Biology subjects

Peeters, D.

Publications and source records attributed to Peeters, D..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2022

Body condition score and triglyceride concentrations and their associations with other markers of energy homeostasis in healthy, non-obese dogs

Serum triglyceride concentrations increase in dogs in overweight condition, which is typically assessed by body condition score (BCS). However, their associations with other markers of energy homeostasis are poorly characterized. The present study aimed to evaluate the associations between both BCS and triglyceride levels and other markers of lipid and glucose metabolism in healthy dogs in overweight condition. 534 overweight, but otherwise healthy, client-owned dogs were included. Serum concentrations of cholesterol, free fatty acids, triglycerides, insulin, glucose and fructosamine were measured. Dogs were assigned to lean (BCS: 3-5) or overweight (BCS: 6-7) categories, and linear models were used to assess the differences between BCS categories and the associations between triglycerides and the other variables, correcting for the effect of breed. Globally, "overweight" dogs had greater serum cholesterol (95% CI: 5.3-6.2 mmol/L or 205-237 mg/dL versus 5.1-5.4 mmol/L or 198-210 mg/dl, P = .003), insulin (95% CI: 17.5-22.1 U/ml versus 16.7-18.0 U/ml, P = .036) and were older (95% CI: 4.0-5.3 versus 3.4-3.7 years, P = .002) than lean dogs. Triglyceride concentrations were positively associated with fructosamine (r2 = 0.31, P = .001), cholesterol (r2 = 0.25, P < .001), insulin (r2 = 0.14, P = .003) and glucose (r2 = 0.10, P = .002), and negatively associated with free fatty acids (r2 = 0.11, P < .001). There was no association between triglyceride levels and age. In conclusion, both BCS and triglyceride concentrations were associated with other markers of glucose and lipid metabolism in overweight, but otherwise healthy dogs. Triglyceride concentrations were associated with an increase in insulin and fructosamine that might reflect an early-phase impairment in glucose tolerance which, surprisingly, was concurrent with lower basal free fatty acids.

physiology↗

bioRxiv2020

Beat gestures influence which speech sounds you hear

Beat gestures - spontaneously produced biphasic movements of the hand - are among the most frequently encountered co-speech gestures in human communication. They are closely temporally aligned to the prosodic characteristics of the speech signal, typically occurring on lexically stressed syllables. Despite their prevalence across speakers of the worlds languages, how beat gestures impact spoken word recognition is unclear. Can these simple flicks of the hand influence speech perception? Across six experiments, we demonstrate that beat gestures influence the explicit and implicit perception of lexical stress (e.g., distinguishing OBject from obJECT), and in turn, can influence what vowels listeners hear. Thus, we provide converging evidence for a manual McGurk effect: even the simplest flicks of the hands influence which speech sounds we hear. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENTBeat gestures are very common in human face-to-face communication. Yet we know little about their behavioral consequences for spoken language comprehension. We demonstrate that beat gestures influence the explicit and implicit perception of lexical stress, and, in turn, can even shape what vowels we think we hear. This demonstration of a manual McGurk effect provides some of the first empirical support for a recent multimodal, situated psycholinguistic framework of human communication, while challenging current models of spoken word recognition that do not yet incorporate multimodal prosody. Moreover, it has the potential to enrich human-computer interaction and improve multimodal speech recognition systems.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2018

Do we predict upcoming speech content in naturalistic environments?

The ability to predict upcoming actions is a characteristic hallmark of cognition and therefore not surprisingly a central topic in cognitive science. It remains unclear, however, whether the predictive behaviour commonly observed in strictly controlled lab environments generalizes to rich, everyday settings. In four virtual reality experiments, we tested whether a well-established marker of linguistic prediction (i.e. anticipatory eye movements as observed in the visual world paradigm) replicated when increasing the naturalness of the paradigm by means of i) immersing participants in naturalistic everyday scenes, ii) increasing the number of distractor objects present, iii) manipulating the location of referents in central versus peripheral vision, and iv) modifying the proportion of predictable nounreferents in the experiment. Robust anticipatory eye movements were observed, even in the presence of 10 objects (hereby testing working memory) and when only 25% of all sentences contained a visually present referent (hereby testing error-based learning). The anticipatory effect disappeared, however, when referents were placed in peripheral vision. Together, our findings suggest that working memory may play an important role in predictive processing in everyday communication, but only in contexts where upcoming referents have been explicitly attended to prior to encountering the spoken referential act. Methodologically, our study confirms that ecological validity and experimental control may go hand in hand in future studies of human predictive behaviour.

neuroscience↗