Long-term exposure to experimental light affects the ground-dwelling invertebrate community, independent of light spectra.

Our planet endures a progressive increase in artificial light at night (ALAN), which affects virtually all species, and thereby biodiversity. Mitigation strategies include reducing its intensity and duration, and the adjustment of light spectrum using modern light emitting diode (LED) light sources. Here, we studied ground-dwelling invertebrate (predominantly insects, arachnids, molluscs, millipedes, woodlice and worms) diversity and community composition after 3 or 4 years of continued nightly exposure (every night from sunset to sunrise) to experimental ALAN with three different spectra (white-, and green- and red-dominated light), as well as for a dark control, in natural forest-edge habitat.

Autistic children's language imitation shows reduced sensitivity to ostracism.

In dialogue, speakers tend to imitate, or align with, a partner's language choices. Higher levels of alignment facilitate communication and can be elicited by affiliation goals. Since autistic children have interaction and communication impairments, we investigated whether a failure to display affiliative language imitation contributes to their conversational difficulties.

Children show selectively increased language imitation after experiencing ostracism.

When threatened with ostracism, children attempt to strengthen social relationships by engaging in affiliative behaviors such as imitation. We investigated whether an experience of ostracism influenced the extent to which children imitated a partner's language use. In two experiments, 7- to 12-year-old children either experienced ostracism or did not experience ostracism in a virtual ball-throwing game before playing a picture-matching game with a partner.

Inhibitory control and lexical alignment in children with an autism spectrum disorder.

Background: Two experiments investigated the contribution of conflict inhibition to pragmatic deficits in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Typical adults' tendency to reuse interlocutors' referential choices (lexical alignment) implicates communicative perspective-taking, which is regulated by conflict inhibition. We examined whether children with ASD spontaneously lexically aligned, and whether conflict inhibition mediated alignment.

Physiological Responses to Salinity Vary with Proximity to the Ocean in a Coastal Amphibian.

Freshwater organisms are increasingly exposed to elevated salinity in their habitats, presenting physiological challenges to homeostasis. Amphibians are particularly vulnerable to osmotic stress and yet are often subject to high salinity in a variety of inland and coastal environments around the world. Here, we examine the physiological responses to elevated salinity of rough-skinned newts (Taricha granulosa) inhabiting a coastal stream on the Pacific coast of North America and compare the physiological responses to salinity stress of newts living in close proximity to the ocean with those of newts living farther upstream.