Lexical-Semantic Analysis of the Adjective Poor in English: Definitions, Synonyms, and Antonyms

The article introduces the lexical-semantic aspect of the adjective poor in English, its synonyms, and antonyms. The analysis featured five English dictionaries: Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus, Cobuild Advanced English Dictionary, The Free Dictionary, Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, and Merriam-Webster Dictionary. The author analyzed the lexical-semantic variants of the adjective and determined its meanings. The component analysis allocated 46 semes and sememes, which were combined into eight thematic groups: 1. People: (poor) people / a group, poverty, emaciated, not very skilful (in a particular activity), needy, humble, meek; 2. Animal: (hungry) animal; 3. Material means: having, material, possessions, mean, petty / (little) money / insufficient wealth, used of land, barren (land), unproductive (land); 4. Lack / shortage: lacking / deficient; 5. Something material: very little of the substance, (little of a particular) substance, (poor) food; 6. Resources: supply (of something specified – resources, materials), (poor) country; 7. Evaluation: bad / not good, (being of a very low) quality, (being of a very low) quantity, (being of a very low) standard, inferior / very little (in quality), inferior (in value), (less) amount, (less) rate, (less) number, little / few, (in bad) condition, not normal, less (than adequate) / scanty / inadequate, negative, small (in worth), quality; 8. Emotional attitude: exciting , pity, (deserving) sympathy, unlucky, disappointing , disagreeable, indifferent, unfavorable, no pleasure. The adjective poor appeared to have 37 synonyms and 13 antonyms.

A central control circuit for encoding perceived food value

Hunger state can substantially alter the perceived value of a stimulus, even to the extent that the same sensory cue can trigger antagonistic behaviors. How the nervous system uses these graded perceptual shifts to select between opposed motor patterns remains enigmatic. Here, we challenged food-deprived and satiated Lymnaea to choose between two mutually exclusive behaviors, ingestion or egestion, produced by the same feeding central pattern generator. Decoding the underlying neural circuit reveals that the activity of central dopaminergic interneurons defines hunger state and drives network reconfiguration, biasing satiated animals toward the rejection of stimuli deemed palatable by food-deprived ones. By blocking the action of these neurons, satiated animals can be reconfigured to exhibit a hungry animal phenotype. This centralized mechanism occurs in the complete absence of sensory retuning and generalizes across different sensory modalities, allowing food-deprived animals to increase their perception of food value in a stimulus-independent manner to maximize potential calorific intake.

A central control circuit for encoding perceived food value

Hunger state can substantially alter the perceived value of a stimulus, even to the extent that the same sensory cue can trigger antagonistic behaviors. How the nervous system uses such graded perceptual shifts to select between opposed motor patterns remains enigmatic. Here we challenged food-deprived and satiated Lymnaea to choose between two mutually exclusive behaviors, ingestion or egestion, produced by the same feeding central pattern generator. Decoding the underlying neural circuit reveals that the activity of central dopaminergic interneurons defines hunger state and drives network reconfiguration, biasing satiated animals towards the rejection of stimuli deemed palatable by food-deprived ones. By blocking the action of these neurons, satiated animals can be reconfigured to exhibit a hungry animal phenotype. This centralized mechanism occurs in the complete absence of sensory retuning and generalizes across different sensory modalities, allowing food-deprived animals to increase their perception of food value in a stimulus-independent manner to maximize potential calorific intake.

Hypothalamic map of stimulation current thresholds for inhibition of feeding in rats

The rat hypothalamus was mapped for the purpose of identifying regions at which electrical stimulation caused the feeding behavior of a hungry animal to be inhibited. At each inhibitory site a determination was also made of the minimal stimulation current necessary for the inhibition of feeding. The results indicated that the inhibitory sites with the lowest current thresholds tended to form a discrete cluster in the lateral part of the ventromedial nucleus and the adjacent neuropil bordering it ventrolaterally. A few low thresholds were also found in the anterior hypothalamic area. The higher thresholds formed an orderly ascending gradient radiating away from the ventromedial nucleus and its ventrolaterally situated anatomical projections. In areas related to ascending monoamine pathways, including the lateral hypothalamus, preoptic region, and arcuate nucleus, as well as in the mammillary bodies, stimulation usually failed to suppress feeding behavior. Implications bearing on neuroregulatory models of feeding behavior are discussed.

Time-Shared Feeding and Drinking

Barbary doves were tested in an operant situation in which they characteristically alternate between feeding and drinking. The experimental findings may be summarized as follows: (1) the cumulative distribution of the intervals between feeding bouts is little affected by reward rates; (2) a lock-on index is correlated with reward rate, but is not affected by altering reward rate per se, as long as the overall rate of ingestion remains the same; (3) when a primarily hungry animal is interrupted while feeding, or a primarily thirsty animal while drinking, the behaviour is resumed after the interruption; (4) when a primarily hungry animal is interrupted while drinking, or a primarily thirsty animal while feeding, the behaviour is resumed after a short interruption, but changes to the alternative behaviour following a long interruption; (5) titration of interruption period in the dominant region of the motivational state space is always stable, but becomes unstable if the dominance changes, or if the titrating criteria are reversed. From this evidence it is concluded that feeding and drinking can be time-shared in a manner analogous to that found in computers.