How humans resolve non-trivial tradeoffs in their navigational choices between the social interactions (e.g., the presence and movements of others) and the physical factors (e.g., spatial distances, route visibility) when escaping from threats in crowded confined spaces? The answer to this question has major implications for the planning of evacuations and the safety of mass gatherings as well ...

BACKGROUND Urbanization causes modification, fragmentation and loss of native habitats. Such landscape changes threaten many arboreal and gliding mammals by limiting their movements through treeless parts of a landscape and by making the landscape surrounding suitable habitat patches more inhospitable. Here, we investigate the effects of landscape structure and habitat availability on the home-...

Studies in cognitive and social psychology have revealed that the distance from X to Y may be estimated as shorter or longer than the same distance from Y to X. Results showed that this judgment depended on particular properties of compared objects and a reference point in social comparisons (Holyoak and Mah, 1982; Codol, 1987; Kamińska-Feldman, 1991, 2012; Arcuri and Serino, 1992; Hurtig et al...

Identification and classification of behavior states in animal movement data can be complex, temporally biased, time-intensive, scale-dependent, and unstandardized across studies and taxa. Large movement datasets are increasingly common and there is a need for efficient methods of data exploration that adjust to the individual variability of each track. We present the Residence in Space and Tim...

When reproducing a previously performed hand movement, humans do not only take into account the actual hand movement itself, but also visual information about the movement path, for instance via observed cursor movement (Klatzky et al., 2003; Ladwig et al., 2012, 2013). Wendker et al. (2014) studied this phenomenon in a condition in which there where two sources of visual information available....

Line transect sampling is a distance sampling method for estimating the abundance of wild animal populations. One key assumption of this method is that all animals are detected at their initial location. Animal movement independent of the transect and observer can thus cause substantial bias. We present an analytic expression for this bias when detection within the transect is certain (strip tr...

BACKGROUND Waterfowl can exploit distant ephemeral wetlands in arid environments and provide valuable insights into the response of birds to rapid environmental change, and behavioural flexibility of avian movements. Currently much of our understanding of behavioural flexibility of avian movement comes from studies of migration in seasonally predictable biomes in the northern hemisphere. We use...

In this article, the authors analyze kinematic characteristics of reaching movements to memorized visual target locations. An increase in target distance was associated with a decrease in correlation between peak acceleration and movement distance and with a simultaneous increase in correlation between peak acceleration and movement time. According to the previous work on motor control in isome...

We investigate how visual motion registered during one’s own movement through a structured world can be used to gauge travel distance. Estimating absolute travel distance from the visual flow induced in the optic array of a moving observer is problematic because optic flow speeds co-vary with the dimensions of the environment and are thus subject to an environment specific scale factor. Discrim...