̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - ̽��ֱ�� of Essex

Pedestrians choose healthy obstacles over boring pavements, study finds

ta385 — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 08:45:00 +0000

Millions of people in the UK are failing to meet recommended targets for physical activity. Exercising 'on the go' is key to changing this but while walking along a pavement is better than nothing it causes no significant increase in heart rate so only qualifies as mild exercise. Walking also fails to significantly improve balance or bone density, unless it includes jumping, balancing, and stepping down.

But would adults opt for such ‘fun’ routes if given the choice? A ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge-led study published today in the journal Landscape Research suggests that with the right design, most would.

Previous research on ‘healthy route choices’ has focused on people’s likelihood of walking instead of using transport. But this study examined how likely people are to pick a more challenging route over a conventional one and which design characteristics influenced their choices.

Lead author, Anna Boldina, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Department of Architecture, said: “Even when the increase in level and extent of activity level is modest, when millions of people are using cityscapes every day, those differences can have a major positive impact on public health.”

“Our findings show that pedestrians can be nudged into a wider range of physical activities through minor changes to the urban landscape. We want to help policy makers and designers to make modifications that will improve physical health and wellbeing.”

Boldina began this research after moving from Coimbra in Portugal – where she found herself climbing hills and ancient walls – to London, which she found far less physically challenging.

Working with Dr Paul Hanel from the Department of Psychology at the ̽��ֱ�� of Essex, and Professor Koen Steemers from Cambridge, Boldina invited almost 600 UK residents to compare photorealistic images of challenging routes – variously incorporating stepping stones, balancing beams, and high steps – with conventional pavements.

Participants were shown images of challenging and conventional tarmac routes and asked which route they would choose. ̽��ֱ��researchers tested out a range of encouraging / discouraging parameters in different scenarios, including crossing water, shortcuts, unusual sculptures and the presence / absence of a handrail and other people. Participants were asked to score how challenging they thought the route would be from 1 (as easy as walking on level tarmac) to 7 (I would not be able to do it).

Eighty per cent of the study’s participants opted for a challenging route in at least one of the scenarios, depending on perceived level of difficulty and design characteristics. Where a challenging option was shorter than a conventional route, this increased the likelihood of being chosen by 10%. ̽��ֱ��presence of handrails achieved a 12% rise.

Importance for health

̽��ֱ��WHO and NHS recommend at least 150 minutes of ‘moderate’ or 75 minutes of ‘vigorous’ activity spread over a week, including a variety of activities aimed at enhancing bones, muscles, and agility to stay healthy. In addition, adults over 65 are advised to perform strength, flexibility, and balance exercises.

Boldina said: “ ̽��ֱ��human body is a very complex machine that needs a lot of things to keep working effectively. Cycling and swimming are great for your heart and for your leg muscles but do very little for your bone density.”

“To improve cardiovascular health, bone density and balance all at once, we need to add a wider range of exercises into our routine daily walks.”

Psychology of choice

Co-author Dr Paul Hanel said: “Children don’t need much encouragement to try out a balance beam but we wanted to see how adults would respond, and then identify design modifications which made them more likely to choose a challenging route.”

“We found that while embarrassment, anxiety, caution and peer pressure can put some adults off, the vast majority of people can be persuaded to take a more challenging route by paying careful attention to design, safety, difficulty level, location and signage.”

̽��ֱ��proportion of participants who were willing to pick a more challenging route varied from 14% for a particular balance beam route to 78% for a route involving wide, low stepping stones and a log with a handrail. ̽��ֱ��least intimidating routes were found to be those with wide, steady-looking balancing beams and wide steppingstones, especially with the presence of handrails.

̽��ֱ��researchers suggest that routes that incorporate more difficult challenges, such as obstacle courses and narrow balancing beams, should be placed in areas more likely to be frequented by younger users.

̽��ֱ��participants expressed a range of reasons for picking challenging routes. Unsurprisingly, the study found that challenging routes which also acted as short cuts appealed. Up to 55% of participants chose such routes. ̽��ֱ��researchers also found that the design of pavements, lighting and flowerbeds, as well as signage helped to nudge participants to choose more challenging routes. Many participants (40%) said the sight of other people taking a challenging route encouraged them to do the same.

̽��ֱ��participants who picked conventional routes often had concerns about safety but the introduction of safety measures, such as handrails, increased uptake of some routes. Handrails next to one steppingstones route increased uptake by 12%.

To test whether tendency to choose challenging routes was linked to demographic and personality factors, participants were asked to answer questions about their age, gender, habits, health, occupation, and personality traits (such as sensation seeking or general anxiety).

̽��ֱ��researchers found that people of all levels of activity are equally likely to pick a challenging route. But for the most difficult routes, participants who regularly engaged in strength and balancing exercises were more likely to choose them.

Older participants were as supportive of the concept as younger ones but were less likely to opt for the more challenging routes for themselves. Nevertheless, across all age groups, only a small percentage of participants said they would avoid adventurous options completely.

̽��ֱ��study applies the idea of “Choice Architecture” (making good choices easier and less beneficial choices harder) plus “Fun theory”, a strategy whereby physical activity is made more exciting; as well as some of the key principles of persuasion: social proof, liking, authority, and consistency.

Future work

̽��ֱ��researchers hope to run experiments in physical test sites to see how intentions convert into behaviour, and to measure how changes in habits improve health. In the meantime, Boldina continues to present her findings to policy makers.

Critics might question the affordability and cost effectiveness of introducing ‘Active landscape routes’ in the current economic environment.

In response, the researchers argue that installing stepping stones in a turfed area can be cheaper than laying and maintaining conventional tarmac pavements. They also point out that these measures could save governments far greater sums by reducing demand for health care related to lack of exercise.

Reference

A Boldina et al., ‘Active Landscape and Choice Architecture: Encouraging the use of challenging city routes for fitness’, Landscape Research (2022). DOI: 10.1080/01426397.2022.2142204

Up to 78% of walkers would take a more challenging route featuring obstacles such as balancing beams, stepping stones and high steps, research has found. ̽��ֱ��findings suggest that providing ‘Active Landscape’ routes in urban areas could help tackle an 'inactivity pandemic' and improve health outcomes.

Pedestrians can be nudged into a wider range of physical activities through minor changes to the urban landscape

Anna Boldina

Collage imagining a challenging 'Active Urbanism' route applied to Sermon Lane in London

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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AI used to test evolution’s oldest mathematical model

sc604 — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 18:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��researchers, from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, the ̽��ֱ�� of Essex, the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the Natural History Museum London used their machine learning algorithm to test whether butterfly species can co-evolve similar wing patterns for mutual benefit. This phenomenon, known as Müllerian mimicry, is considered evolutionary biology’s oldest mathematical model and was put forward less than two decades after Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection.

̽��ֱ��algorithm was trained to quantify variation between different subspecies of Heliconius butterflies, from subtle differences in the size, shape, number, position and colour of wing pattern features, to broad differences in major pattern groups.

This is the first fully automated, objective method to successfully measure overall visual similarity, which by extension can be used to test how species use wing pattern evolution as a means of protection. ̽��ֱ��results are reported in the journal Science Advances.

̽��ֱ��researchers found that different butterfly species act both as model and as mimic, ‘borrowing’ features from each other and even generating new patterns.

“We can now apply AI in new fields to make discoveries which simply weren’t possible before,” said lead author Dr Jennifer Hoyal Cuthill from Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences. “We wanted to test Müller’s theory in the real world: did these species converge on each other’s wing patterns and if so how much? We haven’t been able to test mimicry across this evolutionary system before because of the difficulty in quantifying how similar two butterflies are.”

Müllerian mimicry theory is named after German naturalist Fritz Müller, who first proposed the concept in 1878, less than two decades after Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Müller’s theory proposed that species mimic each other for mutual benefit. This is also an important case study for the phenomenon of evolutionary convergence, in which the same features evolve again and again in different species.

For example, Müller’s theory predicts that two equally bad-tasting or toxic butterfly populations in the same location will come to resemble each other because both will benefit by ‘sharing’ the loss of some individuals to predators learning how bad they taste. This provides protection through cooperation and mutualism. It contrasts with Batesian mimicry, which proposes that harmless species mimic harmful ones to protect themselves.

Heliconius butterflies are well-known mimics, and are considered a classic example of Müllerian mimicry. They are widespread across tropical and sub-tropical areas in the Americas. There are more than 30 different recognisable pattern types within the two species that the study focused on, and each pattern type contains a pair of mimic subspecies.

However, since previous studies of wing patterns had to be done manually, it hadn’t been possible to do large-scale or in-depth analysis of how these butterflies are mimicking each other.

“Machine learning is allowing us to enter a new phenomic age, in which we are able to analyse biological phenotypes - what species actually look like - at a scale comparable to genomic data,” said Hoyal Cuthill, who also holds positions at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and ̽��ֱ�� of Essex.

̽��ֱ��researchers used more than 2,400 photographs of Heliconius butterflies from the collections of the Natural History Museum, representing 38 subspecies, to train their algorithm, called ‘ButterflyNet’.

ButterflyNet was trained to classify the photographs, first by subspecies, and then to quantify similarity between the various wing patterns and colours. It plotted the different images in a multidimensional space, with more similar butterflies closer together and less similar butterflies further apart.

“We found that these butterfly species borrow from each other, which validates Müller’s hypothesis of mutual co-evolution,” said Hoyal Cuthill. “In fact, the convergence is so strong that mimics from different species are more similar than members of the same species.”

̽��ֱ��researchers also found that Müllerian mimicry can generate entirely new patterns by combining features from different lineages.

“Intuitively, you would expect that there would be fewer wing patterns where species are mimicking each other, but we see exactly the opposite, which has been an evolutionary mystery,” said Hoyal Cuthill. “Our analysis has shown that mutual co-evolution can actually increase the diversity of patterns that we see, explaining how evolutionary convergence can create new pattern feature combinations and add to biological diversity.

“By harnessing AI, we discovered a new mechanism by which mimicry can produce evolutionary novelty. Counterintuitively, mimicry itself can generate new patterns through the exchange of features between species which mimic each other. Thanks to AI, we are now able to quantify the remarkable diversity of life to make new scientific discoveries like this: it might open up whole new avenues of research in the natural world.”

Reference:
Jennifer F. Hoyal Cuthill et al. ‘Deep learning on butterfly phenotypes tests evolution’s oldest mathematical model.’ Science Advances (2019). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaw4967

Researchers have used artificial intelligence to make new discoveries, and confirm old ones, about one of nature’s best-known mimics, opening up whole new directions of research in evolutionary biology.

We can now apply AI in new fields to make discoveries which simply weren’t possible before

Jennifer Hoyal Cuthill

J Hoyal Cuthill, photo credits S Ledger and R Crowther

Butterfly co-mimic pairs from the species Heliconius erato (odd columns) and Heliconius melpomene (even columns). Illustrated butterflies are sorted by greatest similarity (along rows, top left to bottom right)

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Sea Change

sc604 — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 09:13:26 +0000

̽��ֱ��coast is an intrinsic part of British identity – and perhaps nowhere is it more at risk than in the East of England. Cambridge researchers are working with communities and organisations across the region to manage the coast for the future, by working with nature rather than against it.

Online atlas explores north-south divide in childbirth and child mortality during Victorian era

sc604 — Tue, 15 May 2018 07:36:56 +0000

̽��ֱ��Populations Past website is part of the Atlas of Victorian Fertility Decline research project based at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, in collaboration with the ̽��ֱ�� of Essex. It displays various demographic and socio-economic measures calculated from census data gathered between 1851 and 1911, a period which saw immense social and economic change as the population of the UK more than doubled, from just under 18 million to over 36 million, and industrialisation and urbanisation both increased rapidly.

̽��ֱ��atlas allows users to select and view maps of a variety of measures including age structure, migration status, marriage, fertility, child mortality and household composition. Users can zoom in to an area on the map and compare side-by-side maps showing different years or measures.

̽��ֱ��maps reveal often stark regional divides. “Geography plays a major role in pretty much every indicator we looked at,” said Dr Alice Reid from Cambridge’s Department of Geography, who led the project. “In 1851, more than one in five children born in parts of Greater Manchester did not survive to their first birthday. In parts of Surrey and Sussex however, the infant mortality rate at the same time was less than a third that number.”

While there are broad north-south divides in most of the maps, patterns at a local level were more complicated: in the northern urban-industrial centres such as Manchester, infant and child mortality were high, while many rural areas of the north had mortality rates as low as rural areas of the south. And in London, there is a sharp east/west divide in fertility, infant mortality, the number of live-in servants, and many other variables.

̽��ֱ��researchers also found that different types of industry were often associated with different types of families: in coal mining areas where there was little available work for women, women married young and often ended up with large families. In contrast, women in the textile-producing areas of Lancashire and Yorkshire had more opportunities to earn a wage, and perhaps consequently, had fewer children on average.

There are also big differences over time. ̽��ֱ��period saw a sharp drop in the number of women who continued to work after marriage, for instance. In 1851, more than a third of married women were in work across large sections of the country, but by 1911, only a tiny fraction of married women worked outside the home, apart from the textile-producing areas of the Northwest.

“This might be associated with the rise of the culture of female domesticity: the idea that a woman’s place is in the home,” said Reid.

Across the Western world, fertility rates have declined over the past 150 years. Gaining a historical perspective of how and why these trends have developed can help improve understanding of the way in which modern societies are shaped.

Between 1851 and 1911, England and Wales changed from countries where there were variable fertility and mortality rates to countries where rates for both were low. Child mortality and fertility fell from the 1870s, together with a fall in illegitimacy, but infant mortality did not start to fall until the dawn of the twentieth century.

As part of the project on fertility decline, the researchers have investigated fertility in more detail. For the first time, they have been able to calculate age-specific fertility rates for more than 2000 sub-districts across England and Wales during this era, and their results challenge views on the way that fertility fell.

“It’s long been thought that the fall in fertility was achieved when couples decided how many children they wanted at the outset of their marriage, and stopped reproducing once they had reached that number,” said Reid. “While this may have happened in more recent fertility transitions, such as in South-East Asia and Latin America, when reliable contraception was widely available, it was not a realistic scenario in the Victorian era.”

“We don’t find age patterns of fertility which would be produced by this type of ‘stopping’ behaviour during the Victorian fertility decline,” said Reid’s collaborator Dr Eilidh Garrett from the ̽��ֱ�� of Essex. “Such behaviour would show up as a larger reduction of fertility among older women, but instead, women of all ages appear to have been reducing their fertility.”

As well as the interactive maps, the Populations Past site provides a variety of resources for researchers, teachers and students at all levels. ̽��ֱ��research was funded by the Economic & Social Research Council and the Isaac Newton Trust.

A new interactive online atlas, which illustrates when, where and possibly how fertility rates began to fall in England and Wales during the Victorian era has been made freely available from today.

In 1851, more than one in five children born in parts of Greater Manchester did not survive to their first birthday. In parts of Surrey and Sussex however, the infant mortality rate at the same time was less than a third that number.

Alice Reid

Populations Past

Early childhood mortality rates in 1851 (left) and 1911 (right). ̽��ֱ��highest rates are in red and the lowest in blue.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Physical activity, even in small amounts, benefits both physical and psychological well-being

sc604 — Thu, 05 Jan 2017 10:54:03 +0000

A new study, based on reports from more than 10,000 individuals, has found that physical activity, whether or not it is classified as exercise, can have a positive effect on emotional well-being. ̽��ֱ��results, by researchers from the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and the ̽��ֱ�� of Essex, are reported in the journal PLOS ONE, and demonstrate how smartphones can be used to collect large-scale data to examine psychological, behavioural and health-related phenomena as they occur in everyday life.

Using data gathered from users of a mood tracking app for Android phones, the researchers found that modest levels of physical activity – even if it couldn’t be classified as exercise – can increase a person’s reported emotional well-being, regardless of their baseline level of happiness. They also found that people reported being happier when they were physically active.

Earlier studies in this area have focused on the relationship between exercise and happiness, with mixed results. Some studies have found that happier people report exercising more, while others have found no relationship between happiness and exercise. Much of this past research has relied solely on retrospective self-reports, on data collected at only one time period, and on small samples.

For the new study, data on physical activity was passively gathered from smartphone accelerometers, and participants were also sent a short survey at two random intervals throughout the day which asked questions about their emotional state. Users reported their emotional state on a grid, based on how positive or negative, and how energetic or sleepy, they were feeling. Users were also asked a handful of questions about how their mood compared to normal.

̽��ֱ��activity data was then averaged over the course of the day, so while the researchers could not pinpoint what participants were doing at any given time, they found that participants who had higher levels of activity throughout the day reported a more positive emotional state.

“Our data show that happy people are more active in general,” said the paper’s senior author Dr Jason Rentfrow, from Cambridge’s Department of Psychology and a Fellow of Fitzwilliam College. “However, our analyses also indicated that periods of physical activity led to increased positive mood, regardless of individuals’ baseline happiness. There have been many studies about the positive psychological effects of exercise, but what we’ve found is that in order to be happier, you don’t have to go out and run a marathon – all you’ve really got to do is periodically engage in slight physical activity throughout the day.”

“Most of us don’t keep track of all of our movements during the day,” said study co-author Dr Gillian Sandstrom from the Department of Psychology at the ̽��ֱ�� of Essex. “A person might track whether they went for a walk or went to the gym, but when asked, most of them probably wouldn’t remember walking from the desk to the photocopier, or from the car to the office door.”

“This study shows how mobile and wearable technology really can allow social psychologists to perform large longitudinal studies as well as open a direct and permanent connection with the users for advice and intervention,” said study co-author Professor Cecilia Mascolo from Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory.

̽��ֱ��research was supported by the UK Engineering and Physical Research Council’s UBhave (Ubiquitous and Social Computing for Positive Behaviour Change) project.

Reference:
Lathia, N. Sandstrom, G.M., Mascolo, C., & Rentfrow, P.J. ‘Happier people live more active lives: Using smartphones to link happiness and physical activity.’ PLOS ONE (2016). https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0160589

̽��ֱ��largest-ever smartphone-based study examining the relationship between physical activity and happiness has found that even minimal levels of activity can have a positive effect on happiness.

In order to be happier, you don’t have to go out and run a marathon.

Jason Rentfrow

Walking

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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