A Behavioural Study of Free Ranging Ceylon Spotted Deer (Axis axis ceylonensis) in Trincomalee, Sri Lanka

Axis axis ceylonensis (Ceylon spotted deer) is a sub species endemic to Sri Lanka. Ecological observations in wild populations of this subspecies have been reported but there is no published research on its behaviour. We report here a behavioural study on a free ranging population of A. a. ceylonensis inhabiting a temple surroundings in Trincomalee, Sri Lanka. Behaviour was quantified by focal sampling on sex age groups in three time zones: 6:30 to 7:30, 12:30-13:30, and 17:00 to 18:00 hours. The deer were more active in the hour after dawn and an hour before dusk. The main activities were feeding and play, the latter common in juveniles. There was a preference to graze on grasses and browse on Ficus sp. leaves. Resting was highest in the afternoon across all groups. This bimodal activity pattern is similar to that of both wild Ceylon and Indian A. axis subspecies despite the absence of predators in the study area. The bimodal activity may be related to thermoregulatory functions while grazing in open grass areas.

Continuous neural activations of simulation and linguistic information during metaphor processing

Language processing relies on conceptual representations which are composed of two crucial components, embodied simulation and linguistic distributional pattern. The embodied component refers to the reactivation of previous sensorimotor experiences related to the concept (e.g., experiences with a clever student when reading "bright student"); the linguistic component refers to the co-occurrence pattern of the constituent words (i.e., how often "bright" and "student" appear in the same context). In this study, we examined the existence and roles of these components in metaphor processing. Using both a behavioural study and EEG, we studied how these components affected the speed, success rate and neurophysiological activations of metaphor comprehension. We found that, while performance of metaphor comprehension was mainly influenced by the embodied component, the linguistic component was activated before the embodied component reached its peak and could act as a shortcut to construct good-enough representations, such that people found it easier to accept and hard to reject a metaphor when the distributional frequency of constituent words was high. In other words, the linguistic distributional pattern could provide a guide for conceptual representations before the embodied component was fully engaged.