Paying attention to attention: intrinsic and extrinsic factors affecting vigilance bout and stare durations in bighorn sheep
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The process of organizing and interpreting sensory information, known as perceptual processing, is a key feature of adaptation allowing animals to integrate, assess and cope with challenges in their environments. Here, we examined the durations of vigilance bouts and stares in bighorn sheep, Ovis canadensis , as an indicator of time spent vigilant and perceptual processing, respectively. We tested the extent to which vigilance was shaped by relevant ecological factors, focusing on predation risk. Specifically, we tested whether stare duration increased when sheep were younger, part of smaller groups, further from others, further from escape terrain or closer to obstructive cover, all of which are expected to affect individual predation risk. Perceptual processing in bighorn sheep conformed to the 1–4 s perceptual window found in other mammals, consistent with the idea of a phylogenetically conserved mechanism across mammalian species but was variable within individuals, indicating that perceptual processing is plastic to relevant ecological contexts. As expected, stare duration was much shorter than vigilance bout duration. Stare duration increased with decreasing distance to obstructive cover, which could indicate perceptual processing costs of searching for cryptic predators. We also found a significant difference in vigilance bout duration between the sexes: age was positively correlated with vigilance bout duration in males but not in females. Vigilance bout durations were longer when animals were further from escape terrain. Neither group size nor distance to other individuals was associated with stare or bout durations. • We examined vigilance bouts and stares (perceptual processing) in bighorn sheep. • Vigilance bout duration was highly repeatable; stare duration was more variable. • Vigilance bouts were affected by age, sex and distance to escape terrain. • Stare duration was only affected by distance to obstructive cover. • Male, but not female, bighorn sheep increased vigilance bout duration with age.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".