scholarly journals Coordination effort in joint action is reflected in pupil size

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Basil Wahn ◽  
Veera Ruuskanen ◽  
Alan Kingstone ◽  
Sebastiaan Mathot
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Pupil Size ◽  
Control Experiment ◽  
Mental Effort ◽  
Main Experiment ◽  
Labor Division ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Visual Tasks ◽  
Physiological Correlate ◽  
Cognitively Demanding Tasks

Humans often perform visual tasks together, and when doing so, they tend to devise division of labor strategies to share the load. Implementing such strategies, however, is effortful as co-actors need to coordinate their actions. We tested if pupil size – a physiological correlate of mental effort – can detect such a coordination effort in a multiple object tracking task (MOT). Participants performed the MOT task jointly with a computer partner and either devised a division of labor strategy (main experiment) or the labor division was already pre-determined (control experiment). We observed that pupil sizes increase relative to performing the MOT task alone in the main experiment while this is not the case in the control experiment. These findings suggest that pupil size can detect a rise in coordination effort, extending the view that pupil size indexes mental effort across a wide range of cognitively demanding tasks.

Men's Retirement and Marital Quality

1996 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 336-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
SCOTT M. MYERS ◽  
ALAN BOOTH
Keyword(s):  
Social Support ◽  
Longitudinal Data ◽  
Gender Role ◽  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Marital Quality ◽  
High Stress ◽  
National Sample ◽  
Quality Characteristics ◽  
Quality Changes ◽  
Wide Range

Using longitudinal data from a national sample of married persons, we explore a wide range of contextual factors that may influence the effect of retirement on marital quality. Characteristics of the husband's job, the division of labor, health, social support, and marital quality are preretirement factors found to affect the influence of retirement on marital quality. Leaving a high-stress job improves marital quality, whereas factors signifying gender role reversals, poor health, and reduced social support lower marital quality. Changes that accompany retirement involving role reversals and decreased social support lower marital quality as did the amount of change in the individual's life. Retirement has a more powerful and pervasive influence on marital quality than prior research suggests.

scholarly journals Topological constraints in early multicellularity favor reproductive division of labor

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Yanni ◽  
Shane Jacobeen ◽  
Pedro Márquez-Zacarías ◽  
Joshua S Weitz ◽  
William C. Ratcliff ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Resource Sharing ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Large Body ◽  
Concave Function ◽  
Cellular Interactions ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Classical Models ◽  
Reproductive Division Of Labor ◽  
Reproductive Division

Reproductive division of labor (e.g., germ-soma specialization) is a hallmark of the evolution of multicellularity, signifying the emergence of a new type of individual and facilitating the evolution of increased organismal complexity. A large body of work from evolutionary biology, economics, and ecology has shown that specialization is beneficial when further division of labor produces an accelerating increase in absolute productivity (i.e., productivity is a convex function of specialization). Here we show that reproductive specialization is qualitatively different from classical models of resource sharing, and can evolve even when the benefits of specialization are saturating (i.e., productivity is a concave function of specialization). Through analytical theory and evolutionary individual based simulations, our work demonstrates that reproductive specialization is strongly favored in sparse networks of cellular interactions, such as trees and filaments, that reflect the morphology of early, simple multicellular organisms, highlighting the importance of restricted social interactions in the evolution of reproductive specialization. More broadly, we find that specialization is strongly favored, despite saturating returns on investment, in a wide range of scenarios in which sharing is asymmetric.

An implicit representation of stimulus ambiguity in pupil size

2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (48) ◽  
pp. e2107997118
Author(s):  
Jackson E. Graves ◽  
Paul Egré ◽  
Daniel Pressnitzer ◽  
Vincent de Gardelle
Keyword(s):  
Pupil Size ◽  
Behavioral Responses ◽  
Pupil Dilation ◽  
Specific Situation ◽  
Implicit Representation ◽  
Stimulus Ambiguity ◽  
Two Measures ◽  
Perceptual Systems ◽  
Physiological Correlate ◽  
Pitch Shift

To guide behavior, perceptual systems must operate on intrinsically ambiguous sensory input. Observers are usually able to acknowledge the uncertainty of their perception, but in some cases, they critically fail to do so. Here, we show that a physiological correlate of ambiguity can be found in pupil dilation even when the observer is not aware of such ambiguity. We used a well-known auditory ambiguous stimulus, known as the tritone paradox, which can induce the perception of an upward or downward pitch shift within the same individual. In two experiments, behavioral responses showed that listeners could not explicitly access the ambiguity in this stimulus, even though their responses varied from trial to trial. However, pupil dilation was larger for the more ambiguous cases. The ambiguity of the stimulus for each listener was indexed by the entropy of behavioral responses, and this entropy was also a significant predictor of pupil size. In particular, entropy explained additional variation in pupil size independent of the explicit judgment of confidence in the specific situation that we investigated, in which the two measures were decoupled. Our data thus suggest that stimulus ambiguity is implicitly represented in the brain even without explicit awareness of this ambiguity.

scholarly journals Is categorization in visual working memory a way to reduce mental effort? A pupillometry study

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cherie Zhou ◽  
Monicque M. Lorist ◽  
Sebastiaan Mathot
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Visual Working Memory ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Pupil Size ◽  
Mental Effort ◽  
Pupil Dilation ◽  
General Category ◽  
Set Size ◽  
Memory Precision ◽  
Continuous Representations

Recent studies on visual working memory (VWM) have shown that visual information can be stored in VWM as continuous (e.g., a specific shade of red) as well as categorical representations (e.g., the general category red). It has been widely assumed, yet never directly tested, that continuous representations require more VWM mental effort than categorical representations; given limited VWM capacity, this would mean that fewer continuous, as compared to categorical, representations can be maintained simultaneously. We tested this assumption by measuring pupil size, as a proxy for mental effort, in a delayed estimation task. Participants memorized one to four ambiguous (boundaries between adjacent color categories) or prototypical colors to encourage continuous or categorical representations, respectively; after a delay, a probe indicated the location of the to-be-reported color. We found that, for set size 1, pupil size was larger while maintaining ambiguous as compared to prototypical colors, but without any difference in memory precision; this suggests that participants relied on an effortful continuous representation to maintain a single ambiguous color, thus resulting in pupil dilation while preserving precision. In contrast, for set size 2 and higher, pupil size was equally large while maintaining ambiguous and prototypical colors, but memory precision was now substantially reduced for ambiguous colors; this suggests that participants now also relied on categorical representations for ambiguous colors (which are by definition a poor fit to any category), thus reducing memory precision but not resulting in pupil dilation. Taken together, our results suggest that continuous representations are more effortful than categorical representations, and that very few continuous representations (perhaps only one) can be maintained simultaneously.

Meeting at Grand Central

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Cronk ◽  
Beth L. Leech
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Air Traffic ◽  
Common Pool Resource ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Slave Rebellions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter summarizes the book's findings regarding cooperation, coordination, and collective action as well as adaptation and the role that organizations play in fostering cooperation. It first considers four vignettes, each highlighting a contrast between a situation in which cooperation did occur and one in which it did not: water as a common-pool resource, grassroots justice in Tanzania, slave rebellions, and coordinated and uncoordinated air traffic. It then offers some observations regarding the relationship between the social and life sciences, with particular emphasis on consilience, emergence, and the scientific division of labor. The chapter explains how consilience is made possible by emergence and cites the study of cooperation as an excellent example of how the division of labor among the sciences can lead to a wide range of complementary insights regarding specific social phenomena.

[i] is Lighter and More Greenish Than [o]: Intrinsic Association Between Vowel Sounds and Colors

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 419-437 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyun-Woong Kim ◽  
Hosung Nam ◽  
Chai-Youn Kim
Keyword(s):  
General Population ◽  
Control Experiment ◽  
Main Experiment ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Phonetic Feature ◽  
Specific Manner ◽  
Phonetic Features

It has recently been reported in the synesthesia literature that graphemes sharing the same phonetic feature tend to induce similar synesthetic colors. In the present study, we investigated whether phonetic properties are associated with colors in a specific manner among the general population, even when other visual and linguistic features of graphemes are removed. To test this hypothesis, we presented vowel sounds synthesized by systematically manipulating the position of the tongue body’s center. Participants were asked to choose a color after hearing each sound. Results from the main experiment showed that lightness and chromaticity of matched colors exhibited systematic variations along the two axes of the position of the tongue body’s center. Some non-random associations between vowel sounds and colors remained effective with pitch and intensity of the sounds equalized in the control experiment, which suggests that other acoustic factors such as inherent pitch of vowels cannot solely account for the current results. Taken together, these results imply that the association between phonetic features and colors is not random, and this synesthesia-like association is shared by people in the general population.

scholarly journals Polarized light information modulates sensorimotor decision making in goldfish

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Santiago Otero Coronel ◽  
Martín Berón de Astrada ◽  
Violeta Medan
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Polarized Light ◽  
Polarization Sensitivity ◽  
Polarization Angle ◽  
Threat Detection ◽  
Low Contrast ◽  
Low Intensity ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Visual Tasks ◽  
Intensity Contrast

AbstractAnimal survival relays on environmental information gathered by their sensory systems. In invertebrates the polarization angle of light is known to provide vital information for a wide range of visual tasks. However, the role of polarization sensitivity in vertebrates remains poorly understood. Here we study if polarization vision enhances threat detection in goldfish. We found that adding a polarization cue to a low intensity contrast looming stimulus biases the type of evasive behavior the animals perform. While low contrast looms mostly evoke subtle alarm reactions, the addition of a polarized cue dramatically increases the probability of eliciting a fast escape maneuver, the C-start response. Goldfish can be startled by polarized light stimuli coming not only from above but also from the sides indicating that polarization sensitivity spans large areas of the retina. In addition, we observed that while low intensity contrast looms preferentially elicit alarm behaviours, high intensity contrast looms rarely induced them, but elicited C-start responses with a high probability. Together, our results show that the addition of a polarized light cue to a low intensity contrast stimulus shifts animal’s decision making from low threshold alarm responses to the higher threshold C-start escape behaviour. This additional visual cue, thus, might aid underwater threat detection and predator avoidance in the animal’s natural environment.Summary statementThis study gives the first compelling evidence that fish can use polarized light information to improve their decision making in the context of visual threat detection.

The Geographical Organization of Production-Systems

1988 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 377-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
R Walker
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labor ◽  
Vertical Integration ◽  
Organization Theory ◽  
Production Systems ◽  
Location Decisions ◽  
Market Exchange ◽  
Unified Approach ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Industrial Geography ◽  
Organization Of Production

In this paper it is argued that a radical reorientation of organization theory and of industrial geography is needed, one that overcomes the limitations of studies that consider plant locations, agglomeration economies, geographies of enterprise, systems of cities, linkage analysis, and the like, separately. I call for a unified approach to industrial location and organization, or, rather, to the spatial division of labor and modes of organization. To do this one must first reopen the question of the division of labor and its obverse, the integration of complex production-systems. One must also go beyond the important inquiry by Scott and others, as to vertical integration/disintegration, to consider a wide range of possible means and modes of organization available, including variations on market exchange, several forms of workplaces, a wide range of firm size and scope, territorial complexes from the industrial district to the nation-state, and differing industry alignments. Last, one must treat geography as integral to the matter of organization, rather than as an outcome of preexisting organizational units that make location decisions. The puzzle of geographical organization is presented as a whole, but without yet trying to put it together for any particular sector, place, or time.

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