Tag: Yahoo

Unlike people, monkeys aren’t fooled by expensive brands

Selected coverage: Le Monde, Yale News, L’Obs, Yahoo, Discover Magazine, Sydney Morning Herald, Herald Scotland, Daily Mail, Tech Times

In at least one respect, Capuchin monkeys are smarter than humans — they don’t assume a higher price tag means better quality, according to a new Yale study appearing in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology.

People consistently tend to confuse the price of a good with its quality. For instance, one study showed that people think a wine labeled with an expensive price tag tastes better than the same wine labeled with a cheaper price tag. In other studies, people thought a painkiller worked better when they paid a higher price for it.

The Yale study shows that monkeys don’t buy that premise, although they share other irrational behaviors with their human relatives.

“We know that capuchin monkeys share a number of our own economic biases. Our previous work has shown that monkeys are loss-averse, irrational when it comes to dealing with risk, and even prone to rationalizing their own decisions, just like humans,” said Laurie Santos, a psychologist at Yale University and senior author of the study. “But this is one of the first domains we’ve tested in which monkeys show more rational behavior than humans do.”

Rhia Catapano, a former Yale undergraduate who ran the study as part of her senior honors thesis, along with Santos and colleagues designed a series of four experiments to test whether capuchins would prefer higher-priced but equivalent items. They taught monkeys to make choices in an experimental market and to buy novel foods at different prices. Control studies showed that monkeys understood the differences in price between the foods. But when the researchers tested whether monkeys preferred the taste of the higher-priced goods, they were surprised to find that the monkeys didn’t show the same bias as humans.

Santos and colleagues think that differences in the response of humans and capuchins could stem from the different experiences that monkeys and people have with markets and how they behave.

“For humans, higher price tags often signal that other people like a particular good.” Santos noted. “Our richer social experiences with markets might be the very thing that leads us — and not monkeys — astray in this case.”

EurekAlert! PR: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-12/yu-upm120114.php

Study: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01330/full

Energy drinks may pose danger to public health

Selected coverage: The Guardian, TIME, BMJ, The Times, Yahoo!, Reuters, NHS Choices, Daily Telegraph

The heavy consumption of energy drinks risks becoming a significant public health problem, especially among young people, warns a team of researchers from the World Health Organization.

Increased consumption of energy drinks may pose danger to public health, especially among young people, warns a team of researchers from the World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe in the open-access journal Frontiers in Public Health.

Energy drinks are non-alcoholic beverages that contain caffeine, vitamins, and other ingredients for example, taurine, ginseng, and guarana. They are typically marketed as boosting energy and increasing physical and mental performance.

João Breda, from the WHO Regional Office for Europe, and colleagues reviewed the literature on the health risks, consequences and policies related to energy drink consumption.

“From a review of the literature, it would appear that concerns in the scientific community and among the public regarding the potential adverse health effects of the increased consumption of energy drinks are broadly valid,” write the authors.

Energy drinks first hit European markets in 1987 and the industry has since boomed worldwide. In the US, sales increased by around 10% per year between 2008 and 2012, and almost 500 new brands hit the market in 2006. The European Food Safety Authority estimates that 30% of adults, 68% of adolescents, and 18% of children below 10 years consume energy drinks.

High Caffeine in Energy Drinks

Part of the risks of energy drinks are due to their high levels of caffeine. Energy drinks can be drunk quickly, unlike hot coffee, and as a result they are more likely to cause caffeine intoxication. In Europe, a European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) study found that the estimated contribution of energy drinks to total caffeine exposure was 43% in children, 13% in teenagers and 8% in adults.

Studies included in the review suggest that caffeine intoxication can lead to heart palpitations, hypertension, nausea and vomiting, convulsions, psychosis, and in rare cases, death. In the USA, Sweden, and Australia, several cases have been reported where people have died of heart failure or were hospitalized with seizures, from excess consumption of energy drinks.

Research has shown that adolescents who often take energy drinks are also more likely to engage in risky behaviours such as sensation seeking, substance abuse, and binge drinking.

Mixing Energy Drinks and Alcohol

Over 70% of young adults (aged 18 to 29 years) who drink energy drinks mix them with alcohol, according to an EFSA study. Numerous studies have shown that this practice is more risky than drinking alcohol only, possibly because these drinks make it harder for people to notice when they are getting drunk.

According to the National Poison Data System in the United States, between 2010 and 2011, 4854 calls to poison information centers were made about energy drinks. Almost 40% involved alcohol mixed with energy drinks. A similar study in Australia demonstrated a growth in the number of calls about energy drinks. Breda and colleagues say a similar investigation would be useful in Europe.

Energy drinks can be sold in all EU countries, but some countries have introduced regulations, including setting rules for sales to children. Hungary introduced a public health tax that includes energy drinks in 2012. In Sweden, sales of some types of energy drinks are restricted to pharmacies and sales to children are banned.

Way Forward

“As energy drink sales are rarely regulated by age, unlike alcohol and tobacco, and there is a proven potential negative effect on children, there is the potential for a significant public health problem in the future,” the authors conclude.

They make the following suggestions to minimize the potential for harm from energy drinks:

  • Establishing an upper limit for the amount of caffeine allowed in a single serving of any drink in line with available scientific evidence;
  • Regulations to enforce restriction of labelling and sales of energy drinks to children and adolescents;
  • Enforcing standards for responsible marketing to young people by the energy drink industry;
  • Training health care practitioners to be aware of the risks and symptoms of energy drinks consumption;
  • Patients with a history of diet problems and substance abuse, both alone and combined with alcohol, should be screened for the heavy consumption of energy drinks;
  • Educating the public about the risks of mixing alcohol with energy drinks consumption;
  • Further research on the potential adverse effects of energy drinks, particularly on young people.

EurekAlert! PR: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-10/f-edm100914.php

Study: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpubh.2014.00134/full

Do you have a sweet tooth? Honeybees have a sweet claw

Selected coverage: Discovery News, Yahoo, Süddeutsche Zeitung, RedOrbit

New research on the ability of honeybees to taste with claws on their forelegs reveals details on how this information is processed, according to a study published in the open-access journal, Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

Insects taste through sensilla, hair-like structures on the body that contain receptor nerve cells, each of which is sensitive to a particular substance. In many insects, for example the honeybee, sensilla are found on the mouthparts, antenna and the tarsi – the end part of the legs. Honeybees weigh information from both front tarsi to decide whether to feed, finds the latest study led by Dr. Gabriela de Brito Sanchez, researcher, University of Toulouse, and Dr. Martin Giurfa, Director of the Research Centre on Animal Cognition, University of Toulouse, France.

Hundreds of honeybees were included in the study. Sugary, bitter and salty solutions were applied to the tarsi of the forelegs to test if this stimulated the bees to extend or retract their tongue – reflex actions that indicate whether or not they like the taste and are preparing to drink. Results revealed that honeybee tarsi are highly sensitive to sugar: even dilute sucrose solutions prompted the bees to extend their tongue. Measurements of nerve cell activity showed that the part of the honeybee tarsus most sensitive to sugary tastes is the double claw at its end. Also, the segments of the tarsus before the claws, known as the tarsomeres, were found to be highly sensitive to saline solutions.

“Honeybees rely on their color vision, memory, and sense of smell and taste to find nectar and pollen in the ever-changing environment around the colony,” says Dr. Giurfa. “The high sensitivity to salts of the tarsomeres and to sugar of the tarsal claws is impressive given that each tarsus has fewer sensilla than the other sense organs. The claw’s sense of taste allows workers to detect nectar immediately when they land on flowers. Also, bees hovering over water ponds can promptly detect the presence of salts in water through the tarsomeres of their hanging legs.”

But what if honeybees receive contradictory information, for example, about tasty sucrose from the right foreleg, but about water or distasteful caffeine from the left? The central nervous system of honeybees weighs this information from both sides, but unequally: input from the side that is first to taste something tasty or distasteful counts for more. For example, if a bee first tasted sucrose on one side, she would typically extend her tongue and subsequently ignore less attractive tastes on the other. But if the order was reversed, she was around 50% less likely than normally to extend her tongue for sucrose.

EurekAlert! PR: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-02/f-dyh013114.php

Study: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnbeh.2014.00025/full

How similar are the gestures of apes and human infants? More than you might suspect

Selected coverage: Smithsonian Magazine, Der Spiegel, LA Times, Slate, NBC, Discovery News, Yahoo, The Telegraph, Daily Mail

With Gozde Zorlu (Frontiers); Stuart Wolpert, Kristen Gillespie & Patricia Greenfield (UCLA Media Relations) 

Psychologists who analyzed video of a female chimpanzee, a female bonobo and a female human infant in a study to compare different types of gestures at comparable stages of communicative development found remarkable similarities among the three species.

This is the first time such data have been used to compare the development of gestures across species. The chimpanzee and bonobo, formerly called the “pygmy chimpanzee,” are the two species most closely related to humans in the evolutionary tree.

“The similarity in the form and function of the gestures in a human infant, a baby chimpanzee and a baby bonobo was remarkable,” said Patricia Greenfield, a distinguished professor of psychology at UCLA and co-author of the study.

Gestures made by all three species included reaching, pointing with fingers or the head, and raising the arms to ask to be picked up. The researchers called “striking” the finding that the gestures of all three species were “predominantly communicative,” Greenfield said.

To be classified as communicative, a gesture had to include eye contact with the conversational partner, be accompanied by vocalization (non-speech sounds) or include a visible behavioral effort to elicit a response. The same standard was used for all three species. For all three, gestures were usually accompanied by one or more behavioral signs of an intention to communicate.

Charles Darwin showed in his 1872 book “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” that the same facial expressions and basic gestures occur in human populations worldwide, implying that these traits are innate. Greenfield and her colleagues have taken Darwin’s conclusions a step further, providing new evidence that the origins of language can be found in gestures and new insights into the co-evolution of gestures and speech.

The findings are published today in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology.

The apes included in the study were named Panpanzee, a female chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), and Panbanisha, a female bonobo (Pan paniscus). They were raised together at the Language Research Center in Atlanta, which is co-directed by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a co-author of the study. There, the apes learned to communicate with caregivers using gestures, vocalizations and visual symbols (mainly geometric shapes) called lexigrams.

“Lexigrams were learned, as human language is, during meaningful social interactions, not from behavioral training,” said the study’s lead author, Kristen Gillespie-Lynch, an assistant professor of psychology at the City University of New York and a former UCLA graduate student in Greenfield’s laboratory.

The human girl grew up in her parents’ home, along with her older brother. Where the apes’ symbols were visual, the girl’s symbols took the form of spoken words. Video analysis for her began at 11 months of age and continued until she was 18 months old; video analysis for the two apes began at 12 months of age and continued until they were 26 months old. An hour of video was analyzed each month for the girl, the chimpanzee and the bonobo.

Overall, the findings support the “gestures first” theory of the evolution of language. During the first half of the study, communicating with gestures was dominant in all three species. During the second half, all three species increased their symbol production — words for the child and lexigrams for the apes.

“Gesture appeared to help all three species develop symbolic skills when they were raised in environments rich in language and communication,” said Gillespie-Lynch, who conducted the research while she was at UCLA. This pattern, she said, suggests that gesture plays a role in the evolution, as well as the development, of language.

At the beginning stage of communication development, gesture was the primary mode of communication for human infant, baby chimpanzee and baby bonobo. The child progressed much more rapidly in the development of symbols. Words began to dominate her communication in the second half of the study, while the two apes continued to rely predominantly on gesture.

“This was the first indication of a distinctive human pathway to language,” Greenfield said.

All three species increased their use of symbols, as opposed to gestures, as they grew older, but this change was far more pronounced for the human child. The child’s transition from gesture to symbol could be a developmental model of the evolutionary pathway to human language and thus evidence for the “gestural origins of human language,” Greenfield said.

While gesture may be the first step in language evolution, the psychologists also found evidence that the evolutionary pathway from gesture to human language included the “co-evolution of gestural and vocal communication.” Most of the child’s gestures were accompanied by vocalization (non-language sounds); the apes’ gestures rarely were.

“This finding suggests that the ability to combine gesture and vocalization may have been important for the evolution of language,” Greenfield said.

The researchers conclude that humans inherited a language of gestures and a latent capacity for learning symbolic language from the last ancestor we share with our chimpanzee and bonobo relatives — an ancestor that lived approximately 6 million years ago.

The evolution of human language built on capacities that were already present in the common ancestor of the three species, the psychologists report.

“Our cross-species comparison provides insights into the communicative potential of our common ancestor,” Gillespie-Lynch said.

The article is titled “A cross-species study of gesture and its role in symbolic development: implications for the gestural theory of language evolution.” Other co-authors were Yunping Feng and Heidi Lyn.

EurekAlert! PR: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-06/uoc–hsa060313.php

Study: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00160/full