Cognitive Invariants of Geographic Event Conceptualization: What Matters and What Refines?

Behavioral experiments addressing the conceptualization of geographic events are few and far between. Our research seeks to address this deficiency by developing an experimental framework on the conceptualization of movement patterns. In this paper, we report on a critical experiment that is designed to shed light on the question of cognitively salient invariants in such conceptualization. Invariants have been identified as being critical to human information processing, particularly for the processing of dynamic information. In our experiment, we systematically address cognitive invariants of one class of geographic events: single entity movement patterns. To this end, we designed 72 animated icons that depict the movement patterns of hurricanes around two invariants: size difference and topological equivalence class movement patterns endpoints. While the endpoint hypothesis, put forth by Regier (2007), claims a particular focus of human cognition to ending relations of events, other research suggests that simplicity principles guide categorization and, additionally, that static information is easier to process than dynamic information. Our experiments show a clear picture: Size matters. Nonetheless, we also find categorization behaviors consistent with experiments in both the spatial and temporal domain, namely that topology refines these behaviors and that topological equivalence classes are categorized consistently. These results are critical steppingstones in validating spatial formalism from a cognitive perspective and cognitively grounding work on ontologies

Diving into the vertical dimension of elasmobranch movement ecology

Knowledge of the three-dimensional movement patterns of elasmobranchs is vital to understand their ecological roles and exposure to anthropogenic pressures. To date, comparative studies among species at global scales have mostly focused on horizontal movements. Our study addresses the knowledge gap of vertical movements by compiling the first global synthesis of vertical habitat use by elasmobranchs from data obtained by deployment of 989 biotelemetry tags on 38 elasmobranch species. Elasmobranchs displayed high intra- and interspecific variability in vertical movement patterns. Substantial vertical overlap was observed for many epipelagic elasmobranchs, indicating an increased likelihood to display spatial overlap, biologically interact, and share similar risk to anthropogenic threats that vary on a vertical gradient. We highlight the critical next steps toward incorporating vertical movement into global management and monitoring strategies for elasmobranchs, emphasizing the need to address geographic and taxonomic biases in deployments and to concurrently consider both horizontal and vertical movements

TRY plant trait database – enhanced coverage and open access

Plant traits—the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants—determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research spanning from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology, to biodiversity conservation, ecosystem and landscape management, restoration, biogeography and earth system modelling. Since its foundation in 2007, the TRY database of plant traits has grown continuously. It now provides unprecedented data coverage under an open access data policy and is the main plant trait database used by the research community worldwide. Increasingly, the TRY database also supports new frontiers of trait‐based plant research, including the identification of data gaps and the subsequent mobilization or measurement of new data. To support this development, in this article we evaluate the extent of the trait data compiled in TRY and analyse emerging patterns of data coverage and representativeness. Best species coverage is achieved for categorical traits—almost complete coverage for ‘plant growth form’. However, most traits relevant for ecology and vegetation modelling are characterized by continuous intraspecific variation and trait–environmental relationships. These traits have to be measured on individual plants in their respective environment. Despite unprecedented data coverage, we observe a humbling lack of completeness and representativeness of these continuous traits in many aspects. We, therefore, conclude that reducing data gaps and biases in the TRY database remains a key challenge and requires a coordinated approach to data mobilization and trait measurements. This can only be achieved in collaboration with other initiatives

Simplicity, regularity and perceptual interpretations: A structural information approach

In the history of visual science, students of perception have searched for organizational grouping principles that determine how an arbitrary visual pattern is interpreted. The notion of simplicity advocated in this chapter attempts to combine various aspects of perceptual grouping within one framework and is a central issue within the Structural Information Theory (SIT), initiated by Leeuwenberg (1969, 1971) and further developed since then. In this chapter, a brief introduction to the notion of simplicity and SIT's regularity based quantifications is given. Furthermore, applications of SIT on various stimulus domains (series, surfaces, objects) are illustrated

Episodic grammar: a computational model of the interaction between episodic and semantic memory in language processing

We present a model of the interaction of semantic and episodic memory in language processing. Our work shows how language processing can be understood in terms of memory retrieval. We point out that the perceived dichotomy between rule-based versus exemplar-based language modelling can be interpreted in a neuro-biological perspective in terms of the interaction between a semantic memory system that encodes linguistic knowledge in the form of abstract rules, and an episodic memory that stores concrete linguistic events. We implement the idea of a semantic-episodic memory integration in a probabilistic grammar, and evaluate its performance as a syntactic parser on corpora of natural language. Our labeled precision and recall results are competitive with state-of-the-art syntactic parsers, with F-scores up to 90.68 on section 22 of the Penn WSJ corpus

Cultural emergence of combinatorial structure in an artificial whistled language

Speech sounds within a linguistic system are both categorical and combinatorial and there are constraints on how elements can be recombined. To investigate the origins of this combinatorial structure, we conducted an iterated learning experiment with human participants, studying the transmission of an artificial system of sounds. In this study, participants learn and recall a system of sounds that are produced with a slide whistle, an instrument that is both intuitive and non-linguistic. The system they are exposed to is the recall output of the previous participant. Transmission from participant to participant causes the system to change and become cumulatively more learnable and more structured. This shows that combinatorial structure can culturally emerge in an artificial sound system through iterated learning