Psychological studies (Proffitt, 2006) have demonstrated that what one sees is influenced by one's goals, physiological state, and emotions. These studies demonstrate that there is a positive correlation between the physical demands (energetic cost) and perceived valence (emotional cost) of a task and the appearance of slant and egocentric distance in the environment. The studies are compelling. However, one can question whether their results are due to changes in the way participants perceived the orientation and extent of (...) their environment or are instead artifacts of the way they judged the difficulty of expected tasks in particular contexts. We asked participants to sketch the rough spatial layout of several paintings as accurately as possible. In this type of task participants continuously compare what they have drawn against what they perceive. Therefore, participants performance can be interpreted as a means to directly measure of the spatial metric of perception. We chose two paintings by Andrew Wyeth as target images: “Christina's World” and “Winter, 1946.” Participants were asked to draw the spatial arrangement of the key features of the scene depicted in the target painting twice: prior to being presented with biographical information about the subject of the painting condition; and then again after being told the biographical information that altered the perceived task demands or emotional valence of the events they depicted. We predicted that participants' drawings would differ in the two conditions indicating that: change in the energetic or emotional costs of the depicted action would cause them to perceive the depicted orientation of hills as steeper and distance between key landmarks as longer. Results from the energetic cost condition support this prediction. We will discuss our results and the suggestion that these types of effects reflect a role for motor simulation in perception (Witt, 2005). (shrink)

The human brain does not use more energy than the smaller brains of animals of comparable corporal weight. Uniquely, human functions localized largely in parts of the human brain that show greatest size increase over other animals may be mediated primarily by nonsynaptic neurotransmission, with reduced energy cost per kilogram of brain. This may affect the energetic constraints on evolution.

The extreme sexual size dimorphism in spiders has motivated studies for many years. In many species the male can be very small relative to the female. There are several hypotheses trying to explain this fact, most of them emphasizing the role of energy in determining spider size. The aim of this paper is to review the role of energy in sexual size dimorphism of spiders, even for those spiders that do not necessarily live in high foliage, using physical and allometric (...) principles. Here we propose that the cost of transport or equivalently energy expenditure and the speed are traits under selection pressure in male spiders, favoring those of smaller size to reduce travel costs. The morphology of the spiders responds to these selective forces depending upon the lifestyle of the spiders. Climbing and bridging spiders must overcome the force of gravity. If bridging allows faster dispersal, small males would have a selective advantage by enjoying more mating opportunities. In wandering spiders with low population density and as a consequence few male–male interactions, high speed and low energy expenditure or cost of transport should be favored by natural selection. Pendulum mechanics show the advantages of long legs in spiders and their relationship with high speed, even in climbing and bridging spiders. Thus small size, compensated by long legs should be the expected morphology for a fast and mobile male spider. (shrink)

Features of gait are determined at multiple levels, from the selection of the gait itself (e.g. walk or run) through the specific parameters utilized (stride length, frequency, etc.) to the pattern of muscular excitation. The ultimate choices are neurally determined, but what is involved with that decision process? Human locomotion appears stereotyped not so much because the pattern is predetermined, but because these movement patterns are good solutions for providing movement utilizing the machinery available to the individual (the legs and (...) their requisite components). Under different circumstances the appropriate solution may differ broadly (different gait) or subtly (different parameters). Interpretation of the neural decision making process would benefit from understanding the influences that determine the selection of the appropriate solution in any set of circumstances, including that of normal conditions. In this review we survey an array of studies that point to energetic cost as a key input to the gait coordination system, and not just an outcome of the gait pattern implemented. We then use that information to rigorously define the construct proposed by Sparrow and Newell (1998) where the effects of environment, organism and task act as constraints determining the solution set available, and the coordination pattern is then implemented under a pressure for energetic economy. Environment is defined in terms of affordances based on the ecological psychology definition of the concept and organism is defined as classic morphology and physiology based capabilities. We rely on a novel conceptualization of task that recognizes that the task goal needs to be separated from the mechanisms that achieve the goal if the motivation behind the selection of the mechanism strategy is to be exposed and understood. This reformulation of the Sparrow and Newell construct is then linked to the proposed pressure for economy by considering it as an optimization problem, where the most readily selected gait strategy will be that which achieves the task goal at (or near) the energetic minimum. (shrink)

In this paper I present a case study of mathematical explanation in science that is new to the philosophical literature, and that arises in the context of estimating the energetic costs of running in bipedal animals. I refer to this as the Bipedal Gait Costs explanation. I argue that it is important for examples of applied mathematics to be driven not just by philosophical and mathematical concerns but also by scientific concerns. After a detailed presentation of the BGC case (...) study, I discuss ways in which it is different from standard examples of MES. One distinctive aspect of BGC is that substantive mathematics occurs at two different levels. I argue for a distinction to be drawn between the mathematical modeling that occurs at one level, which is non-explanatory, and the mathematical theorem which is applied to results gleaned from these models, which is explanatory. I conclude by drawing some connections with broader indispensability-based arguments for platonism in the philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

Sexual selection drives the evolution of some of the most exaggerated traits in nature. Studies on sexual selection often focus on the size of these traits relative to body size, but few focus on energetic maintenance costs of the tissues that compose them, and the ways in which these costs vary with body size. The relationships between energy use and body size have consequences that may allow large individuals to invest disproportionally more in sexually selected structures, or lead to (...) the reduced per‐gram maintenance cost of enlarged structures. Although sexually selected traits can incur energetic maintenance costs, these costs are not universally high; they are dependent on the relative mass and metabolic activity of tissues associated with them. Energetic costs of maintenance may play a pervasive yet little‐explored role in shaping the relative scaling of sexually selected traits across diverse taxa. Also see the video abstract here: https://youtu.be/JyuoQIeA33Q. (shrink)

Social grooming is an important element of social life in terrestrial primates, inducing the putative benefits of β-endorphin stimulation and group harmony and cohesion. Implicit in many analyses of grooming (e.g. biological markets) are the assumptions of costs and benefits to grooming behaviour. Here, in a review of literature, we investigate the proximate costs and benefits of grooming, as a potentially useful explanatory substrate to the well-documented ultimate (functional) explanations. We find that the hedonic benefits of grooming are well documented. (...) However, we did not find convincing evidence for costs. If proximate costs do exist, they might consist of energetic, cognitive, opportunity costs, or some combination of all of these. Nonetheless, there remains the possibility that grooming costs are negligible, or even that the provision of allogrooming is rewarding in itself. We suggest empirical research to resolve this issue. (shrink)

The present study was designed to explore the performance costs of negative emotional stimuli in a vigilance task. Forty participants performed a vigilance task in two conditions: one with task-irrelevant negative-arousing pictures and one with task-irrelevant neutral pictures. In addition to performance, we measured subjective state and frontal cerebral activity with near infrared spectroscopy. Overall performance in the negative picture condition was lower than in the neutral picture condition and the negative picture condition had elevated levels of energetic arousal, (...) tense arousal and task-related thoughts. Moreover, there was a significant relationship between the impact of the negative pictures on tense arousal and task-related thoughts and the impact of the negative pictures on performance . These results provide support for indirect cost models of negative emotional stimuli on target detection performance. (shrink)

We give a general method for producing various effective Null and Positivstellensätze, and getting new Positivstellensätze in algebraically closed valued fields and ordered groups. These various effective Nullstellensätze produce algebraic identities certifying that some geometric conditions cannot be simultaneously satisfied. We produce also constructive versions of abstract classical results of algebra based on Zorn's lemma in several cases where such constructive version did not exist. For example, the fact that a real field can be totally ordered, or the fact that (...) a field can be embedded in an algebraically closed field. Our results are based on the concepts we develop of dynamical proofs and simultaneous collapse. (shrink)

We present two prudent semantics within Dung's theory of argumentation. They are based on two new notions of extension, referred to as p-extension and c-extension. Two arguments cannot belong to the same p-extension whenever one of them attacks indirectly the other one. Two arguments cannot belong to the same c-extension whenever one of them indirectly attacks a third argument while the other one indirectly defends the third. We argue that our semantics lead to a better handling of controversial arguments than (...) Dung's ones. We compare the prudent inference relations induced by our semantics w.r.t. cautiousness; we also compare them with the inference relations induced by Dung's semantics. (shrink)

Migrating Minds contributes to the prominent interdisciplinary domain of Cosmopolitan Studies with twenty innovative essays by humanities scholars from all over the world that re-examine theories and practices of cosmopolitanism from a variety of perspectives.

A travers une phénoménologie où l'art éclaire le réel, à travers son choix des auteurs et des oeuvres qu'il a commentés, le philosophe Henri Maldiney (1912-2013) a proposé un décentrement du regard et du savoir propres à renouveler l'étude du paysage. Il part d'une question trompeusement simple : sommes-nous "devant" ou "dedans" le paysage? Comment s'approche le paysage? Comment se fait-il image? Ce recueil présente une pensée complexe de manière accessible à tous les spécialistes et les passionnés de littérature et (...) d'études visuelles. Exemples littéraires, picturaux et photographiques, témoignent de la fécondité d'une pensée fondée sur l'aisthèsis, la présence et le rythme."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Comment une école publique d’art en Grande Bretagne a-t-elle été créée, comment a-t-elle évolué au XIXe siècle et quelle fut sa place vis-à-vis de la Royal Academy of Arts? Quelles furent l’incidence et l’importance de l’économie politique utilitariste et plus particulièrement des écrits de J. Bentham sur le goût, l’éthique et l’utilité, dans le développement d’une institution subventionnée par l’État et destinée à l’éducation artistique de la nation? Quels furent les débats et les apories..

Learning to live together is the central concern of education everywhere in the world. Traditional sporting games provide interpersonal experiences that shape miniature communities charged with emotional meanings. The objective of this study was to analyze the ethnomotor features of TSG in three Catalan-speaking Autonomous Communities and to interpret them for constructing emotional communities. The study followed a phenomenological-interpretative paradigm. The identification of TSG was done by a hermeneutic methodological approach by using an exhaustive exploratory documentary research. We studied 503 (...) games collected in the Dictionary Català-Valencià-Balear de Alcover and Moll. Instruments and procedure: A database was built up with information about the internal and external logic of the games. The validity of the information was confirmed by means of a concordance test between the researchers. Data processing was carried out by means of classification trees, identifying the predictive variables of the types of TSG. Most of the TSGs were sociomotor games. The classification tree identified four explanatory variables. Three variables were internal traits, and one variable corresponded to external logic. Features of the TSG of the Catalan-speaking Autonomous Communities build original emotional communities. The ethnomotor regularities triggered emotional experiences associated with pleasure for living together ; domesticating of aggressiveness over opponents ; developing sustainability ; educating the competition ; and interpersonal well-being based on the community. (shrink)