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KOIZUMI, R., MITANI, T., UEDA, K., & KONDO, S. (2017). Skill reading of human social cues by horses (Equus caballus) reared under year-round grazing conditions. Animal Behaviour and Management, 53(2), 69–78.
Abstract: Animals use communicative signals, such as gesture or gaze, to communicate to someone the intention or expression of the sender, which is called social cue. In the previous studies, it was suggested the skill of reading human social cue in domestic animals are influenced to the domestication, the experience contacting with human and training to obey human. In this present study, we tested the skill for horses (Equus caballus) kept in year-round grazing conditions using 33 horses differed from breed and the degree of the experience with human by object-choice task subjects choosing either of bait boxes located at the end of experimenter. As results, non-socialized horses hardly responded to human social cues. Habituated horses that were both of trained and untrained responded to human social cues, but their accuracy rates were not more than 50% except for two trained subjects. For the skill of reading human social cues, there was high individual variation in responding to human social cues in horses kept in year-round grazing conditions. The individual characteristics influenced to it more than domestication, the experience with human, and training to obey human.
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Bílá, K., Beránková, J., Veselý, P., Bugnyar, T., & Schwab, C. (2017). Responses of urban crows to con- and hetero-specific alarm calls in predator and non-predator zoo enclosures. Anim. Cogn., 20(1), 43–51.
Abstract: Urban animals and birds in particular are able to cope with diverse novel threats in a city environment such as avoiding novel, unfamiliar predators. Predator avoidance often includes alarm signals that can be used also by hetero-specifics, which is mainly the case in mixed-species flocks. It can also occur when species do not form flocks but co-occur together. In this study we tested whether urban crows use alarm calls of conspecifics and hetero-specifics (jackdaws, Corvus monedula) differently in a predator and a non-predator context with partly novel and unfamiliar zoo animal species. Birds were tested at the Tiergarten Schönbrunn in the city of Vienna by playing back con- and hetero-specific alarm calls and control stimuli (great tit song and no stimuli) at predator (wolf, polar bear) and non-predator (eland antelope and cranes, peccaries) enclosures. We recorded responses of crows as the percentage of birds flying away after hearing the playback (out of those present before the playback) and as the number of vocalizations given by the present birds. A significantly higher percentage of crows flew away after hearing either con- or hetero-specific alarm calls, but it did not significantly differ between the predator and the non-predator context. Crows treated jackdaw calls just as crow calls, indicating that they make proper use of hetero-specific alarm calls. Responding similarly in both contexts may suggest that the crows were uncertain about the threat a particular zoo animal represents and were generally cautious. In the predator context, however, a high percentage of crows also flew away upon hearing the great tit control song which suggests that they may still evaluate those species which occasionally killed crows as more dangerous and respond to any conspicuous sound.
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Heberlein, M. T. E., Manser, M. B., & Turner, D. C. (2017). Deceptive-like behaviour in dogs (Canis familiaris). Anim. Cogn., 20(3), 511–520.
Abstract: Deception, the use of false signals to modify the behaviour of the receiver, occurs in low frequencies even in stable signalling systems. For example, it can be advantageous for subordinate individuals to deceive in competitive situations. We investigated in a three-way choice task whether dogs are able to mislead a human competitor, i.e. if they are capable of tactical deception. During training, dogs experienced the role of their owner, as always being cooperative, and two unfamiliar humans, one acting ‘cooperatively’ by giving food and the other being ‘competitive’ and keeping the food for themselves. During the test, the dog had the options to lead one of these partners to one of the three potential food locations: one contained a favoured food item, the other a non-preferred food item and the third remained empty. After having led one of the partners, the dog always had the possibility of leading its cooperative owner to one of the food locations. Therefore, a dog would have a direct benefit from misleading the competitive partner since it would then get another chance to receive the preferred food from the owner. On the first test day, the dogs led the cooperative partner to the preferred food box more often than expected by chance and more often than the competitive partner. On the second day, they even led the competitive partner less often to the preferred food than expected by chance and more often to the empty box than the cooperative partner. These results show that dogs distinguished between the cooperative and the competitive partner, and indicate the flexibility of dogs to adjust their behaviour and that they are able to use tactical deception.
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Ringhofer, M., & Yamamoto, S. (2017). Erratum to: Domestic horses send signals to humans when they are faced with an unsolvable task. Anim. Cogn., 20(3), 407.
Abstract: Some domestic animals are thought to be skilled at social communication with humans due to the process of domestication. Horses, being in close relationship with humans, similar to dogs, might be skilled at communication with humans. Previous studies have indicated that they are sensitive to bodily signals and the attentional state of humans; however, there are few studies that investigate communication with humans and responses to the knowledge state of humans. Our first question was whether and how horses send signals to their potentially helpful but ignorant caretakers in a problem-solving situation where a food item was hidden in a bucket that was accessible only to the caretakers. We then examined whether horses alter their behaviours on the basis of the caretakers’ knowledge of where the food was hidden. We found that horses communicated to their caretakers using visual and tactile signals. The signalling behaviour of the horses significantly increased in conditions where the caretakers had not seen the hiding of the food. These results suggest that horses alter their communicative behaviour towards humans in accordance with humans’ knowledge state.
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Ringhofer, M., & Yamamoto, S. (2017). Domestic horses send signals to humans when they face with an unsolvable task. Anim. Cogn., 20(3), 397–405.
Abstract: Some domestic animals are thought to be skilled at social communication with humans due to the process of domestication. Horses, being in close relationship with humans, similar to dogs, might be skilled at communication with humans. Previous studies have indicated that they are sensitive to bodily signals and the attentional state of humans; however, there are few studies that investigate communication with humans and responses to the knowledge state of humans. Our first question was whether and how horses send signals to their potentially helpful but ignorant caretakers in a problem-solving situation where a food item was hidden in a bucket that was accessible only to the caretakers. We then examined whether horses alter their behaviours on the basis of the caretakers’ knowledge of where the food was hidden. We found that horses communicated to their caretakers using visual and tactile signals. The signalling behaviour of the horses significantly increased in conditions where the caretakers had not seen the hiding of the food. These results suggest that horses alter their communicative behaviour towards humans in accordance with humans’ knowledge state.
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Sommer, V., Lowe, A., & Dietrich, T. (2016). Not eating like a pig: European wild boar wash their food. Anim. Cogn., 19(1), 245–249.
Abstract: Carrying food to water and either dunking or manipulating it before consumption has been observed in various taxa including birds, racoons and primates. Some animals seem to be simply moistening their food. However, true washing aims to remove unpleasant surface substrates such as grit and sand and requires a distinction between items that do and do not need cleaning as well as deliberate transportation of food to a water source. We provide the first evidence for food washing in suids, based on an incidental observation with follow-up experiments on European wild boar (Sus scrofa) kept at Basel Zoo, Switzerland. Here, all adult pigs and some juveniles of a newly formed group carried apple halves soiled with sand to the edge of a creek running through their enclosure where they put the fruits in the water and pushed them to and fro with their snouts before eating. Clean apple halves were never washed. This indicates that pigs can discriminate between soiled and unsoiled foods and that they are able to delay gratification for long enough to transport and wash the items. However, we were unable to ascertain to which degree individual and/or social learning brought this behaviour about.
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Hoffman, C. L., & Suchak, M. (2017). Dog rivalry impacts following behavior in a decision-making task involving food. Anim. Cogn., , 1–13.
Abstract: Dogs learn a great deal from humans and other dogs. Previous studies of socially influenced learning between dogs have typically used a highly trained demonstrator dog who is unfamiliar to the observer. Because of this, it is unknown how dynamics between familiar dogs may influence their likelihood of learning from each other. In this study, we tested dogs living together in two-dog households on whether individual dogs’ rivalry scores were associated with performance on a local enhancement task. Specifically, we wanted to know whether dog rivalry impacted whether an observer dog would approach a plate from which a demonstrator dog had eaten all available food, or whether the observer dog would approach the adjacent plate that still contained food. Dog rivalry scores were calculated using the Canine Behavioral Assessment and Research Questionnaire and indicated each dog’s tendency to engage aggressively with the other household dog. Low-rivalry dogs were more likely to approach the empty plate than high-rivalry dogs when the observer dog was allowed to approach the plates immediately after the demonstrator had moved out of sight. This difference between low- and high-rivalry dogs disappeared, however, when observer dogs had to wait 5 s before approaching the plates. The same pattern was observed during a control condition when a human removed the food from a plate. Compared to low-rivalry dogs, high-rivalry dogs may pay less attention to other dogs due to a low tolerance for having other dogs in close proximity.
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Rørvang, M. V., Ahrendt, L. P., & Christensen, J. W. (2015). Horses fail to use social learning when solving spatial detour tasks. Anim.Cogn., 18(4), 847–854.
Abstract: Social animals should have plenty of opportunities to learn from conspecifics, but most studies have failed to document social learning in horses. This study investigates whether young Icelandic horses can learn a spatial detour task through observation of a trained demonstrator horse of either the same age (Experiments 1 and 2, n = 22) or older (Experiment 3, n = 24). Observer horses were allowed to observe the demonstrator being led three times through the detour route immediately before being given the opportunity to solve the task themselves. Controls were allowed only to observe the demonstrator horse eating at the final position, but not the demonstration of the route. Although we found a tendency towards better performance by observer horses in the second experiment, we were unable to repeat this result in a similar set-up with a new group of horses and older, dominant demonstrator horses. We conclude that horses exposed to prior demonstration did not perform better than control horses in solving spatial detour tasks.
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Griffin, A. S., Tebbich, S., & Bugnyar, T. (2017). Animal cognition in a human-dominated world. Anim. Cogn., 20(1), 1–6.
Abstract: In the USA, each year, up to one billion birds are estimated to die from colliding with windowpanes (Sabo et al. 2016). A further 573,000 are struck down by wind turbines, along with 888,000 bats (Smallwood 2013). Worldwide, unintended capture in fishing devices is recognized as the single most serious global threat to migratory, long-lived marine taxa including turtles, birds, mammals and sharks (Wallace et al. 2013). Estimates put the number of amphibians killed per year on Australian roads at 5 million (Seiler 2003). The likelihood of a green turtle erroneously ingesting plastic debris, often by mistaking them for food, rose from 30% in 1985 to almost 50% in 2012 (Schuyler et al. 2013). Human-induced rapid environmental change (HIREC, sensu Sih et al. 2011) is filling animals’ environments with new threats which bear little or excessive similarity to those they have encountered in their evolutionary history (Dwernychuk and Boag 1972; Patten and Kelley 2010; Witherington 1997). As a consequence, many of the stimuli involved fall outside the adaptive processing space of animals’ evolutionary perceptual, learning, memory and decision-making systems, making individuals particularly vulnerable to their impact.
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Ducatez, S., Audet, J. - N., Rodriguez, J. R., Kayello, L., & Lefebvre, L. (2017). Innovativeness and the effects of urbanization on risk-taking behaviors in wild Barbados birds. Anim. Cogn., 20(1), 33–42.
Abstract: The effects of urbanization on avian cognition remain poorly understood. Risk-taking behaviors like boldness, neophobia and flight distance are thought to affect opportunism and innovativeness, and should also vary with urbanization. Here, we investigate variation in risk-taking behaviors in the field in an avian assemblage of nine species that forage together in Barbados and for which innovation rate is known from previous work. We predicted that birds from highly urbanized areas would show more risk-taking behavior than conspecifics from less urbanized parts of the island and that the differences would be strongest in the most innovative of the species. Overall, we found that urban birds are bolder, less neophobic and have shorter flight distances than their less urbanized conspecifics. Additionally, we detected between-species differences in the effect of urbanization on flight distance, more innovative species showing smaller differences in flight distance between areas. Our results suggest that, within successful urban colonizers, species differences in innovativeness may affect the way species change their risk-taking behaviors in response to the urban environment.
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