Influence of detectability and ability to escape on natural selection of conspicuous autotomous defenses

1991 ◽  
Vol 69 (3) ◽  
pp. 757-764 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Cooper Jr. ◽  
Laurie J. Vitt
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Simple Model ◽  
Conditional Probability ◽  
Body Part ◽  
Probability Of Detection ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Lizard Species ◽  
Predator Prey ◽  
Selection Of

Antipredatory adaptations in which a predator's attack is diverted to body parts that may be sacrificed or are less vulnerable sometimes depend upon the conspicuousness of the body part attacked. The predator's attention is drawn to the emphasized part, which serves as a decoy. Such defenses appear paradoxical in that they increase the probability of detection. However, they simultaneously increase the probability of postdetectional escape enough to decrease the overall probability of being killed. Based on probabilities of detection and of escape following detection, a simple model predicts the conditions in which autotomy and related defenses are favored. For a conspicuous decoy, equilibrium values of the increases in probabilities of detection and of escape following detection are given. Data on the conditional probability of escape after detection are discussed for the scincid lizards Eumeces fasciatus and E. laticeps, which have brightly colored autotomous tails. Versions of the model that split the predator–prey encounter into several successive stages are outlined briefly and illustrated by the data for the two lizard species. Strategies for measuring the probabilities and testing the model's predictions are considered.

Maximizing Recall of Gruesome Images for Health Effects Advertising: An Experimental Investigation

2010 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 112-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brennen W. Mills ◽  
Owen B. J. Carter ◽  
Robert J. Donovan
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Investigation ◽  
Body Part ◽  
The Body ◽  
Advertising Effectiveness ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Online Study ◽  
Video Clips ◽  
Video Images ◽  
The Impact

The objective of this case study was to experimentally manipulate the impact on arousal and recall of two characteristics frequently occurring in gruesome depictions of body parts in smoking cessation advertisements: the presence or absence of an external physical insult to the body part depicted; whether or not the image contains a clear figure/ground demarcation. Three hundred participants (46% male, 54% female; mean age 27.3 years, SD = 11.4) participated in a two-stage online study wherein they viewed and responded to a series of gruesome 4-s video images. Seventy-two video clips were created to provide a sample of images across the two conditions: physical insult versus no insult and clear figure/ground demarcation versus merged or no clear figure/ground demarcation. In stage one, participants viewed a randomly ordered series of 36 video clips and rated how “confronting” they considered each to be. Seven days later (stage two), to test recall of each video image, participants viewed all 72 clips and were asked to identify those they had seen previously. Images containing a physical insult were consistently rated more confronting and were remembered more accurately than images with no physical insult. Images with a clear figure/ground demarcation were rated as no more confronting but were consistently recalled with greater accuracy than those with unclear figure/ground demarcation. Makers of gruesome health warning television advertisements should incorporate some form of physical insult and use a clear figure/ground demarcation to maximize image recall and subsequent potential advertising effectiveness.

scholarly journals Perception on Prolonged Standing Work in Electronic Manufacturing Company

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3.24) ◽  
pp. 44
Author(s):  
Norlizaa Mohamad ◽  
Jafri Mohd Rohani ◽  
Ismail Abdul Rahman ◽  
Anis Amira Mat Zuki
Keyword(s):  
Good Health ◽  
Body Part ◽  
Health Condition ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Region ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Prolonged Standing ◽  
Electronic Manufacturing ◽  
Strong Relation ◽  
Ergonomic Interventions

Prolonged standing is one of the common activities in electronic industry as the task requirement. Prolonged standing can cause discomfort on the body of the workers and can lead to injury and occupational disease. The purpose of this study is to investigate standing workers perception on the fatigue and the discomfort on their respective body region for 12 hours working time. The subjects are the 80 workers with a good health condition and at least 6 months tenure. The subject data are collected via questionnaires and Likert scale to define the discomfort, pain, and fatigue. The workers were interviewed regarding their job and perceived fatigue discomfort. The results show the domination of the lower body region with the higher mean at the lower back, legs, and foot ankle. No statistically significant differences were found between the job tenure and body part discomfort pain and fatigue. There is a significant relation between gender and discomfort pain on legs and foot ankle. The result also shows a strong relation between age and the discomfort body parts of thigh and foot ankle. The perceptions of the workers towards discomfort pain and fatigue cause by prolonged standing during performing the task. The results from this study will provide a view for industrial consultants or ergonomist with evidence to support for ergonomic interventions for prolonged standing activity such as job rotation and work-rest schedule. 

Semantics of Hawrami Body Part Terms

2012 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 319-335
Author(s):  
Bistoon Abasi ◽  
Amer Gheitury
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
Body Part ◽  
Field Work ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Semantic Properties ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Internal Body

Human body as a universal possession of human beings constitutes an interesting domain where questions regarding semantic categorisations might be sought crosslinguistically. In the following, we will attempt to describe the terms used to refer to the body in Hawrami, an Iranian language spoken in Paveh, a small township in the western province of Kermanshah near Iraqi borders. Due to the scarcity of written material, the inventory of 202 terms referring to external and internal body parts were obtained through a field work, which took a long time, and techniques, such as the “colouring task”, observation and recording the terms as used in ordinary conversations and informal interviews with native speakers. The semantic properties of the terms and the way they are related in a partonymy or locative relationship were also investigated. As far as universals of body part terms are concerned, while conforming to ‘depth principle’ concerning the number of levels each partonomy may consist of, Hawrami violates an important feature of this principle by not allowing transitive relations between different levels of partonomic hierarchies. In addition, Hawrami lacks a term for labelling the ‘whole’.

Body and emotion

2002 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 341-367 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ning Yu
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Cultural Models ◽  
Body Part ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Emotional Experiences ◽  
Emotional Symptoms ◽  
Internal Organs ◽  
Internal Body ◽  
External Body

This study presents a semantic analysis of how emotions and emotional experiences are described in Chinese. It focuses on conventionalized expressions in Chinese, namely compounds and idioms, which contain body-part terms. The body-part terms are divided into two classes: those denoting external body parts and those denoting internal body parts or organs. It is found that, with a few exceptions, the expressions involving external body parts are originally metonymic, describing emotions in terms of their externally observable bodily events and processes. However, once conventionalized, these expressions are also used metaphorically regardless of emotional symptoms or gestures. The expressions involving internal organs evoke imaginary bodily images that are primarily metaphorical. It is found that the metaphors, though imaginary in nature, are not really all arbitrary. They seem to have a bodily or psychological basis, although they are inevitably influenced by cultural models.

Determination and transdetermination in imaginal disks of Drosophila (Summary only)

1970 ◽  
Vol 176 (1044) ◽  
pp. 291-293
Keyword(s):  
Single Cells ◽  
Body Part ◽  
Cell Types ◽  
Structural Features ◽  
Theoretical Concept ◽  
Body Cavity ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Region ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Imaginal Disks

It is generally assumed that in multicellular organisms the diversity of the different cell types is the result of different gene activity which becomes manifest in the course of development. This theoretical concept of cell differentiation was developed on the basis of results obtained from a relatively small number of suitable experimental systems. One of them comprises the imaginal disks of the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster . Imaginal disks are larval primordia in holometabolic insects such as flies and mosquitoes, and consist of densely packed populations of morphologically uniform cells. They give rise to defined structures of the adult body (mainly integument), thus replacing parts of the larva which are almost completely histolysed during metamorphosis. The prospective fate of the various imaginal disks can be tested, for example, by transplantation experiments. Individual disks are removed from larvae of a genetically marked strain and transplanted into the body cavity of another larva with which the transplants undergo metamorphosis. The metamorphosed derivatives of the disks are then found in the abdomen of the fly and can be microscopically identified on the basis of the morphology of bristles, hairs and other structural features of the integument. The same method is applied for examination of the developmental performance of disk fragments. From the results of such experiments the following conclusions are drawn: (1) Individual disks of fully grown larvae, that is larvae which are ready to pupate, are determined (programmed) for exactly defined body parts of the adult organism. (2) The individual subregions of such a body part can be localized precisely within a disk. Based on these facts fate maps (anlage plans) can be worked out. (3) From experiments in which different genetically marked disks are intermingled and then transplanted into larvae it is concluded that even single cells are determined for structures of a specific body region.

scholarly journals The natural selection of metabolism and mass selects allometric transitions from prokaryotes to mammals

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lars Witting
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Body Mass ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
The Body ◽  
Net Energy ◽  
A Value ◽  
Spatial Dimensions ◽  
Self Replication ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
Evolution Proceeds

AbstractInter-specific body mass allometries can evolve from the natural selection of mass, with ±1/4 and ±3/4 exponents following from the geometry of intra-specific interactions when density dependent foraging occurs in two spatial dimensions (2D, Witting, 1995). The corresponding values for three dimensional interactions (3D) are ±1/6 and ±5/6.But the allometric exponents in mobile organisms are more diverse than the prediction. The exponent for mass specific metabolism tends to cluster around −1/4 and −1/6 in terrestrial and pelagic vertebrates, but it is strongly positive in prokaryotes with an apparent value around 5/6 (DeLong et al., 2010). And a value around zero has been reported in protozoa, and on the macro evolutionary scale from prokaryotes over larger unicells to multicellular vertebrates (Makarieva et al., 2005, 2008).I show that mass specific metabolism can be selected as the pace of the resource handling that generates net energy for self-replication and the selection of mass, and that this selection of metabolism and mass is sufficient to explain metabolic exponents that decline from 5/6 over zero to −1/6 in 3D, and from 3/4 over zero to −1/4 in 2D. The decline follows from a decline in the importance of mass specific metabolism for the selection of mass, and it suggestsi) that the body mass variation in prokaryotes is selected from primary variation in mass specific metabolism,ii) that the variation in multicellular animals are selected from primary variation in the handling and/or densities of the underlying resources,iii) that protozoa are selected as an intermediate lifeform between prokaryotes and multicellular animals, andiv) that macro evolution proceeds along an upper bound on mass specific metabolism.

scholarly journals Patterns of semantic variation differ across body parts: evidence from the Japonic languages

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 455-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. A. Huisman ◽  
Roeland van Hout ◽  
Asifa Majid
Keyword(s):  
Hierarchical Structure ◽  
Body Part ◽  
Naming Task ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Language Family ◽  
The Face ◽  
Lexical Similarity ◽  
Multi Method Approach ◽  
Method Approach

Abstract The human body is central to myriad metaphors, so studying the conceptualisation of the body itself is critical if we are to understand its broader use. One essential but understudied issue is whether languages differ in which body parts they single out for naming. This paper takes a multi-method approach to investigate body part nomenclature within a single language family. Using both a naming task (Study 1) and colouring-in task (Study 2) to collect data from six Japonic languages, we found that lexical similarity for body part terminology was notably differentiated within Japonic, and similar variation was evident in semantics too. Novel application of cluster analysis on naming data revealed a relatively flat hierarchical structure for parts of the face, whereas parts of the body were organised with deeper hierarchical structure. The colouring data revealed that bounded parts show more stability across languages than unbounded parts. Overall, the data reveal there is not a single universal conceptualisation of the body as is often assumed, and that in-depth, multi-method explorations of under-studied languages are urgently required.

scholarly journals Effects of Pause Design on the Decline in Pulling Effort and the Evaluation of Perceived Effort in Pulling Tasks

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (24) ◽  
pp. 12022
Author(s):  
Cannan Yi ◽  
Fan Tang ◽  
Kaiway Li ◽  
Hong Hu ◽  
Huali Zuo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Material Handling ◽  
Perceived Exertion ◽  
Body Part ◽  
Exponential Model ◽  
The Body ◽  
Muscular Fatigue ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Perceived Effort ◽  
Work Related ◽  
Pull Strength

Pulling is one of the manual material handling activities that could lead to work-related musculoskeletal disorders. The objectives of this study were to explore the development of muscular fatigue when performing intermittent pulling tasks and to establish models to predict the pull strength decrease due to performing the tasks. A simulated truck pulling experiment was conducted. Eleven healthy male adults participated. The participants pulled a handle with a load of 40 kg, which resulted in a pulling force of approximately 123 N. The pulling tasks lasted for 9 or 12 min with one, two, or three pauses embedded. The total time period of the embedded pauses was 3 min. The pull strength after each pull and rest was measured. Ratings of the perceived exertion on body parts after each pull were also recorded. The results showed insignificant differences regarding the development of muscular fatigue related to rest frequency. We found that the development of muscular fatigue for pulling tasks with embedded pauses was significantly slower than that for continuous pulls. The forearm had a higher CR-10 score than the other body parts indicating that the forearm was the body part suffering early muscle fatigue. An exponential model was developed to predict the pull strength of the pulling tasks with embedded pauses. This model may be used to assess the developing of muscular fatigue for pulling tasks.

Body Parts and Nature of Injuries Associated with Manual Materials Handling Workers' Compensation Claims

1997 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 619-623
Author(s):  
Lobat Hashemi ◽  
Patrick G. Dempsey
Keyword(s):  
Body Part ◽  
The Body ◽  
Workers Compensation ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Materials Handling ◽  
Lower Back ◽  
Manual Materials Handling ◽  
Cost Distribution ◽  
Compensation Claims ◽  
The Cost

Workers' compensation claims associated with manual materials handling (MMH) represent the single largest source of claims and costs. There have been few analyses of such losses associated with MMH. An examination of the nature of the injuries associated with MMH as well as the body parts most frequently affected can lead to a better understanding of the losses attributed to MMH to suggest further research efforts. A large sample of MMH claims was analyzed and stratified with respect to body part affected and the nature of the injury. The cost distribution associated with the claims was considerably skewed, and an attempt to fit several known distributions to the data did not produce a statistically-significant fit. The lower back area and upper extremities were the body parts associated with the majority of claims. Strain was the nature of injury most frequently reported (51.3%). Lower back area strains were the most frequently reported nature of injury and body part combination.

The categorical perception of tactile distance: A difference in acuity at anatomical landmarks?

2012 ◽  
Vol 25 (0) ◽  
pp. 42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Le Cornu Knight ◽  
Matthew Longo ◽  
Andrew J. Bremner
Keyword(s):  
Categorical Perception ◽  
Body Part ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Anatomical Landmarks ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Subjective Equality ◽  
Perceptual Distortions ◽  
Distance Judgments

Tactile distance judgments are prone to a number of physiological and perceptual distortions. One such distortion concerns tactile distances over the wrist being perceptually elongated relative to those within the hand or arm. This has been interpreted as a categorical segmentation effect: The wrist implicitly serves as a partition between two body part categories so that stimuli crossing the wrist appear further apart. The effect could alternatively be explained in terms of specialized acuity at anatomical landmarks (i.e., the wrist). To test these opposing explanations we presented participants with two tactile distances sequentially for comparison (one mediolaterally, across the arm, and the other proximodistally, along the arm). Points-of-Subjective-Equality (DV) were compared on the hand, wrist and arm, on dorsal and ventral surfaces between subjects. If the acuity account were true distances would be elongated in both axes at the wrist. If the categorical segmentation account were true there would be a selective perceived increase of the proximodistal distance at the wrist. A previously reported mediolateral bias was found on all body parts but, consistent with the categorical account, at the wrist the magnitude of the bias was either reduced (dorsally) or not found (ventrally) suggesting a selective proximodistal elongation. We found no evidence of increased acuity in the vicinity of the wrist in this task. Therefore we conclude that the segmentation of the body into discrete parts induces categorical perception of tactile distance.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document