Expanding Travel Constraint Negotiation Theory: An Exploration of Cognitive and Behavioral Constraint Negotiation Relationships

Travel participation and preferences are impacted by a range of constraints, which can be overcome using behavioral (i.e., actions) and cognitive (i.e., mental) constraint negotiation strategies. Given the limited focus on cognitive negotiation in tourism research, this study aims to expand travel constraint negotiation theory using a sequential mixed-methods approach. Qualitative interviews (n=27) with travelers affected by constraints were used to identify emergent themes of cognitive constraint negotiation. A quantitative survey (n=978) was conducted to empirically test hypothesized relationships between constraints and cognitive as well as behavioral negotiation strategies. Results showed cognitive constraint negotiation (1) involved either changes in perceptions of a constraint or travel aspirations, (2) was positively related to behavioral strategies, and (3) mediated the relationship between constraints and behavioral negotiation strategies. Consequently, cognitive constraint negotiation was found to play a more important role than suggested in past studies.

Dynamic structure of locomotor behavior in walking fruit flies

The function of the brain is unlikely to be understood without an accurate description of its output, yet the nature of movement elements and their organization remains an open problem. Here, movement elements are identified from dynamics of walking in flies, using unbiased criteria. On one time scale, dynamics of walking are consistent over hundreds of milliseconds, allowing elementary features to be defined. Over longer periods, walking is well described by a stochastic process composed of these elementary features, and a generative model of this process reproduces individual behavior sequences accurately over seconds or longer. Within elementary features, velocities diverge, suggesting that dynamical stability of movement elements is a weak behavioral constraint. Rather, long-term instability can be limited by the finite memory between these elementary features. This structure suggests how complex dynamics may arise in biological systems from elements whose combination need not be tuned for dynamic stability.

All-You-Can-Eat Buffet: Entry Price, the Fat Tax and Meal Cessation

A widespread meal-serving system commonly blamed for contributing to the obesity epidemic is the all-you-can-eat buffet, where customers can help themselves to as much food as they wish to eat in a single meal for a fixed entry price. The paper offers a rational-choice model for addressing the individual's eating dilemma in an-all-you-can-eat buffet, incorporating the motivation of getting-one's-money's-worth as a behavioral constraint on eating. Contrary to previous findings, the model reveals that the individual will not necessarily overeat beyond the point of fullness and will not necessarily increase eating in response to a higher entry price. An experiment conducted in collaboration with a sushi restaurant supports this conclusion. The paper further shows that a fat tax imposed on both buffet and a-la-carte meals will not affect buffet eating, hence subjecting all-you-can-eat buffets to the fat tax program need not be counter-effective as the literature results imply.

Short-Latency, Goal-Directed Movements of the Pinnae to Sounds That Produce Auditory Spatial Illusions

The precedence effect (PE) is an auditory spatial illusion whereby two identical sounds presented from two separate locations with a delay between them are perceived as a fused single sound source whose position depends on the value of the delay. By training cats using operant conditioning to look at sound sources, we have previously shown that cats experience the PE similarly to humans. For delays less than ±400 μs, cats exhibit summing localization, the perception of a “phantom” sound located between the sources. Consistent with localization dominance, for delays from 400 μs to ∼10 ms, cats orient toward the leading source location only, with little influence of the lagging source. Finally, echo threshold was reached for delays >10 ms, where cats first began to orient to the lagging source. It has been hypothesized by some that the neural mechanisms that produce facets of the PE, such as localization dominance and echo threshold, must likely occur at cortical levels. To test this hypothesis, we measured both pinnae position, which were not under any behavioral constraint, and eye position in cats and found that the pinnae orientations to stimuli that produce each of the three phases of the PE illusion was similar to the gaze responses. Although both eye and pinnae movements behaved in a manner that reflected the PE, because the pinnae moved with strikingly short latencies (∼30 ms), these data suggest a subcortical basis for the PE and that the cortex is not likely to be directly involved.