UNews - David Logue

New animal behaviour study lends insight to performance limits of Olympic athletes

trevor.kenney — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 14:54:55 +0000

As Olympians test the limits of their performance at the 2024 Paris Olympics, a ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge animal behaviour researcher has co-authored a paper that is unlocking the way scientists can measure performance constraints — the factors that place limits on just how far and fast we can physically perform.

Dr. David Logue in ULethbridge’s Department of Psychology and co-author Dr. Tyler Bonnell recently published the paper, Skewed performance distributions as evidence of motor constraint in sports and animal displays, in Royal Society Open Science. Logue, in his Birdsong Lab, studies birds to learn about the evolution of interactive communication. From songs to mating displays, he has travelled the world studying how birds communicate with one another and what factors influence their behaviours and ultimately lead to their successes or failures.

This novel mathematical approach will benefit evolutionary biology and could also be utilized in physiology and sport.

In seeking a better way to identify, characterize and compare performance constraints in animal behaviour, the two wondered if human sport was the perfect forum to test a new mathematical approach to quantifying whether a bird was really “trying” their best while performing their songs and what constraints might most influence their behaviour.

“We want to know for a certain behaviour if an animal is going up to their limit against a certain constraint, but we can’t ask a bird if they are trying their best,” says Logue. “So, we looked to high performance athletes to test our theory, because we know if we ask someone like Usain Bolt, for example, are you running as fast as you can, the answer will be “yes”, and we believe him because he is motivated — by rewards like fame and money — to reach his limit.”

Their goal was to evaluate and expand the toolkit for the analysis of performance constraints. Having reviewed existing methods, they’d found that none were able to estimate constraints with data from one behavioural trait in one population. The math is fairly involved but in simple terms, they developed a formula that can be applied to multiple data sets that yields predictable results — in other words it works — showing that people, athletes and birds’ performances skew away from the constraint they are facing.

What is skew? Many distributions, like height or weight, are shaped like a bell curve, with a few extremes and most of the data showing somewhere in the middle. But when examining constrained performance (like running speed, or jump height), scientists don’t see a normal bell curve. Everyone is trying to perform at the highest level possible, but constraints, like limits to how fast their muscles can contract, prevent them from performing any higher. As such, values are bunched on the constrained side of the distribution. Statisticians call this a skewed distribution.

“It’s a statistical method to actually measure what the constraint is, like a signature of limitation, and then we’re able to use math to extract that and measure it,” explains Logue. “In science, we always need to measure stuff. So, this is a way of measuring things, and it's a particularly useful way of measuring because you only need to look at one variable.”

Logue says it was satisfying to apply their theory in numerous settings. They used data from Olympic athletes over multiple Games, testing it on throwing distances, jump distances and race times. They then applied it to baseball pitch speeds and even three-point shooting in basketball and each time, the math held up. And while he’s excited to now use it in the realm of evolutionary biology, they’ve opened the door to the approach having applications in multiple other domains, such as physiology and sport.

“Suppose that you wanted to test different training regimens with your athletes, or different nutrition regimens or different equipment. We could see if the constraint changes based on whether they wear these shoes or those shoes, whether they train like this or that. You could test multiple variables,” says Logue.

He says the next step for the study is to make it more accessible to those who might not be keen on the intricacies of the math needed to be applied.

“What we may be doing is writing a package for the programming language to where it’s more of a plug-and-play, off-the-shelf product you just apply to your data sets, as opposed to really having to understand the math and the hard-core coding end of it,” says Logue. “It’s exciting for me because we had this idea and now, we’ve shown it works, which is great from an animal behaviour angle, and if it gets adopted by sports science, that would be killer because I love that area too.”

Like human singers, songbirds warm up their voices before a performance

trevor.kenney — Wed, 17 May 2023 16:07:34 +0000

If you’ve ever wondered why songbirds are seemingly much busier in the early morning hours, a new paper out of the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge explains the birds aren’t just singing their hearts out to welcome you to the day — rather, they’re warming their voices up for their important morning performance.

PhD student Juleyska Vazquez Cardona working in the field.

PhD student Juleyska Vazquez Cardona (MSc ’22), working with Dr. David Logue out of the Department of Psychology, says that birds warm up their voices just like human singers would before a performance. The phenomenon is known as the dawn chorus, where songbirds sing intensely during the early morning before tapering off as the morning progresses.

“There are many hypotheses as to why this happens and one of those is that they are warming up their voices during that period, so our study was to look at how well they sing their songs using some performance measures, and then how their performance changes throughout the morning,” says Vazquez Cardona.

They studied the Adelaide’s warbler, a small songbird found in a dry forest in southwestern Puerto Rico. Logue taught at the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Puerto Rico for five years prior to coming to ULethbridge in 2015 and is still an adjunct professor there. Vazquez Cardona earned her Bachelor of Science in her home country before coming to Canada to complete her master’s and now her PhD.

The Adelaide's warbler

The group started recording the birds prior to sunrise just before they start singing and then recorded continuously throughout the dawn chorus, where the birds sing intensely for about 20 to 25 minutes. The recording then continues for another hour or so after, giving the researchers a full data set of measures for the performance.

Using more detailed metrics than in previous studies, they were able to identify performance changes in the warblers as they progressed through their warm-up. These measures include recovery time, voiced frequency modulation and unvoiced frequency modulation.

“The measures of performance are basically about how fast the bird can sing,” says Logue. “You can hear these notes in rapid succession, and we have three different ways of measuring how fast they sing. For example, as their performance improves, the silent gaps between each note get shorter and shorter. The performance is lowest first thing in the morning, increases rapidly during the dawn chorus and then levels off afterward.”

A bird’s song isn’t for entertainment, rather it’s thought to be a call to potential mates (only males sing during the breeding season) and a warning to other males that this is their territory. Logue describes the warbler as a fiercely territorial bird that will fight other males multiple times throughout the day to establish its territory.

The warm-up, they believe, primes the warbler to maximize its performance. The researchers are looking to strengthen the warm-up hypothesis by linking the vocal performance of the sender with how competing birds and females respond as receivers of these songs.

“We found that singing at a high rate through the dawn chorus increased the birds’ performance in both recovery time and unvoiced frequency modulation,” says Vazquez Cardona. “Now, we want to take this further and look at the function of a strong vocal performance. One thing we’ll be looking at is how they use their vocal performance relative to the time of an aggressive encounter with a neighbour bird who is trying to get into that territory. We also need to figure out whether the females prefer high performance songs.”

The study, Vocal performance increases rapidly during the dawn chorus in Adelaide’s warbler, was published in Behavioral Ecology, the official journal of the International Society for Behavioral Ecology and is available here.

��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge awarded record $3.9 million in NSERC funding

trevor.kenney — Mon, 22 Jun 2015 22:04:26 +0000

The ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge was awarded a record $3.9 million of funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) this year, with U of L researchers earning support for projects in neuroscience, biological sciences, psychology, chemistry & biochemistry, physics & astronomy, geography and mathematics & computer science.

This unprecedented level of support was announced earlier today by Canada’s Minister of State (Science and Technology), the Honourable Ed Holder, at a national funding announcement in Oshawa, Ont.

Dr. Robert McDonald’s base grant of $355,000 (over five years) is the largest NSERC grant awarded to the U of L this year.

“This latest round of NSERC funding clearly demonstrates the outstanding research our faculty and students are undertaking,” says Interim Vice-President (Research) Dr. Lesley Brown. “That our research portfolio continues to grow as it does is testament to the quality of the work being done and also speaks to the ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ striking the right balance as a comprehensive teaching and research institution.”

��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge researchers receiving NSERC Discovery Grant funding include: Dr. Gerlinde Metz (neuroscience); Dr. Aaron Gruber (neuroscience); Dr. Alice Hontela (biological sciences); Dr. Jean-Baptiste Leca (psychology); Dr. David Logue (psychology); Dr. Artur Luczak (neuroscience); Dr. Robert McDonald (neuroscience); Dr. Majid Mohajerani (neuroscience); Dr. Gregory Pyle (biological sciences); Dr. Masami Tatsuno (neuroscience); Dr. Paul Vasey (psychology); Dr. Robert Laird (biological sciences); Dr. René Boeré (chemistry & biochemistry); Dr. Paul Hayes (chemistry & biochemistry); Dr. Locke Spencer (physics & astronomy); Dr. Mark Walton (physics & astronomy); Dr. Christopher Hopkinson (geography); Dr. Robert Benkoczi (mathematics & computer science); Dr. Shahadat Hossain (mathematics & computer science); Dr. Habiba Kadiri (mathematics & computer science); Dr. Nathan Ng (mathematics & computer science).

In addition, Drs. John Zhang and Olga Kovalchuk were each awarded NSERC Discovery Development Grants.

Luczak and McDonald will also both receive an additional $120,000 in funds through the Discovery Accelerator Supplements program (over a three-year period), while McDonald’s base grant of $355,000 (over five years) is the largest NSERC grant awarded to the U of L this year. He is studying neural circuits and mechanisms of context-specific conditioned inhibition.

The ��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ’s doctoral students were extremely successful in the NSERC Doctoral Scholarship competitions, led by Katie Wilson (chemistry & biochemistry), who was named a Canada Vanier Scholar, demonstrating leadership skills and a high standard of scholarly achievement in graduate studies. Jason Flindall (neuroscience) was awarded a Canadian Doctoral Scholarship, while Kayla Stone (neuroscience), Allonna Harker (neuroscience) and Stefan Lenz (chemistry & biochemistry) were awarded NSERC Postgraduate Doctoral Scholarships. Additionally, five masters students were awarded the NSERC Canadian Graduate Scholarship, including: Justin Lee (neuroscience), Serena Shandik (neuroscience), Matthew Robbins (physics & astronomy), Rhys Hakstol (chemistry & biochemistry) and Douglas Turnbull (chemistry & biochemistry).

“We are pleased with the amount of money invested in our researchers and what this could yield in terms of the results they will achieve and the benefits their work will bring to society,” adds Brown. “Our continuing success with the federal research funding agencies is testament to our researchers’ ability to compete on the national stage.”

NSERC grants aim to develop, attract and retain the world’s most talented researchers at Canadian universities who are working in a multitude of scientific and engineering disciplines.

UNews - David Logue

New animal behaviour study lends insight to performance limits of Olympic athletes

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Like human singers, songbirds warm up their voices before a performance

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��Ѹ�����Դ���߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge awarded record $3.9 million in NSERC funding

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��Ѹ��Դ��߿�Ƭ of Lethbridge awarded record $3.9 million in NSERC funding