as a function of soil depth. The RID data used for fitting in the model were measured in two uneven-aged mountain forest ecosystems in the French Alps. These sites differ in tree density and species composition.Key Results In general, the validation of each sub-model indicated that all sub-models of ChaMRoots had good fits. The model achieved a highly satisfactory compromise between the number of aerial input parameters and the fit to the observed data.Conclusions The semi-mechanistic ChaMRoots model focuses on the spatial distribution of root density at the tree cluster scale, in contrast to the majority of published root models, which function at the level of the individual. Based on easy-to-measure characteristics, simple forest inventory protocols and three sub-models, it achieves a good compromise between the complexity of the case study area and that of the global model structure. ChaMRoots can be easily coupled with spatially explicit individual-based forest dynamics models and thus provides a highly transferable approach for modelling 3-D root spatial distribution in complex forest ecosystems.     

Getting back to the rough ground: deception and 'social living'

At the heart of the social intelligence hypothesis is the central role of 'social living'. But living is messy and psychologists generally seek to avoid this mess in the interests of getting clean data and cleaner logical explanations. The study of deception as intelligent action is a good example of the dangers of such avoidance. We still do not have a full picture of the development of deceptive actions in human infants and toddlers or an explanation of why it emerges. This paper applies Byrne & Whiten's functional taxonomy of tactical deception to the social behaviour of human infants and toddlers using data from three previous studies. The data include a variety of acts, such as teasing, pretending, distracting and concealing, which are not typically considered in relation to human deception. This functional analysis shows the onset of non-verbal deceptive acts to be surprisingly early. Infants and toddlers seem to be able to communicate false information (about themselves, about shared meanings and about events) as early as true information. It is argued that the development of deception must be a fundamentally social and communicative process and that if we are to understand why deception emerges at all, the scientist needs to get 'back to the rough ground' as Wittgenstein called it and explore the messy social lives in which it develops.     

A psychotherapeutic approach to task-oriented groups of severely ill patients

This paper presents a conceptual approach for leading various types of groups of chronically mentally ill patients. Although these groups may have a concrete, task-oriented purpose, with skillful leadership they also function as psychotherapy groups. The developmental deficits in ego functions, object relations, and social skills that severely impair such groups can be compensated by non-interpretative actions of the therapists. The group leader must actively work to provide for the structure, stability, and safety of the group when group members are unable to provide these for themselves.     

From network-to-antibody robustness in a bio-inspired immune system

Behavioural robustness at antibody and immune network level is discussed. The robustness of the immune response that drives an autonomous mobile robot is examined with two computational experiments in the autonomous mobile robots trajectory generation context in unknown environments. The immune response is met based on the immune network metaphor for different low-level behaviours coordination. These behaviours are activated when a robot sense the appropriate conditions in the environment in relation to the network current state. Results are obtained over a case study in computer simulation as well as in laboratory experiments with a Khepera II microrobot. In this work, we develop a set of tests where such an immune response is externally perturbed at network or low-level behavioural modules to analyse the robust capacity of the system to unexpected perturbations. Emergence of robust behaviour and high-level immune response relates to the coupling between behavioural modules that are selectively engaged with the environment based on immune response. Experimental evidence leads discussions on a dynamical systems perspective of behavioural robustness in artificial immune systems that goes beyond the isolated immune network response.     

江苏地产药白首乌的研究现状及进展

江苏地产白首乌是一传统中药,为萝摩科植物耳叶牛皮消Cynanchum auriculatum Royle ex Wight的块根,具有多种药理作用.通过对其药源、生物活性成分及主要药理作用的研究现状及进展进行综述,为白首乌的进一步开发提供参考.     

Maintenance of the contraction time of the smooth muscle cell

It has been analyzed the speed of contraction (measured as Vmax) of guinea-pig intestine in vitro, after stimulation with carbachol. High doses of carbachol induce an high Vmax; but repeating the dose at short interval (4 min) the speed of contraction is reduced until it reaches values of Vmax 4,3. Low doses of carbachol determine a low Vmax that with repeating doses increases until Vmax 4,2. On the base of this tendency at the same Vmax, and from the anomalous behaviour of the intestines to one dose in front to different doses in carbachol. The excludes that the process could be due to a passive adaptation and hypothesizes a model of behaviour inside the cell. A model to which the myocells balance the stimulus in the way to make constant their velocity of contraction.     

The epistemic costs of compromise in bioethics

Bioethicists sometimes defend compromise positions, particularly when they enter debates on applied topics that have traditionally been highly polarised, such as those regarding abortion, euthanasia and embryonic stem cell research. However, defending compromise positions is often regarded with a degree of disdain. Many are intuitively attracted to the view that it is almost always problematic to defend compromise positions, in the sense that we have a significant moral reason not to do so. In this paper, we consider whether this common sense view can be given a principled basis. We first show how existing explanations for the problematic nature of compromise fall short of vindicating the common sense view, before offering our own explanation, which, we claim, comes closer to vindicating that view. We argue that defending a compromise will typically have two epistemic costs: it will corrupt attempts to use the claims of ethicists as testimonial evidence, and it will undermine standards that are important to making epistemic progress in ethics. We end by suggesting that the epistemic costs of compromise could be reduced by introducing a stronger separation between ethical debate aimed at fulfilling the epistemic role of ethics, and ethical debate that aims to directly produce good policy or practice.     

中国雪豹的威胁与保护现状

大部分保护机构只有能力在特定种群层面上保护大型食肉动物, 而物种的灭绝风险却是在全球尺度进行评估的。因此, 要填补这一尺度断层, 多机构的工作与意见汇总非常必要。本研究综合了文献和18家中国雪豹(Panthera uncia)研究与保护机构共24位一线工作人员提供的信息, 经过两次集体讨论和填写评分表格的方式, 识别出21种威胁因素, 在全国层面和青海、西藏、新疆、四川和甘肃5个主要雪豹分布省区层面对威胁进行了排序, 并汇总了各保护机构实施的17项保护行动, 以及各项行动所应对的威胁。全国评分前三的威胁依次是基层保护部门能力不足(9.5分)、气候变化(8.0分)、当地社区保护动力不足(6.8分), 不同省区的威胁排序则体现出很大差异性。其中, 目前仍没有任何行动措施应对气候变化。虽然已有一些保护行动来应对基层保护能力不足和当地社区保护动力不足的问题, 如保护区能力建设、开展社区监测等, 但行动的覆盖尺度仍远远不够。