The role of fundamental fears in the engagement in health protecting behaviour and the use of health care services

Introduction Fundamental fears have been found to contribute to the engagement in health protective behaviour and the use of health care services before. These behaviours are proposed to contribute to the development of chronic pain. In order to validate these results, anxiety sensitivity (AS), injury/illness sensitivity (IS), and fear of negative evaluation (FNE) were tested in regard to these behaviours and general health concerns. Method Measures of fundamental fears, health protecting behaviour, use of health care services and perceived health were administered online to 121 participants. Correlations were tested with Pearson correlation tests. Predictive values of the fundamental fears were calculated with linear regressions. Results IS correlated positively with all behavioural measures and was the best predictor for all three behavioural measures. AS only correlated with perceived health. FNE showed a trend with perceived health and somewhat predicted health protecting behaviour. Discussion Results partially replicate previous findings, but also contradict other findings. This study further confirms the notion that fundamental fears are involved in pain-related behaviours and recommends further investigation in these relations

Monte Carlo Tree Search with Heuristic Evaluations using Implicit Minimax Backups

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) has improved the performance of game engines in domains such as Go, Hex, and general game playing. MCTS has been shown to outperform classic alpha-beta search in games where good heuristic evaluations are difficult to obtain. In recent years, combining ideas from traditional minimax search in MCTS has been shown to be advantageous in some domains, such as Lines of Action, Amazons, and Breakthrough. In this paper, we propose a new way to use heuristic evaluations to guide the MCTS search by storing the two sources of information, estimated win rates and heuristic evaluations, separately. Rather than using the heuristic evaluations to replace the playouts, our technique backs them up implicitly during the MCTS simulations. These minimax values are then used to guide future simulations. We show that using implicit minimax backups leads to stronger play performance in Kalah, Breakthrough, and Lines of Action.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures, 9 tables, expanded version of paper presented at IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG) 2014 conferenc

Does crypsis influence foraging patterns in a colour polymorphic Arctic fox population?

Seasonal coat colour moulting species moult to white winter fur for crypsis in snow-covered landscapes. Seasonal coat colour moulting occurs in birds and mammals; some are colour polymorphic; one of which is the arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus), having a blue and white colour morph. Camouflage, thermoregulation and physiology likely contributed to the evolution of this polymorphism. Climate change is expected to reduce snow cover duration in the Arctic, putting the white morph under pressure as periods of background mismatching may be prolonged. Through behavioural plasticity, animals can select environments that improve their crypsis level, but this mechanism has never been researched in Arctic foxes. Behavioural and phenotypic plasticity are expected to be vital for winter-white morphs to adapt to climate change but remain poorly understood. In this study, I aim to examine whether Arctic foxes are aware of their crypsis level. I thereby build upon the foundations of the camouflage hypothesis to investigate the potential presence of behavioural plasticity linked to crypsis level. I do this through camera trap images from feeding stations on Varanger. I predict conspicuous foxes use feeding stations more because of lowered foraging success (Foraging hypothesis), or alternatively, less to avoid predation at feeding stations (Predator avoidance hypothesis). Furthermore, I predict that conspicuous foxes will display a higher degree of nocturnal behaviour than cryptic foxes to avoid predation (Nocturnal behaviour hypothesis). To investigate this, I analysed 193.715 camera trap images made at 19 feeding stations, scoring 61.950 pictures containing Arctic foxes taken during March, May, August, and December from 2018 until 2021, using the moulting stage, snow cover, and light hours as predictors. I found no compelling evidence to suggest that the two colour morphs use the feeding stations differently. The predicted change in winter detection rate in blue Arctic foxes was not found. Both colour morphs displayed strong nocturnal behaviour having a higher likelihood of presence during the night. To conclude, Arctic foxes appear unaware of their degree of crypsis and show no behavioural plasticity, as both colour morphs display similar foraging behaviour. Keywords: colour polymorphism, seasonal coat colour moult, arctic fox, supplementary feeding, camouflage hypothesis, foraging, snow cover, climate change