The literature on human turning preferences is inconsistent. While the few studies with children below 14 years of age uniformly describe an overall left-turning (counterclockwise) tendency, a recent Internet study with more than 1500 adults found a right-sided (clockwise) bias. We set out to investigate spontaneous turning behaviour in children age 5-3 years and, based on neuropsychiatric work...

Caenorhabditis elegans exhibits spontaneous motility in isotropic environments, characterized by periods of forward movements punctuated at random by turning movements. Here, we study the statistics of turning movements-deep Omega-shaped bends-exhibited by swimming worms. We show that the durations of intervals between successive Omega-turns are uncorrelated with one another and are effectively...

swimming C. elegans 3 4 Nikhil Srivastava (1), Damon A. Clark (1), Aravinthan D.T. Samuel (1) 5 6 Department of Physics and Center for Brain Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, 7 MA 8 9 Running Head: Turns in swimming worms 10 11 Corresponding author: 12 Aravinthan Samuel 13 17 Oxford Street 14 Cambridge, MA 02138 15 e-mail: [email protected] 16 17 18 19 Articles in PresS. J Neurop...

Dictyostelium discoideum slugs migrating in the absence of external stimuli tend to continue migrating in the original randomly 'chosen' direction. Spontaneous deviations from the starting direction accumulate with time at a rate that measures the 'physiological noise' in the slugs' steering mechanism. Most of the spontaneous turning signals arise in the transduction chain 'downstream' of the c...

At the beginning of their offshore migration, hatchling sea turtles enter the ocean at night and establish a course away from land by swimming directly into oceanic waves. How turtles can detect wave direction while swimming under water in darkness, however, has not been explained. Objects in a water column beneath the surface of the ocean describe a circular movement as waves pass above. In pr...

Video image detection systems (VIDS) provide an opportunity to analyse complex traffic scenes that are captured by stationary video cameras. Our work concentrates on the derivation of traffic relevant parameters from vehicle trajectories. This paper examines different procedures for the description of vehicle trajectories using analytical functions. Derived conical sections (circles, ellipses a...

Curve walking of crayfish Astacus leptodactylus was investigated by exploiting their optomotor response. The animal walked while spatially fixed on a motor-driven treadmill and turning behaviour was induced by an optical stimulus, a pattern consisting of vertical stripes moving in a horizontal direction. In this open-loop situation, the crayfish maintains the same step frequency for the legs on...

An image processing system was programmed to automatically track and digitize the movement of amebae under phase-contrast microscopy. The amebae moved in a novel chemotaxis chamber designed to provide stable linear attractant gradients in a thin agarose gel. The gradients were established by pumping attractant and buffer solutions through semipermeable hollow fibers embedded in the agarose gel....