ALBERT

Beschreibung: For decades, the cognitive and neural sciences have benefitted greatly from a separation of mind and brain into distinct functional domains. The tremendous success of this approach notwithstanding, it is self-evident that such a view is incomplete. Goal-directed behaviour of an organism requires the joint functioning of perception, memory and sensorimotor control. A prime candidate for achieving integration across these functional domains are attentional processes. Consequently, this Theme Issue brings together studies of attentional selection from many fields, both experimental and theoretical, that are united in their quest to find overreaching integrative principles of attention between perception, memory and action. In all domains, attention is understood as combination of competition and priority control (‘bias’), with the task as a decisive driving factor to ensure coherent goal-directed behaviour and cognition. Using vision as the predominant model system for attentional selection, many studies of this Theme Issue focus special emphasis on eye movements as a selection process that is both a fundamental action and serves a key function in perception. The Theme Issue spans a wide range of methods, from measuring human behaviour in the real word to recordings of single neurons in the non-human primate brain. We firmly believe that combining such a breadth in approaches is necessary not only for attentional selection, but also to take the next decisive step in all of the cognitive and neural sciences: to understand cognition and behaviour beyond isolated domains.

Beschreibung: Despite the enormous popularity of penguins, their social behaviour remains poorly understood. Video recordings of penguins and penguin colonies are sporadic, of insufficient resolution and duration, and suffer from camera movements that may be artistically motivated but make them scientifically worthless. Recordings of penguin colonies during the winter months are particularly short in supply. Here we present three different observatories that are able to automatically take time-lapse recording over prolonged time periods under harsh climatic conditions. i) The microbs is a very low cost observatory (~700 US$), capable of recording high-resolution (12 MPix) time-lapse data. It features a water-proof Canon D10 consumer-grade camera that we programmed through a bootable SD-card. The camera is powered by a 40 W solar panel and a 100 Ah 12V battery. The microbs can record up to 32 GB of data (approximately one month at a rate of 1 image/min) before the memory card has to be changed manually. ii) To enable even longer observations at very remote locations where a regular change of the SD-card is not feasible, we designed the Mobile Emperor Penguin Observatory (MEPO). It is equipped with a night vision (b/w) and daylight (color) CCD-sensor. Images are recorded on a solid-state PC with very low energy consumption, or they can be sent via satellite (Inmarsat) that is available on large parts of the Antarctic coast. The observatory is remote-operated through the satellite link to adjust parameters such as image frame rate, to select the images to be sent via satellite or to power the observatory up or down. iii) The Single Penguin Observation & Tracking (SPOT) observatory is used to track the movements of individual penguins over prolonged time periods and count the present number of individual penguins. The observatory consists of a wide-angle (45°) camera and a high-speed (5 images/s) high resolution (11 MPix) camera equipped with a telephoto lens (400-600mm). We deployed several microbs, one MEPO and three SPOT observatory between 2011-13 at Crozet Island, Adelie Land and Atka Bay, respectively, and will present first results.

Beschreibung: Despite the enormous popularity of penguins, their social behaviour remains poorly understood. Video recordings of penguins and penguin colonies are sporadic, of insufficient resolution and duration, and suffer from camera movements that may be artistically motivated but make them scientifically worthless. Recordings of penguin colonies during the winter months are particularly short in supply. Here we present three different observatories that are able to automatically take time-lapse recording over prolonged time periods under harsh climatic conditions. i) The microbs is a very low cost observatory (~700 US$), capable of recording high-resolution (12 MPix) time-lapse data. It features a water-proof Canon D10 consumer-grade camera that we programmed through a bootable SD-card. The camera is powered by a 40 W solar panel and a 100 Ah 12V battery. The microbs can record up to 32 GB of data (approximately one month at a rate of 1 image/min) before the memory card has to be changed manually. ii) To enable even longer observations at very remote locations where a regular change of the SD-card is not feasible, we designed the Mobile Emperor Penguin Observatory (MEPO). It is equipped with a night vision (b/w) and daylight (color) CCD-sensor. Images are recorded on a solid-state PC with very low energy consumption, or they can be sent via satellite (Inmarsat) that is available on large parts of the Antarctic coast. The observatory is remote-operated through the satellite link to adjust parameters such as image frame rate, to select the images to be sent via satellite or to power the observatory up or down. iii) The Single Penguin Observation & Tracking (SPOT) observatory is used to track the movements of individual penguins over prolonged time periods and count the present number of individual penguins. The observatory consists of a wide-angle (45°) camera and a high-speed (5 images/s) high resolution (11 MPix) camera equipped with a telephoto lens (400-600mm). We are currently deploying three microbs, one MEPO and one SPOT observatory during the Antarctic summer 2011 at Crozet Island, Adelie Land and Atka Bay, respectively, and will present first results.

Beschreibung: Studies of animal behavior in remote polar regions are essential to understand ecologic change, yet they require significant human and logistic resources. Behavioral data are mostly gathered by tagging single animals, such as penguins and whales. While tagging delivers high-accuracy data for single animals, it cannot be used to study collective behavior in social species due to high costs and the often time-consuming or disturbing tagging process. We present an alternative approach to study animal behavior using automated, remotely operated and energetically independent image acquisition systems. We developed a land-based system for studying penguins, and a sea-based system to study whales. The sea-based system employs a rotating infrared camera (5 rev/s, 360°) for the automatic detection of whales within a radius of up to 3 nautical miles during day and night, and a high-resolution CCD camera equipped with a telephoto lens. Upon detection of a whale in the thermal image, the CCD-camera is automatically pointed at the respective location, and triggered to acquire photos at 5 Hz, allowing species identification up to several miles distance The imaging system is mounted on an active tilt stage to counteract ship movements in heavy seas, which allows to calculate absolute whale positions with an accuracy of ~10%. From the trajectory of an individual whale, likely areas of subsequent surfacing positions are estimated, providing proactive tracing of the whale, which improves the likelyhood of capturing it on photo and and its identification. Automatic whale detection and identification data may then be used to conduct autonomous line transect surveys throughout the cruise. Continuous automatic whale detections during recent expeditions contibuted significantly to the amount of data available for density calculations and habitat suitability modeling. We will present data from three expeditions on RV Polarstern during the years 2009-2011, including several tens of ship-whale encounters. The system will be used during two more expeditions in early 2012, for automatic marine mammal detection, localization and identification purposes. Our land-based system employed a simpler image acquisition and automated analysis technology and was first used to study the collective behavior of Emperor penguins during huddling. The system is capable of simultaneously tracking the positions of more than 1400 huddling emperor penguins. The trajectories revealed that Emperor penguins move collectively in a highly coordinated manner to ensure mobility while at the same time keeping the huddle tightly packed. Every 30–60 seconds, all penguins make small steps, which travel as a wave through the entire huddle. Over time, these small movements lead to large-scale reorganization of the huddle. Moreover, from the high-resolution images is it possible to obtain a precise count of the penguin colony, and to obtain morphometric data from individual penguins to monitor their nutritional state. Thus far, we built five observatories that are currently being shipped to an Adélie penguin (Adélie Land), King penguin (Crozet Island) and Emperor penguin (Atka Bay, Adélie Land) colony, respectively. All three observatories are designed for year-round operations.

Beschreibung: In polar regions, highly adapted social behavior is crucial for the survival of several species. One prominent example is the huddling behavior of Emperor penguins. To understand how Emperor penguins solve the physical problem of movement in densely packed huddles, we observed an Emperor penguin colony (Atka Bay) with time-lapse imaging and tracked the positions of more than 1400 huddling penguins. The trajectories revealed that Emperor penguins move collectively in a highly coordinated manner to ensure mobility while at the same time keeping the huddle tightly packed. Every 30 - 60 seconds, all penguins make small steps, which travel as a wave through the entire huddle. Over time, these small movements lead to large-scale reorganization of the huddle. Our data show that the dynamics of penguin huddling is governed by intermittency and approach to kinetic arrest in striking analogy with inert non-equilibrium systems. We will also present observations from a different Emperor penguin colony (Adélie Land), an Adélie penguin colony (Adélie Land), and a King penguin colony (Crozet Island).

Beschreibung: The goal of this review is to introduce a theory of task-driven visual attention and working memory (TRAM). Based on a specific biased competition model, the ‘theory of visual attention’ (TVA) and its neural interpretation (NTVA), TRAM introduces the following assumption. First, selective visual processing over time is structured in competition episodes. Within an episode, that is, during its first two phases, a limited number of proto-objects are competitively encoded—modulated by the current task—in activation-based visual working memory (VWM). In processing phase 3, relevant VWM objects are transferred via a short-term consolidation into passive VWM. Second, each time attentional priorities change (e.g. after an eye movement), a new competition episode is initiated. Third, if a phase 3 VWM process (e.g. short-term consolidation) is not finished, whereas a new episode is called, a protective maintenance process allows its completion. After a VWM object change, its protective maintenance process is followed by an encapsulation of the VWM object causing attentional resource costs in trailing competition episodes. Viewed from this perspective, a new explanation of key findings of the attentional blink will be offered. Finally, a new suggestion will be made as to how VWM items might interact with visual search processes.