MECHANICAL PROPERTIES OF ACHILLES TENDON IN RELATION TO VARIOUS SPORT ACTIVITIES OF COLLEGIATE ATHLETES

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether mechanical properties of Achilles tendon adapt to the mechanics of diffrent sport activities. Subjects included thirty-five male collegiate track and field athletes (Sprinters, Long distance runners, Jumpers), swimmers, and non-athletes (Controls). The elongation of the Achilles tendon during isometric voluntary plantar flexion contraction was measured. Jumpers and swimmers displayed larger elongation, strain, tendon force and stress of the Achilles tendon when compared to long distance runners and controls. However, the stiffness and Young’s modulus of the Achilles tendon were not significantly different between groups. These results suggested that mechanical properties of the Achilles tendon were unchanged with load characteristics of each sport activity

Octopamine regulates social behaviors between genetically unrelated ant queens.

In different tasks involving action perception, performance has been found to be facilitated when the presented stimuli were produced by the participants themselves rather than by another participant. These results suggest that the same mental representations are accessed during both production and perception. However, with regard to spoken word perception, evidence also suggests that listeners’ representations for speech reflect the input from their surrounding linguistic community rather than their own idiosyncratic productions. Furthermore, speech perception is heavily influenced by indexical cues that may lead listeners to frame their interpretations of incoming speech signals with regard to speaker identity. In order to determine whether word recognition evinces similar self-advantages as found in action perception, it was necessary to eliminate indexical cues from the speech signal. We therefore asked participants to identify noise-vocoded versions of Dutch words that were based on either their own recordings or those of a statistically average speaker. The majority of participants were more accurate for the average speaker than for themselves, even after taking into account differences in intelligibility. These results suggest that the speech representations accessed during perception of noise-vocoded speech are more reflective of the input of the speech community, and hence that speech perception is not necessarily based on representations of one’s own speech