Underwater Video Gaming – For Fish


Underwater computer gaming has reached the fish tanks in the laboratories of the biologists. Not through a piscatorial interest I hasten to add, but to study the predatory instinct of their fish.

Ioannou et al chose the bluegill sunfish to play their new computer game of hunt and catch (1, 2). In the wild a bluegill sunfish will eat lots of insect larvae as well as small crustaceans. It sneaks up and sucks them in when they least expect it like a salesman on a car lot. Young ones go after water fleas and rotifers.

Their computer game consists of projecting reddish dots onto a screen in the tank, which the fish take for prey and sneak up to suck them in. Of course it would be no fun if they were easy to hunt and get close to, so they are more challenging than that. Also, they are not just offered one at a time.

They are presented with a small army of red dots for them to try and chase down to attack and devour. Now on occasion, real insect larvae and water fleas will move around independently, but not always. They can start to herd and move along in group motion and now the question is what do the bluegills think about that?

The answer is that they don’t care for it. This isn’t what you want your prey to do. Ganging up is going to make any self-respecting bluegill uneasy and they leave well alone. They expect their lunch bites to be doing their own thing and will look for the individual who eschews the crowd to wander off on their own.

Up until now the study of predatory hunting has been a little hit or miss as the prey are not under the control of the experimenter. Now with the development of virtual prey, complete control of the experiment is possible and the effects of natural prey behavior can be simulated repeatedly and the predator’s response monitored systematically.

What isn’t recorded in the write-ups of the game play is the attention span of the bluegills. Do they become addicted or do they just dabble?

  1. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2012/08/15/science.1218919
  2. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19368532



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Robot Reflections – Whose Pixel Is This?


Robot reflections – are they going to be recognized? So far the answer is no, they lack the self-awareness. Just like one-year-old humans, the image that they see in a mirror is apparently somebody else.

To most of us this may not seem to be a matter of great urgency, but the BBC reports that to Mr. Hart at Yale this is not a state of affairs that he is prepared to ignore and is actively programming his wide-eyed robot friend Nico to look in the mirror and be just as horrified as the rest of us as he sees what a less than ideal state he’s in (1).

Robots have already been able to recognize that the actions that it sees in a mirror are of an entity that it can copy, but so far no robot can wave at a mirror and record that whatever is waving back is a itself. This self-recognition is not a trivial problem that could be meaningful solved by having a name-tag which the robot could read (in mirror writing of course). It is one of recognizing that a movement is not another robot copying but a reflection of its own motion.

The concept of recognizing a reflection of oneself is a sophisticated one and requires a whole series of visual cues, both static and dynamic at the same time understanding that the right hand is really the left hand.

Not all animals can pass this “mirror test” of self-awareness. Some primates can and apparently elephants and dolphins can, although none of these have regular access to mirrors as part of their daily ablutions.

Once Nico has learned to be sufficiently self-aware to recognize himself in a mirror, I wonder how long it will take him to learn to recognize himself in a photograph where now the right hand is the right hand and there are no motion cues? Perhaps an acting job in the movies will be a halfway house in his education.

  1. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19354994


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Decisions, Decisions, Decisions


Decisions, decisions, decisions are something that we all have to worry over, but are we managers or are we worker bees and does that make a difference? The lore in the literature cozies up to a dual process theory. This suggests that we are either heuristic or deeply contemplative.

When we get a large team of psychologists, neuroscientists and business schoolies together there will be experiments and experiments are what we have. Caspers et al in the latest edition from the Public Library of Science have corralled a group of experienced managers and a similar size group of workers with no management responsibilities and stuffed them one at a time in the big magnet while making them make decisions under stress (1).

There were 35 of each managerial or non-managerial persuasion in their 40’s with an even split between the sexes who were give a large number of word pairs to make decisions about which they favored while coping with the trauma of a prolonged fMRI study. They were given about a second to make a decision and press a button with their right or left hand depending on which word they preferred. They had to do this for 540 decisions.

The aim of the experimental program was to see if the same parts of the brains were being lit up whether the subject was a manager or a non-manager. With managers the head of the caudate nucleus deep in the center of the brain was activated with less response within the cortex. The opposite picture showed up for the non-managers.

What does this mean? The managers are using intuition, memory, gut instinct – that is they are heuristically inclined. The non-managers are being more thoughtful, contemplative considering carefully, at least as thoughtfully as you can when under considerable time stress. So it appears that managers shrug off the stress and just go for it, while the worker bees worry about decisions, decisions, decisions.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.p are some4thingone.0043537


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Marching To The Beat Of A Different Drummer


Marching to the beat of a different drummer? In the first place, marching isn’t easy. We take several years learning to walk and then fit young people spend weeks, if the join the army, learning to march around in step with their colleagues to the beat of the drum. And eventually, as we get older, neurological problems can again make marching along a difficult thing to do.

So as you walk, your motion – legs, torso, – move in a somewhat chaotic manner rather than the regular one that we imagine. The chaos get worse as we age (no surprise there). Sejdić et al decide to see how much our chaos was reduced by a metronomic cadence delivered aurally, visually or haptically (1).

Fifteen twenty-somethings were sent round a rectangular course and their natural gait logged. After that they were sent round with  backpacks full of metronomes. Of course, they weren’t all sent round at the same time or the chaos would have been wonderful to behold.

With personal metronomes linked to earphones, a light on a pole sticking out of their hat or a vibrator in their glove, the walkers walked and the regularity of their motion was logged.

Regularly flashing lights and vibrating gloves had some effect on chaos reduction in the walkers walking round their exercise yard, but the largest effect was the auditory sound beamed into their ear from their backpack feeding the earphones.

Everyone was marching to the beat of a different drummer, their own beat having been established at the start, but it would have been interesting to have had the metronomes changed and then see how successful the devices would have been in bringing the walkers into the new cadence and whether the chaos would have increased.

What fractions of their natural beat frequency would be comfortable or uncomfortable? So how easy is for people to change and start marching to the beat of a different drummer than their own?

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0043104

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Will Work For Chocolate


Will work for chocolate is alive and well among some undergraduates. The experimental psychologists at U of Birmingham have recruited forty females into their labs with the promise of free chocolate. We should note that this isn’t to be considered as a long-term career prospect, which would cause anyone to drop out of their courses, but a secret study into their self-control.

Naish and Harris planned this study carefully and offered places on their ‘Mood, Personality, and Lifestyle Experiment’ that would have free chocolate provided (1). The women selected were 18 to 25 years old with BMI of 16 to 33 and exhaustive profile studies placed them in either low or high sensory sensitivity groups.

That was the set up and the experiment started with stressing the participants out with anagrams to solve. Handy bowls of chocolate goodies were placed within easy reach while the young ladies were racking their brains.

The control group had easy anagrams containing only 4 to 6 letters, but those destined to suffer the worst that the psycho-experimenters had to offer had 6 to 8 letters in theirs, BUT only 14% were solvable. The time was of course limited and the clock ticked inexorably to the close as the participants struggled with impossible puzzles with no hope of success.

In the end it wasn’t the stress that produced the highest chocolate consumption. The only correlation that worked was that those deemed to be in the high sensory sensitivity group managed to eat almost twice as much chocolate as those in the low sensory sensitivity group.

So if you have a weakness for the good life and its sensory excitement, it will be best that you don’t keep bowls of chocolate goodies on you desk while you are revising, working on term papers or filling in income tax forms else your BMI will be at risk.

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0043622


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Drinking Beer From A Curved Glass Is A Risky Proposition


Drinking beer from a curved glass is a risky proposition. When a tankard was a tankard, you knew where you were and the best looking of those tankards had a nice round belly like their owners.  But in these more sophisticated days, glasses are often more like vases for sticking flowers in.

The effect of rates of beer consumption due to glass shape has been studied by psychologists Attwood et al from my old Alma Mater (U Bristol) and is published in last weeks PLoS ONE (1). 159 young men sober young men and women (18 to 40-years old) were lined up and divided into 8 groups. (It would have been 160 but one participant failed to drain their glass.)

Vase shaped lager glasses (“flutes”) were used and compared to true cylindrical straight up and down honest glasses. Some were filled to the brim, some were half filled, some were filled with a soft drink and some only half filled. Note alcoholics were weeded out and all had been sober for 12 hours.

The rate of drink consumption was monitored by computerized video as the participants watched a nature documentary and then carried out word-search puzzles with pencil and paper.

By now I’m sure you are all thirsting for the results. Well, the drinkers who were given full 12 oz. glasses of lager drank faster than those with straight glasses – they finished the glass in 60% of the time it took a straight glass drinker to drink theirs. Those who worked with half full glasses or soft drink glasses (full or half-full) drank at a rate independent of glass shape.

The explanation suggested was that the judgment of how much was left was impaired by the curvature of the glass as if the person had consumed half the beer, the remaining beer would be more than half the height of the glass due to the wide top and narrow bottom, unlike the honest straight glass where the height would accurately reflect the remaining percentage. Thus the drinkers were regulating alcohol consumption by the height of liquid in the glass. The bottom half of the flutes were close to straight so the misjudgment would be less when this part was in play.

It is interesting to note that the consumption rate for the soft drinks matched that of the curved glass beer drinker. In this experimental program the soft drink was Dr. Pepper and somewhat inexplicably for a town with plenty of microbrew choices, the beer was a French lager (Bière de France) – very strange!

  1. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0043007


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