Does temporal predictability of tasks influence task choice?

Animal populations are frequently limited by the availability of food or of habitat. In central-place foragers, the cost of accessing these resources is distance-dependent rather than uniform in space. However, in seabirds, a widely studied exemplar of this paradigm, empirical population models have hitherto ignored this cost. In part, this is because non-independence among colonies makes it difficult to define population units. Here, we model the effects of both resource availability and accessibility on populations of a wide-ranging, pelagic seabird, the black-browed albatross Thalassarche melanophris . Adopting a multi-scale approach, we define regional populations objectively as spatial clusters of colonies. We consider two readily quantifiable proxies of resource availability: the extent of neritic waters (the preferred foraging habitat) and net primary production (NPP). We show that the size of regional albatross populations has a strong dependence, after weighting for accessibility, on habitat availability and to a lesser extent, NPP. Our results provide indirect support for the hypothesis that seabird populations are regulated from the bottom-up by food availability during the breeding season, and also suggest that the spatio-temporal predictability of food may be limiting. Moreover, we demonstrate a straightforward, widely applicable method for estimating resource limitation in populations of central-place foragers.

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Task Choice Moderates Affective Influences on Effort-Related Cardiovascular Response

International Journal of Psychophysiology ◽

10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2021.07.122 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 168 ◽

pp. S41

Author(s):

Guido H.E. Gendolla

Keyword(s):

Cardiovascular Response ◽

Task Choice ◽

Affective Influences

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Flexible Work, Temporal Disruption and Implications for Health Practices: An Australian Qualitative Study

Work Employment and Society ◽

10.1177/0950017020954750 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 095001702095475

Author(s):

Ginny M Sargent ◽

Julia McQuoid ◽

Jane Dixon ◽

Cathy Banwell ◽

Lyndall Strazdins

Keyword(s):

Health Improvement ◽

Health Practices ◽

Flexible Work ◽

Physically Active ◽

Personal Lives ◽

Social Theories ◽

Employment Standards ◽

Temporal Predictability ◽

Health Promoting

Flexible work provisions are justified as enabling workers to manage their personal lives, including their health, around work. This study deploys social theories of practice to investigate how the temporal characteristics of flexible work can produce, alter and disrupt the health improvement efforts of workers, concentrating on healthy eating and keeping physically active. Drawing from in-depth interviews with 12 Australian workers, the study explores the temporal mechanisms linking flexible work to health practices, focusing on routines, rhythms and rituals (the three Rs). This research finds that work-time arrangements can provide the temporal scaffolding necessary for health practices (through routines, rhythms and rituals), but only when there is day-to-day, mid-term, and long-term work predictability. Australia’s flexible work policies do not provide this requisite temporal predictability. Health promoting employment provisions would have to reinstate employment standards from the 1970s, providing the desired predictability for flexible provisions to benefit workers.

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Does Secondary Task Measure Outcome Conflict or Resource Allocation?

Proceedings of the Human Factors Society Annual Meeting ◽

10.1177/154193129203601808 ◽

1992 ◽

Vol 36 (18) ◽

pp. 1398-1402

Author(s):

Pamela S. Tsang ◽

Tonya L. Shaner

Keyword(s):

Resource Allocation ◽

Task Performance ◽

Dual Task ◽

Secondary Task ◽

Tracking Error ◽

Memory Task ◽

Primary Task ◽

Memory Probe ◽

Temporal Predictability ◽

Task Measure

The secondary task technique was used to test two alternative explanations of dual task decrement: outcome conflict and resource allocation. Subjects time-shared a continuous tracking task and a discrete Sternberg memory task. The memory probes were presented under three temporal predictability conditions. Dual task performance decrements in both the tracking and memory tasks suggested that the two tasks competed for some common resources, processes, or mechanisms. Although performance decrements were consistent with both the outcome conflict and resource allocation explanations, the two explanations propose different mechanisms by which the primary task could be protected from interference from the concurrent secondary task. The primary task performance could be protected by resource allocation or by strategic sequencing of the processing of the two tasks in order to avoid outcome conflict. In addition to examining the global trial means, moment-by-moment tracking error time-locked to the memory probe was also analyzed. There was little indication that the primary task was protected by resequencing of the processing of the two tasks. This together with the suggestion that predictable memory probes led to better protected primary task performance than less predictable memory probes lend support for the resource explanation.

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Time for Action: Neural Basis of the Costs and Benefits of Temporal Predictability for Competing Response Choices

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience ◽

10.1162/jocn_a_01795 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-17

Author(s):

Inga Korolczuk ◽

Boris Burle ◽

Jennifer T. Coull ◽

Kamila Śmigasiewicz

Keyword(s):

Motor Cortex ◽

Onset Time ◽

Incorrect Response ◽

Response Conflict ◽

Cortical Inhibition ◽

Costs And Benefits ◽

Neural Basis ◽

Response Hand ◽

Temporal Predictability ◽

Choice Complexity

Abstract The brain can anticipate the time of imminent events to optimize sensorimotor processing. Yet, there can be behavioral costs of temporal predictability under situations of response conflict. Here, we sought to identify the neural basis of these costs and benefits by examining motor control processes in a combined electroencephalography–EMG study. We recorded electrophysiological markers of response activation and inhibition over motor cortex when the onset-time of visual targets could be predicted, or not, and when responses necessitated conflict resolution, or not. If stimuli were temporally predictable but evoked conflicting responses, we observed increased intertrial consistency in the delta range over the motor cortex involved in response implementation, perhaps reflecting increased response difficulty. More importantly, temporal predictability differentially modulated motor cortex activity as a function of response conflict before the response was even initiated. This effect occurred in the hemisphere ipsilateral to the response, which is involved in inhibiting unwanted actions. If target features all triggered the same response, temporal predictability increased cortical inhibition of the incorrect response hand. Conversely, if different target features triggered two conflicting responses, temporal predictability decreased inhibition of the incorrect, yet prepotent, response. This dissociation reconciles the well-established behavioral benefits of temporal predictability for nonconflicting responses as well as its costs for conflicting ones by providing an elegant mechanism that operates selectively over the motor cortex involved in suppressing inappropriate actions just before response initiation. Taken together, our results demonstrate that temporal information differentially guides motor activity depending on response choice complexity.

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