Summary1. Evidence-based policy requires researchers to provide the answers to ecological questions that are of interest to policy makers. To find out what those questions are in the UK, representatives from 28 organizations involved in policy, together with scientists from 10 academic institutions, were asked to generate a list of questions from their organizations. 2. During a 2-day workshop the initial list of 1003 questions generated from consulting at least 654 policy makers and academics was used as a basis for generating a short list of 100 questions of significant policy relevance. Short-listing was decided on the basis of the preferences of the representatives from the policy-led organizations. 3. The areas covered included most major issues of environmental concern in the UK, including agriculture, marine fisheries, climate change, ecosystem function and land management. 4. The most striking outcome was the preference for general questions rather than narrow ones. The reason is that policy is driven by broad issues rather than specific ones. In contrast, scientists are frequently best equipped to answer specific questions. This means that it may be necessary to extract the underpinning specific question before researchers can proceed. Synthesis and applications.Greater communication between policy makers and scientists is required in order to ensure that applied ecologists are dealing with issues in a way that can feed into policy. It is particularly important that applied ecologists emphasize the generic value of their work wherever possible.

No abstract

No abstract

Two experiments are reported investigating oculomotor behavior and linguistic processing when reading dynamic horizontally scrolling text (compared to reading normal static text). Three factors known to modulate processing time in normal reading were investigated: Word length and word frequency were examined in Experiment 1, and target word predictability in Experiment 2. An analysis of global oculomotor behavior across the 2 experiments showed that participants made fewer and longer fixations when reading scrolling text, with shorter progressive and regressive saccades between these fixations. Comparisons of the linguistic manipulations showed evidence of a dissociation between word-level and sentence-level processing. Word-level processing (Experiment 1) was preserved for the dynamic scrolling text condition with no difference in length and frequency effects between scrolling and static text formats. However, sentence-level integration (Experiment 2) was reduced for scrolling compared to static text in that we obtained no early facilitation effect for predictable words under scrolling text conditions.

It is well established that categorising the emotional content of facial expressions may differ depending on contextual information. Whether this malleability is observed in the auditory domain and in genuine emotion expressions is poorly explored. We examined the perception of authentic laughter and crying in the context of happy, neutral and sad facial expressions. Participants rated the vocalisations on separate unipolar scales of happiness and sadness and on arousal. Although they were instructed to focus exclusively on the vocalisations, consistent context effects were found: For both laughter and crying, emotion judgements were shifted towards the information expressed by the face. These modulations were independent of response latencies and were larger for more emotionally ambiguous vocalisations. No effects of context were found for arousal ratings. These findings suggest that the automatic encoding of contextual information during emotion perception generalises across modalities, to purely non-verbal vocalisations, and is not confined to acted expressions.