Behavioural variables influence contact call rate more than characteristics of the vegetation in a group-living passerine species.

Although the contact calls of birds have been studied for their acoustic properties, limited research has investigated their repetitive nature. The rate of contact calls could be related to movement, with recruiting birds signalling their location, or it could help maintaining spacing between group mates, or give information about the environment where both signaller and receiver are located. If maintaining spacing, higher call rates would be expected in denser vegetation; alternatively, if birds gain information about predation risk from the cessation of contact calling, then open areas might elicit higher call rate.

Spontaneous gesture and spatial language: Evidence from focal brain injury.

People often use spontaneous gestures when communicating spatial information. We investigated focal brain-injured individuals to test the hypotheses that (1) naming motion event components of manner-path (represented by verbs-prepositions in English) are impaired selectively, (2) gestures compensate for impaired naming. Patients with left or right hemisphere damage (LHD or RHD) and elderly control participants were asked to describe motion events (e.

Naming and gesturing spatial relations: evidence from focal brain-injured individuals.

Spatial language helps us to encode relations between objects and organize our thinking. Little is known about the neural instantiations of spatial language. Using voxel-lesion symptom mapping (VLSM), we tested the hypothesis that focal brain injured patients who had damage to left frontal-parietal peri-Sylvian regions would have difficulty in naming spatial relations between objects.